This is news that not only Gator but virtually all Internet users will hate -- Brian Shuster has received a patent for pop-up advertisements.
The patent is known, ridiculously, as the “Traffic Management Utility." It's not clear how Shuster managed to persuade the PTO that he deserved a patent for pop-up ads, or how he will enforce his rights.
The clincher is that Shuster thinks one-click shopping was "fairly obvious", in contrast to his “more sophisticated mechanism” of controlling "exit traffic." Um, OK.
MSN has an article about Shuster and his "invention" here.