5 ms·

Even when Occam's razor would point the way of this being an intel ops to make adversaries waste resources, wouldn't it be cool to be proven wrong, and actually

• libertine 7y ago
  On one side I can see this is propaganda. You have plenty of real world scenarios of companies wasting resources on the pursuit of something that looks trivial: like electric vehicles. Yet a lot of them are pulling the plug on something that looked easy, after dumping millions into it, right? "It's just electric motors, a battery and wheels". If any government goes on a spiral to pursuit these devices it surely is a money furnace. On the other side, if this is clearly non-sense... don't they have smart people in Russia, China, etc, claiming the same? Maybe that's the genius of it all: it's so obviously propaganda non-sense that's too much obvious to be propaganda.
  • molmalo 7y ago
    Exactly, or maybe it's a weird sense of humor, trolling their friends/adversaries? I mean, if I worked on secret stuff for years, maybe I would develop that kind of humor, and file a patent application for a Flux Capacitor, just to tease my friends about the time machine we are building...
• credit_guy 7y ago
  Fully with you here. But here’s the thing, if your nuclear scientist troll spends one afternoon with the bogus patent application, and the adversary loughs at it after 30 seconds, you end up wasting more resources than them. Which means you need to be sophisticated to troll. War is the art of misdirection, but you can’t fool someone you have a tank when all you have is an umbrella.
• whoopdedo 7y ago
  What if these are "tanks"? The British didn't want to let anyone know they were building armored vehicles, thus the unassuming name that someone in 1915 would not have guessed what it was. If the Navy has created a groundbreaking new device, but they want to hide its true nature, a far-fetched name like "gravitational wave", even though it's not the theoretical gravity wave it sounds like, lets you talk about it without an eavesdropper knowing what it is. That term, and "inertial mass reduction" have never been used in a patent before so the inventor is free to define them however he likes.
  • delecti 7y ago
    > That term, and "inertial mass reduction" have never been used in a patent before so the inventor is free to define them however he likes. I'm apparently not familiar enough with the patent system. It seems like a pretty enormous flaw in the system if the first person to request a patent on the subject could completely redefine terms that have pretty unambiguous scientific meanings.
    • jimktrains2 7y ago
      While I agree with you and I think parent's wording isn't the best, I think parent's point is that military tanks aren't liquid tankers or holding tanks like the term would have meant when the term was first used for military tanks, and military tanks were called that specifically to give little insight into what they did. Now no one takes issue with a military tank being called a tank.
    • dangerface 7y ago
      > It seems like a pretty enormous flaw in the system if the first person to request a patent on the subject could completely redefine terms that have pretty unambiguous scientific meanings. Yup patent trolls make millions through this flaw they get the most vague patents they can and then sue everyone they see, they only need to win one case with a sleepy judge to make their money back.
  • bufferoverflow 7y ago
    If you want to hide it, filing a patent application is a pretty dumb move.