Appeal No. 2003-2156
Application No. 09/849,761
has been argued but only aspects of the disclosed invention
repeated in the Brief and Reply Brief. Thus, we choose as a
representative claim for our consideration, independent
claim 14 on appeal, as reproduced earlier in this opinion.
Although we agree with appellant’s characterizations in
the Brief and Reply Brief that the examiner has not set
forth a sufficient rationale in the answer as to the
combinability/motivation of appellant’s admitted prior art
with Kolesnik, we still sustain the rejection of the claims
on appeal. Initially, the examiner’s statement of the
rejection at page 3 of the Answer implicitly includes
independent claims 1, 8, 14 and 22. The examiner has not
separately parsed these independent claims, but has
considered each of the remaining dependent claims on appeal
at pages 3 and 4. The examiner has not presented to us a
detailed study of what the teachings of the admitted prior
art and Kolesnik are. The examiner’s rationale is either
unexplained or weakly explained. We will therefore not
speculate as to the combinability of the respective
references relied upon by the examiner.
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