Appeal No. 95-0421
Application 07/880,702
ratio to produce initialized maximum timer settings; and
re-setting the maximum and minimum timers of each
station to the initialized maximum and minimum timer
settings for that station.
3. The examiner finally rejected claims 1-10 under
35 U.S.C. § 103. No other claims are pending. (Paper 5 at 1.)
In making the rejection, the examiner relied on the
following references:
McCauley 3,913,788 21 Oct. 1975
Keeney 4,199,080 22 Apr. 1980
4. The references, read as a whole, do not teach or
suggest the claimed acts or structures for initializing timers in
a classification tank. Specifically, the references do not teach
sorting valve-open time data to identify a most active station
and normalizing all other station valve-open times to obtain
initialized minimum and maximum timer settings for each station.
The examiner has relied on the level of skill in the art to
provide the missing suggestion (e.g., Paper 12 at 6-7), but has
not explained why the artisan would have been motivated to modify
the references to obtain the claimed invention. The teaching in
McCauley that (1.63-66) the prior art Cochran system uses maximum
and minimum timers and the teaching in Keeney that the maximum
and minimum timer values are "predetermined" (6:53-54) or
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