[noonespecial]

Ask them if they'd be OK with a patent that simply read "using a computer to transmit a radio wave" and see if they'd get behind trolls suing every texi-cab company that uses a dispatch radio tuned by a PLL and a microcontroller.

That might help them understand where this is headed (and already arrived in many cases).

They want to patent that brilliant little algo they spent months on to eek out that seemingly impossible spread spectrum noise piercing scheme that they finally got working. That's not how it happens at the patent office these days. Worse still, after all those months of creating something genuinely usefull, they're likely to be sued by someone who's never touched a radio, or made a product, and has a patent that reads more like "walky-talkies with teh interwebs inside".