Personally, both. And I'd say something like... industry projects eventually have to actually be profitable or it gets cut or eventually called out as fraud. Sa

Personally, both. And I'd say something like... industry projects eventually have to actually be profitable or it gets cut or eventually called out as fraud. Same is true of academic projects, except the currency is reputation and hopefully application. Once a field is believed not to be fruitful, those projects stop getting funded. But academic projects are inherently closer to aspirational, so I'm not sure it's fair to conflate aspirational with fraud. This episode sounds like fraud. Aspirational is claiming your novel magnetic media "could" enable a terabyte per centimeter storage density when you know perfectly well it couldn't hit that in a real application. I dislike the rhetorical overreach and would not use naive statements like that, but it is a different thing entirely to take claim for work that wasn't even done.