The application was not "filed in June." The application was published in June. From TFPA (after all, the link is to a patent application, not an article):

The provisional patent application was made on 14 December 2010. The full utility patent application was made on 13 December 2011 (also from TFPA). The reason the application was published in June 2012 is that the utility application claims the priority date of the provisional application, and June was eighteen months after that date.

In your view, what about the "end product" has to change in order for the improvement to be patentable? Manufacturing cost? Ease of assembly? Size? Features? Power consumption?

Nearly all patentable improvements I've seen result in a change in a product -- otherwise, no one would make the improvement in the first place -- but what's the "end product"? Is it the chip the new circuit goes into, sold by the semiconductor manufacturer? The radio using the chip, sold by the radio company? The car using the radio, sold by the car company? Not every invention patented is put into a consumer product by an OEM.

Okay, but that doesn't answer the question asked: At what point in this development do we draw the line and say, "Below this, it's not patentable?"

I hear this a lot, and I'm not against it at all, but I'd like to understand more about how you'd like that to work.

Suppose, for example, we take something like the FM demodulator in a radio. When Edwin Armstrong invented it, back in the stone age of the 1930s, I think we can all agree that (a) it was an "actual physical device," and (b) that it met all the other criteria (novelty, non-obviousness, etc.) needed for a patent. It was implemented with the technology available at the time -- stone knives, bear skins, and vacuum tubes (valves).

Skipping over details like the invention of ratio detectors, etc., the next change in implementation of FM detectors came when the tubes were replaced with discrete transistors. This required some change in bias methods, impedance levels, etc., but no major redesign. It did save cost, size, and power, though.

The next change was integration. At first, the transformer was still needed for the demodulator, and so it was pinned out of the ICs, which were still analog. This saved cost, size, and power still further.

Later, schemes were found to integrate the function of the transformer, fully integrating the (still analog) demodulator. This saved cost and size still further.

Still later, improvements in integration processes enabled the function of the FM demodulator to be performed digitally, using an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a bunch of hard-wired logic gates, emulating the mathematical function performed by the analog demodulator. This saved cost, size, and power still further.

After that, demodulator designs were moved into hardware register-transfer languages, like Verilog, providing portability from chip to chip, and enabling one to program the hardware in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to become, when preceded by the ADC, an FM demodulator. This saved cost.

Demodulator designs were next ported into programmable hardware dedicated to signal-processing applications (digital signal processors); this required the ADC, plus the Verilog algorithm to be converted to the DSP's assembly language. This saved cost and size.

Finally, technology improved to the point that the FM demodulator could be made by an ADC followed by a microcomputer, programmed with software in a high-level language as part of a much larger system. This saved cost.

At what point in this development do we draw the line and say, "Below this, it's not patentable?"

You may find Richard Rhodes' Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb interesting. It discusses a lot of detail in various hydrogen bomb designs, and why things are as they (possibly) are. (The technical points all seem to be internally consistent but, other than that, I have no way of verifying the accuracy of the book. Still, it's a great geek read.) Even the Wikipedia entry is enlightening.

One point is that it's tough to get deuterium hot enough to fuse, without having the energy radiate away as just a bright X-ray source, cooling things back off. (Turning a liability into an asset -- using pressure from the radiation of the fission first stage to compress and ignite the fusion second stage -- is supposed to be one of the key ideas of the Bomb.)

Nuclear weapons do not "rely on mushing things together quickly enough to generate fission." Nuclear weapons take material that is already fissioning at a very low rate -- or on the edge of doing so, and can be made to do so by the addition of the appropriate neutron source -- and "mushes it together" fast enough and dense enough that the resulting chain reaction occurs very rapidly, creating an explosion instead of just a general warming of the material.

The "mushing" is what creates the explosion, not what creates the fission. The fission is a property of the material itself, which is why the international control of fissionable material -- primarily plutonium and enriched uranium -- is sufficient to control the spread of nuclear weapons (in theory). Nuclear arms control is not done by controlling "things that mush."

Can you either:

(a) explain how an impact can make something radioactive;
(b) cite a source for your belief that these diamonds are radioactive; or
(c) stop going on and on about it?

Thank you.

Don't get so hung up on the UPS Service Guarantee (section 47, pdf page 32, paper page 29):

What follows (in Section 47.1) is seven bullets of conditions, followed (in Section 47.2) by eleven bullets of exclusions.

I don't have a problem with UPS -- they've always treated me, and my packages, well -- but I'm not under any illusions that I could actually get a court judgement from them based on their terms of service, should they decide not to refund their shipping charges on a lost parcel, and I decided to sue. Any service guarantee that may be canceled by the service provider, at its sole discretion and without prior notice, isn't very reassuring.

Resending a packet due to a missed ACK takes up air time, just like it did sending it the first time, and the carriers have no control on where the user will be. If they make their systems robust enough to move their present average packet reception rate from an already-good 93-95% to, say, 99%, this will only enable their users to move down another floor in their sub-basements, or another few city blocks, or another cubicle row deeper into the building, before the average goes back down again -- after all, wireless systems have limited range. The cost of the new infrastructure would be roughly twice that of the previous one ("increasing coverage is increasingly expensive"), and you're going to pay for the cost of the infrastructure either way in your air-time charges.

Look at it this way: Even if the company only charged for packets successfully received, it would just increase their rates by (1/0.95) - 1 = 5.3% to (1/0.93) - 1 = 7.5% to maintain the same cash flow. Plus it would have to start keeping track of the success or failure of each packet transmitted, and put that into its billing scheme. That's a database PITA I don't want, thank you very much.

The red flag for me was,

I've always tried to be in companies in which what I did was directly tied to the company's main business. There is an analogy to a river: You want to be in the main stream, not in some backwater, so that when things get tight and money dries up, you're not left high and dry -- as in, a department or division that can be conveniently closed as a "cost reduction," with little (immediate) effect on their main business.

A corollary to this applies to physical locations, too: Remote sites will be closed before corporate headquarters will be, so pay attention to your job's location.

Besides, if you're not in the company's main business, you could develop a fabulous thing, and nobody at your company will appreciate it. (Think Xerox PARC. There are many examples at smaller scales.)

This leads to something that has always puzzled me about American political parties -- their legal status. Are they non-profit corporations, or something? Other than the brownshirts, what keeps me from opening up a storefront down the street from the local Republican Party headquarters, and call my place the local Republican Party headquarters, instead -- complete with candidates that I support, fundraisers, etc.?

20120037751, filed 26 April 2010. Not yet issued. . . .

The Bureau of Industry and Security, US Department of Commerce, is the place to go to see the appropriate regulations. See, especially, the Export Administration Regulations, the Commerce Control List (especially), and the Lists to Check list. (Yes, there are so many lists that the lists themselves have a list.)

There are lots of reasons for weather delays of rocket launches, but one of them is wind. I've been told (by actual rocket scientists, with only a few Green Martians* in them at the time) that there are two critical factors related to wind -- the wind speed itself and its variability, i.e., gusts -- and that the reasons both trace back to the limitations of the directional-control system of the engines (i.e., the gimbals) and the guidance system of the rocket.

The limitation on maximum wind speed is related to the range of control of the engines (i.e., how many degrees off the axis of the rocket the engines can point), since that eventually works back to how large a wind-compensating vector is available to the guidance system. The gust limitation is related to the response speed (slew rate) of the engine gimbals, since that eventually works back to how fast the guidance system can respond to changes in wind speed and/or direction.
________
*Equal parts vodka, Midori, sour mix, ginger ale, 7-Up, and soda, in case you're curious. Once a favorite of that crowd, back in the day.

FTFY.

And I would say that that goes double for professors teaching undergraduate required classes (chemistry, biology, physics, etc.) at universities that have medical schools. At the U.S. university I attended (a large state school with more than 30,000 students at the time), people interested in learning chemistry need not apply, because the goal was to avoid teaching freshmen at all costs -- too many students might pass, and then how would they fund the sophomore organic chemistry classes? Besides, they could save money on teaching assistants and labs because a sufficiently small fraction of the pre-med students would still pass, without instruction. Since these students did, in fact, pass, they used the fact of their passing as a justification of these policies -- after all, everyone knows chemistry is difficult, right? Nobody asked how many undergraduate chemistry majors went into chemistry as a profession, or became chemistry grad students (all of them were from other schools, mostly overseas).

When my brother went through the program a few years later, he found out that, despite the department's best efforts, too many freshmen were still passing chemistry. Since the 200-student class was down to a single, massively-overworked graduate teaching assistant, the minimum allowed by regulation, they had thought of something else: They contacted the math department, and coordinated the mid-term exams for the freshman chemistry and freshman calculus classes, so that they occurred on the same night: chemistry 6-8 PM, calculus 8-10 PM. That bit of synergism did the trick -- both classes' passing rate dropped to "acceptable" levels.

Oh, and not to worry -- this isn't a case of sour grapes. I passed very well, thank you, and got three graduate degrees to boot, so I'm none the worse for wear. However, as a result of this and a litany of similar experiences, I don't suffer undergraduate teaching apologists gladly.