It's only a submarine patent because the PTO stalled.

In the January lawsuit, Hyatt alleges he was told by a PTO unit director that the agency's unofficial policy in dealing with him is to give him the runaround to avoid making a decision he could appeal. He said that may be why the patent office hasn't granted him a patent since 1997.

TFA says different.

Which is interesting in light of the 11th amendment

Apparently, they want to stall, becuase if they deny the patent it could be appealed in court.

So, they just sit on it.

So basically they're keeping it in limbo on purpose.

Don't you know that corporations and the "elite" have more privileges and rights than lowly peons like this inventor?

The daughter didn't breach anything, she just got his dad busted for telling HER about it.

They paid $10K in back wages, and $60K in legal expenses, which he gets to keep. It was the $80K in punitive damages that were forfeited by the blabbermouthing.

The father was bound by it, and breached it by telling her daughter. That alone would be cause to refuse payment. His daughter being a blabbermouth just got him caught for it.

While I don't agree that the settlement should have been confidential in the first place, a contract is a contract and he broke the damn rules.

I hope the lawyers eat their fill out of what he DID keep, and then he loses in the final appeal and gets left hung out to dry.

We hate it when big corporations weasel out of their promises, so I don't really think it's kosher to let Joe Sixpack have a free pass doing the same thing.

And honestly, I oppose confidentiality clauses on principle. This 80 grand was nothing more than hush money to bribe dad to keep his trap shut about what the company did, and this is the sort of thing the public needs to be warned about.

So you use virtualization to sort?

Trippy.

If anything this will only put more pressure on governments to cockblock bitcoins.

Sometimes I wonder if it's a conspiracy to get bitcoin banned and shoved into the black market.

Spectrum should be owned by the public and rented on an annual basis to the private sector to the highest bidder.

This brings in competition that will keep companies from buying it and then sitting on their ass doing nothing with it.

One thing it has that bitcoin lacks: official buy-in from sovereign nations.

With dollars, you can spend them pretty much wherever you want.

The usability of bitcoin is vulnerable to sovereign nations throwing hissy fits and banning or seizing it arbitrarily.

Depends, is the new scanning done in series or parallel to the old scanning?