Undoubtedly somebody much smarter than the low-rent cryptologists they hire at the NSA.
Never make a deal with a prosecutor without a judge approved plea bargain.
A coworker was in a car accident with her sister driving. The prosecutor told her sister: "We're charing you with reckless driving. Just plead guilty and you'll get off with a small fine. I'll ask the judge to be lenient."
They charged her with assault on her own sister. Confused, she pled guilty anyway, like she said she would. The prosecutor asked for the maximum penalty which includes jail time, and got it.
The first symptom of a new but incomplete understanding of patents is gold fever. That is when you have an idea that what you are holding is extremely valuable and that you must protect it from others at all costs. People tend to get irrational about it.
So here is some reality: The fact that you have even published your video (which is "use in commerce" under patent law) invalidates future patents that you might file on that same art. Then there is the prior art (including art you are not aware of), and the recent court finding in Alice v. CLS Bank that invalidates most process and method patents which describe software. These all work against the potential that your thesis is going to make you rich through patent licensing.
You can get a patent awarded, perhaps, that you can use to hoodwink an investor, but forcing an automotive company to pay you? Much less likely and it will cost $10 Million in attorney fees to get there.
Probably your school wants 51% of the revenue and your grant funding sources (and those of your college department) may have their own policies on patents.
I could offer a handful of reasons, but the top one would be that they don't want to maintain it. Probably, the developers had Rifts, they wanted to play around with the tech, and they were gambling a bit on the development of the Rift during the development of the game engine (the right time to get involved, if you want to be first-to-market, so a smart move).
However, very few people own Rifts, and so if they left this in, Rift users finding bugs and incompletely-tested code would need to be supported (otherwise, PR nightmare).
When people use the "hack," they have the company has the option of saying, "That's not officially supported, you had to change things in order to do it." So, when there are bugs and things that don't work very well, the company has its hands clean, the enthusiasts still get to fool around with their early-adopter toy, and the company looks better in the long run.
NASA built three Orbiter Processing Facilities, or OPFs, to service its space shuttle fleet between missions. All three are located next to the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building at the Florida spaceport where Apollo Saturn 5 moon rockets and space shuttles were “stacked” for launch. Under an agreement with NASA, Boeing will modify OPF bays 1 and 2 for the X-37B program, completing upgrades by the end of the year.
The company already has an agreement with NASA to use OPF-3 and the shuttle engine shop in the VAB to assemble its CST-100 commercial crew craft being built to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The company says up to six capsules can be processed in the facility at the same time.
The most important take-away from this news is that it strongly suggests the Air Force now intends to expand the X-37B program. They will not only be flying both X37B’s again, they might even planning to increase the fleet’s size from two ships.
It is better to never have tried anything than to have tried something and failed. - motto of jerks, weenies and losers everywhere