Technology Insights
Technology Insights are short commentaries relating to today's technology challenges by leading minds of the day. We hope that they will point you toward useful ideas and information to help you chart your way in these exciting and challenging times.
On Using Technology Insights..... Information and links in Technology Insights are accurate at the time the story is posted. However, link addresses and the meaning and applicability of information changes over time. If you choose to use ideas from the Insights, consider that further research may be warranted.
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United States Patent 6,960,975
Volfson November 1, 2005
. Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state
. Abstract
A space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state is provided comprising a hollow superconductive shield, an inner shield, a power source, a support structure, upper and lower means for generating an electromagnetic field, and a flux modulation controller. A cooled hollow superconductive shield is energized by an electromagnetic field resulting in the quantized vortices of lattice ions projecting a gravitomagnetic field that forms a spacetime curvature anomaly outside the space vehicle. The spacetime curvature imbalance, the spacetime curvature being the same as gravity, provides for the space vehicle's propulsion. The space vehicle, surrounded by the spacetime anomaly, may move at a speed approaching the light-speed characteristic for the modified locale.
Inventors: Volfson; Boris (Huntington, IN)
Appl. No 11/079,670
Filed: March 14, 2005
Primary Examiner: Barrera; Ramon M.
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"A funny thing happened on the way to the demise of the software industry. It never happened. ... Perhaps there is a deeper path dependency in industrial development than we are aware of. An industry, once started on a patent-free basis, establishes an innovation path that later proves relatively impervious to the imposition of patents. Perhaps patents overall simply do not affect the big variables of economic life�industry structure, the basic pace of innovation, etc.�in such an industry to any great extent. ... Apart from their role in fostering outside entry, and perhaps a marginal but significant role in making old industries safe for small, entrepreneurial firms, patents do not seem to have shifted the basic parameters of innovation [in software]."
Robert P. Merges, Excerpt from "The Uninvited Guest: Patents on Wall Street"
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"Terrorism is rare - which is good for us but bad for data miners. ... Suppose that there are 1,000 terrorists in the U.S. and that the data-mining process has an amazing 99 percent success rate. Then 10 terrorists will probably still slip through - and 2.8 million innocent people will also be fingered. To reduce these false positives to a manageable level, the data miners will have to narrow their search criteria, which in turn means they will miss more (or perhaps all) of the terrorists."
"Total Information Overload", Scientific American, March, 2003, p. 12 -
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"People get a false sense of security after deploying technologies that they don't really understand."
Brian Kelly, CEO of iDefense, Inc. quoted in "Promise of Security", eWeek, January 20, 2003, p. 40
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"Producing high volumes of hydrogen cleanly and efficiently for fuel cells remains and unsolved challenge. The gas can be extracted from oil or natural gas or synthesized by splitting water molecules with electricity. But such hydrogen merely transports energy derived from another fuel."
Brad Lemley, "The Car of Tomorrow", Discover, October, 2002, p. 18
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"According to a study my the Standish Group. a consulting firm in West Yarmouth, MA, U.S. commercial software projects are so poorly planned and managed that in 2000 almost a quarter were canceled outright, creating no final product. The canceled projects cost firms $67 billion; overruns on other projects racked up another 21 billion. But because [the] 'code and fix' [mentality of software developers] leads to such extensive, costly rounds of testing, even successful software projects can be wildly inefficient. Incredibly software projects often devote 80 percent of their budgets to repairing flaws they themselves produced - a figure that does not include the even more costly process of furnishing product support and developing patches for problems found after release."
Charles C. Mann, "Why Software is so Bad", MIT Technology Review, July/August 2002, pp. 33-38
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"Much of the popular press and many of our legislative leaders are embracing a new idea called the Hydrogen Economy. Unfortunately many are doing so without an apparent understanding of that which they are embracing. ... To be viable a technology must be able to fulfill its hype and prove that it is better than simple conversation. Thus is is important to look beyond the hype and examine the total energy equation."
Enoch Durbin, "Holes in the Hydrogen Economy", Natural Gas Fuels, May, 2002, pp. 18-19
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"We are going through a rapidly accelerating epistemological sea change. We are using unprecedentedly powerful new tools, and in the process, as the Oxford biologist J. Z. Young pointed out in his BBC Reith Lecture in 1951, we are becoming those tools. What we have lacked until recently is an intellectual culture able to transform its own premises as fast as our technologies are transforming us."
John Brockman, The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty First Century, Introduction, page xv
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"New technologies for human fertility are greeted at first with fascination, then with horror, and finally with indifference. Consider this: today there are tens of thousands of 'test tube babies' walking around, living normal lives. In vitro fertilization, once proclaimed as the death knell of human dignity, is now thoroughly uncontroversial."
"Leader - Caveat emptor, biotechnology.", Red Herring, October 1, 2001, p. 27
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"Moore's law is a death march. In a decade or two, the silicon chip will be kaput. What then?"
Mark K. Anderson, in the September 2001 issue of Wired (pp. 152-157), discussing the concept of quantum computers, which may be able to calculate many orders of magnitudes faster than currently predicted speed limits for silicon based chips.
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"Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion. An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices--wait or eat it raw. Software customers have had the same choices.
" The Mythical-Man Month, Frederick P. Brooks, page 21
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"The current power infrastructure is as incompatible with the future as horse trails were to automobiles."
Kurt Yeager, President of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) quoted in "The Energy Web," Wired, July 2001
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"Technology is ubiquitous, directly or indirectly invading nearly all sectors of the U.S. economy. Moreover, a compelling case can be made that the high-tech sector is boosting the long-term potential growth path of the U.S. economy and determining the relative economic success for metropolitan areas around the country ."
Milken Institute Technology Study, Technology in the Economy, March 20, 2001
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"More than 99 percent of all executing computer instructions come from COTS products." Note: COTS is an acronym for "Commercial Off The Shelf" components now typically used for large-scale software projects.
Victor R. Basili and Barry Boehm; Computer, May 2001, page 91
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"Most of our predictions are based on very linear thinking. That's why they will likely be wrong: Technology follows exponential curves."
Vinod Khosia, Sr. Partner, Klieiner Perkins Caufiled & Byers; Wired, April 2001, page 203
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Business as usual is a comfortable ride to bankruptcy. If you''re not investing in new markets and new technologies, you are doomed."
Dave Hakala, "Mile-High View"; Sm@rt Partner, December 4, 2000, page 50
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"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
Richard Feynman, U.S. physicist and Nobel Prize winner
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"Matter warps space; space guides matter. That, in a nutshell, is Einstein's general theory of relativity." The lead-in statement on an article on the first clear evidence of a "weird relativistic effect" called frame dragging.
Science, Vol 289, September 1, 2000, page 1448.
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"Seeing is no longer believing. The image you see on the evening news could well be fake--a fabrication of fast new video-manipulation technology.�.. A government, terrorist or advocacy group could set geopolitical events in motion with a snippet of well-doctored video."
Ivan Amato, "Lying with Pixels;" Technology Review, July/August 2000, pages 60-66
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"What will replace the tech economy? Get ready for bioeconomy, which will supplant our infotech economy. Bioec will give new meaning to the smell of money."
Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer, Time, May 22, 2000, pages 76-77.
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"Why do I sense a technology slippage in this area? Probably because Silicon Valley has become obsessed with dot-com operations that focus on business models instead of technology."
John C. Dvorak in reference to a Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer's move to 0.15 and 0.13 micron technology, in "Inside Track," PC Magazine, May 9, 2000
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"We're looking at how to functionally package size, volume, and capacity at an increasingly smaller feature-size scale...... So we're looking at how you put a spacecraft on a chip." Samuel L. Venneri, Chief Technologist, NASA, in response to a question, "What do you see as the most critical technologies for the next decade?"
NASA Tech Briefs, February 2000, page 30
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"The infrastructure of the Internet in 2025 is likely to inspire a rewrite of the popular adage that describes technology as an inanimate expression of human thought and creativity. At some point in the next quarter-century, the ghost in the machine will become the ghost in the network......"
from Technical Complexity Brings Simplicity to the Net by Joe McGarvey and Charles Babcock
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Emcore Corp of Somerset, NJ was a Grand Winner of the SBIR Technology of the Year Award at Tech East '99 for their indium-gallium-nitride based material for bright, blue, light-emitting diodes (LEDs)."
Reported in NASA Tech Briefs, January 2000, page 20
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"...totally unknown in high-tech circles, Nakamura has beaten heavily funded teams of researchers at such technology behemoths as Sony, Hewlett-Packard, and Fujitsu to the last, most coveted high-tech prize of the 20th century: a blue semiconductor laser. And along the way, he developed the first bright blue light-emitting diode (LED)."
Popular Science, February 2000, pages 57-60
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"While continuing technological growth appears to create an ever more fragile infrastructure prone to collapse from the smallest fracture or violation, it also creates an environment from which it becomes increasingly easier and faster to recover from the same situations. So while natural and man-made effects may change the course and direction of some technological trends, there is little, if anything, that will alter their momentum."
Tim Studt, R&D Editorial; R&D Magazine, December 1999, page 7
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"If machines can be built to count, calculate, play chess, even "think," why not a machine to translate one language into another? British workers are planning a translator based on the storage or "memory" apparatus in a mathematical machine. After "reading" the material by means of a photoelectric scanning device, the machine would look up the words in its built-in dictionary in the instrument's memory unit and pass the translation on to electric typewriters."
Originally appeared in Scientific American, December 1949
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"Electronic-commerce software enjoyed a bumper year in 1999. The Internet grew 280 percent, to $1.7 billion.... ...at the end of 1999, almost all entrepreneurial activity is focused on the development of novel business models centered around the Internet, rather than on real technological innovation."
Quoted from "10 Trends 2000 Epilog;" appearing in Red Herring, No. 73, December 1999, pages 208-210
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"The next two or three decades are likely to see even greater technological change than has occurred in the decades since the emergence of the computer., and also even greater change in industry structures, in the economic landscape, and probably in the social landscape as well."
Quoted from "Beyond the Information Revolution," by Peter R. Drucker; The Atlantic Monthly, October 1999
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