I'm not against this idea at all, but the water table is so high in most places in Florida that it would be really difficult to do. One needs to drill down less than 20 feet in most places to reach water. It's why one sees so few (substantially zero) houses with basements in Florida.

Keep in mind that his grad students were the ones that created the controlled technology in the first place, while working in his lab, and there is no evidence (nor any accusations made by the Prosecutor at his trial) that his students ever surreptitiously transferred the controlled technology outside the US. As another commenter notes elsewhere, it's impossible to exaggerate how goofy the rules are, and Prof. Roth ignored the "obviously illogical and irrational" regulations -- to his detriment.

And if you think he "chose" to employ foreign citizens as grad students, you haven't visited a US science, technology, engineering, or math graduate school since, say, 1980 or so. The ratio of foreign citizens to US citizens among the electrical engineering doctoral students at a major US state university with which I am familiar is approximately 20:1.

See the sad case of Prof. John Roth, of the University of Tennessee.

It's not just trading in state secrets ("espionage"). In the US it's also the trading in controlled technologies. The difference is, a controlled technology can be transferred to any US citizen with no legal issue at all, but cannot be transferred to (certain) foreign citizens. A state secret, on the other hand, may not be transferred even to another US citizen without authorization.

It's the information the technologist has stored on it that is the problem. The export control laws are enforced by the Bureau of Industry and Security, and they are arcane, complex, and woefully out of date. Just to give one example, if you're a microprocessor designer, and have a design that operates at temperatures exceeding 125C, that design is controlled; carrying that design in your laptop when you go to China is a violation of the law -- whether or not it is even accessed while in China. (It's also illegal to show that design to any person of Chinese citizenship, even if you both are in the US at the time; that, too, is considered export under the law.)

The other -- and, I would submit, more important -- reason for not taking your business laptop to China (if you're from the US) is US export control laws. The definitions of "export" and "controlled technology" have been so generalized that it is an even-money bet that the laptop of a given technologist contains information that, were he to travel to China, would result in at least a technical violation of the law -- and the penalties are severe.

Dekatron valves are an example of a solution to the problem of making storage registers before integrated circuits made them essentially free. Making reliable working memory was one of the biggest problems faced by the early computer hardware designers, and Dekatron valves (tubes) were one of the more creative solutions. Of course, the reliability of solid-state electronics made them a technological backwater, but that makes them no less interesting -- it's fun to speculate on how things would have worked out if cold-cathode valves remained the dominant storage technology.

In my experience (speaking as someone old enough to remember watching the coverage of President Kennedy's assassination on television), the odds are not good, since the existing people are typically happy with the existing system -- otherwise, they would have changed it by now. However, one hope is to find a value of your organization -- and it'll be specific to each organization -- that would be improved by the change you desire.

Note that this is not your value, but a stated value of the "old guard" that could be improved by the new system -- and, usually, avoiding the mortality of the old guard itself is not an acceptable value. Extra credit if you can arrange a discussion of the old guard value in such a way that Bob can take credit for the improved performance of the new system.

Often, like so much in life, people with existing beliefs have to pass on before new ideas are accepted; ask yourself if you will be open to replacing your Google Docs system by something you don't know and have never heard of, in ten or twenty years' time.

Recognize that you will have to do all the work to install the new system, just as Bob did to install his own system years ago.

Is this a leer jet? Is this a Learjet?

Absolutely. Ever heard of co-processors, or hardware accelerators? They are hardware implementations of algorithms that are used to speed computation and reduce power consumption, and are in every modern microprocessor.

Since they are hardware implementations of software algorithms, if this change were in force the manufacturer and seller of hardware accelerators (and the computer that contains them) would be vulnerable to patent infringement lawsuits from holders of software patents. However, if the processor did not contain them, this would not be the case, so there would be great incentive for manufacturers to design microprocessors, and computers in general, without them.

Having to design computing hardware without embedded data processing algorithms would slow progress a lot -- I wouldn't want to do it. Especially with attorneys trying to tell me that my address decoder or bus contention manager or AES-128 encryption engine is a hardware implementation of their software algorithm. Eek.

Passing the buck to the hardware portion of the computer, instead of the software, doesn't solve the problem.

Apologies. That was not my intent. I, too, am trying to understand what Stallman is saying.

[rubs chin] . . . so his proposal would establish a sort of one-way intellectual property door, in which patented hardware could be emulated in software without patent infringement, but patented software algorithms implemented in hardware would infringe.

The implications of that are interesting. On the one hand, it would tend to force implementations of all kinds of things into software (even things that would be better done in hardware), for fear of lawsuits, which might slow the pace of hardware development -- even the programmable hardware the software runs on. On the other hand, it would make the decision of whether to patent a software algorithm an interesting one: The only valuable software patents would be those that seemed likely to be implemented into hardware (and could therefore get royalties).

As I have asked elsewhere, suppose that the guys developing code for general purpose hardware developed an improved algorithm, and some other guy took their algorithm, instantiated it in hard-wired logic gates, and sold it as a physical product. Is your position that the guy who took the improved algorithm and made money off of it owes nothing to those who invented the algorithm?

. . . but suppose that the guys working on programmable hardware developed an improved algorithm to use on their programmable hardware, and some other guy took their algorithm, instantiated it in hard-wired logic gates, and sold it. Is your position that the guy who took the improved algorithm and made money off of it owes nothing to those who invented the algorithm?

I beg to differ -- billions and billions of FPGAs have been sold, over the last 30 years, for just about every computing application one could name. It's hard to think of a more generally-used piece of computing hardware than one that can be programmed to be anything you want.

Or does "generally used computing hardware" mean that it has to be a consumer product? That wouldn't protect the armies of software developers in the world working on industrial or imbedded applications...

Besides, how do DSPs escape the "generally used computing hardware" category? They're above your line, too.

I'm not against it at all, but II really would like to understand how Stallman's proposal would apply to, say, the following example (one I've used before):

Suppose we take something like the FM demodulator in a radio. When Edwin Armstrong invented it, back in the stone age of the 1930s, I think we can all agree that (a) it was an "actual physical device," and (b) that it met all the other criteria (novelty, non-obviousness, utility, etc.) needed for a patent. It was implemented with the technology available at the time -- stone knives, bear skins, vacuum tubes (valves), and a transformer.

Skipping over details like the invention of ratio detectors, phase-locked loops, etc., the next change in implementation of FM detectors came when the tubes were replaced with discrete transistors. This required some change in bias methods, impedance levels, etc., but no major redesign. It did save cost, size, and power, though.

The next change was integration. At first, the transformer was still needed for the demodulator, and so it was pinned out of the ICs, which were still analog. This saved cost, size, and power still further.

Later, schemes were found to integrate the function of the transformer, fully integrating the (still analog) demodulator. This saved cost and size still further.

Still later, improvements in integration processes enabled the function of the FM demodulator to be performed digitally, using an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a bunch of hard-wired logic gates, emulating the mathematical function performed by the analog demodulator. This saved cost, size, and power still further.

Demodulator designs were next ported into programmable hardware dedicated to signal-processing applications (digital signal processors); this required the ADC, plus the algorithm converted to the DSP's assembly language. This saved cost and size.

After that, demodulator designs were moved into hardware register-transfer languages, like Verilog, providing portability from chip to chip using standard-cell logic families. This saved cost.

Later, the Verilog designs were ported into field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), enabling one to program the hardware in the chip to become, when preceded by the ADC, an FM demodulator. This saved cost.

Finally, technology improved to the point that the FM demodulator could be made by an ADC followed by a microcomputer, programmed with software in a high-level language as part of a much larger system. This saved cost.

At what point in this development do we draw the line and say, "Below this, it's not patentable (or patent infringement)?" Where is "software"?