That's not very good reasoning. If all software patents are bunk, so are many electrical engineering patents. I hope that the second sentence is not supposed

That's not very good reasoning. If all software patents are bunk, so are many electrical engineering patents. I hope that the second sentence is not supposed to be a substantiation for the first one. If anything, it's an example of why the system must be fixed. Is this sufficiently far from software to get me a patent for my ideas? It shouldn't give you that right in the first place. Patents were meant for engineering inventions, not for mathematical discoveries. Encoding a mathematical discovery in an engineered form does not change its substantial nature.