The meaning of determining

The Board addresses the meaning of "determining" in Ex parte Julian.

Claim 1 recites a “determining” step. One relevant plain meaning of “determine” is “to settle or decide by choice of alternatives or possibilities.” MERRIAM-WEBSTER’S COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY 315 (10th ed. 1999). Accordingly, the multiple access communication system of claim 1 chooses between either responding or not responding, conditional upon whether “the reverse-link performance drops below the predetermined threshold.” Such an interpretation of the “determining” step is consistent with the explanation in the Specification that “[u]pon recognition of channel degradation, the access point may stop responding 412 to the ACK messages sent from the access terminal, and then switch 416 to transmission of data not using incremental redundancy.”