If all software patents are bunk, so are many electrical engineering patents.

If software is built on hardware, anything I represent in software can be 1:1 related to the digital circuit equivalent. It may be silly or infeasible to do so - but I could make an ASIC or FPGA that runs my latest piece of code. Maybe those wouldn't count because they're too close to the way we think of software. Okay - I lay out my PCB with just 4011s NAND gates. Is this sufficiently far from software to get me a patent for my ideas?

I think software should move towards a trade secret model and abolish software specific patents entirely. Unless you can demand to see the source code, you can never prove whether or not I used your algorithm.

That - or, software developers need to make one gigantic document of every single idea they have implemented and used. If everyone has 5 ideas a day that they implemented and wrote down, we'd hit some sticky situations where a new problem is found. And, much like the patent system, if we put it online where anyone could potentially see it, we can say that it was prior art for any future patent.

Then - as they don't have to be good ideas necessarily, we run through and make all permutations of every single word on the page, leading to every possible idea that can be thought of in that context. Prior art for everything. Or just get Pi out and start translating it to English.

And yet few people realize that. The USPTO continues to issue software-equivalent patents as well as software patents, and the courts uphold their validity, all while claiming that "real" math is not patentable, but offering no clear theoretical framework for distinguishing the two.

ASICs could be argued to be physical implementations and therefore patentable. On the other hand, when converting a software algorithm to an ASIC design involves no additional creative effort, how can the ASIC be patented?

As a good person (who doesn't want his patent thrown out when it goes to court), I would not try to submit an incomplete design and I would make sure that my filing included all of the necessary information to put the design into future generations' hands. (But not the billion dollars, of course!) Who's to say it involves no additional creative effort? I remember Computer Organization and Architecture classes as a Computer Scientist that were meant to teach me the left hand of the equation while making me aware of the tetris game that exists on the right hand side, but not bogging us down (since we were computer scientists and not electrical engineers.)

So out of self interest, maybe I should wish to be able to patent the algorithms. I know and I was raised better than that. Our pyramid schemes start and end with our brothers (and sisters) who majored in electrical engineering! Software is meant to be free, and hardware has innate marginal cost as a necessity of physics.

Remember it can be up to the patent examiner in an abstract sense with no rhyme or reason on whether or not to grant a patent, and many of the folks I hear would rather see "boots on the ground." In other words, without the billion dollars to put the fab into works: no patent for us, so no victory.

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.