The only US patent I could find assigned to Hagenuk that discusses antennas was 5886668, which doesn't mention radiation absorbed by the body at all. Can you supply a reference?

This is incorrect. 802.11 is both -- it specifies both the MAC and a number of physical (PHY) layers, better known as the "radio" part. The standards can be downloaded here -- for free -- if you'd like to see for yourself.

The funny part is, those corporate researchers that I've met -- and it would be dozens over the years -- all use cell phones, and buy them for their spouses and children. What cold-hearted bastards! Or ignorant fools! Or both!

And the corporate cell phone designers that I've met -- and it would be hundreds over the years -- all use cell phones and, despite their decades of work on improving the size, weight, battery life, and range of their devices, never once realized that it would be to their competitive advantage to minimize any radiation absorbed by the body, since that represents wasted energy that could have been used to reach the cell tower instead. Idiots!

But the managerial genius of the corporations! They can stay in the business for twenty years or more, and each hire hundreds of EM researchers and tens of thousands of engineers, without one of them cracking and letting the Great Corporate Secret -- those Top Secret studies that show how dangerous cell phones are -- out to the public. The maintained secrecy would impress the NSA and NRO, while the control of their people would impress Kim Jong-un. Masterful!

I assume no one there was making a server?

Placed just above the submission, "Astronomy Portfolio Review Recommends Defunding US's Biggest Telescope," the combination tells you all you need to know.

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.