It's more the UN Food program offering the third world a choice between (popular) meat -- which will ultimately, slowly but inexorably, fuck over every last hectare of their farm land as crops are grown for the purpose of raising animals which fart out toxic gases and produce too much shit to use it all as fertiliser (because if you feed cows on plants fertilised with nothing but cow shit, they get BSE), and in the end they have to import all their food from the first world -- and (unpopular) vegan tofu, rather than just vegan tofu which at least they can grow sustainably. And they can probably even afford then to raise a small number of animals for m**t as an occasional treat.
If Britain joined the Euro (which is unlikely to happen now; until only the last century we were still using pounds, shillings and pence, and it would have been groats and farthings if the press had their way), more of the world's business would be transacted in Euros than US Dollars.
Euros are already just as welcome on the world's Black markets as Dollars.
You might be able to get a well-stripped-down Linux kernel and initial ramdisk on a 1.44MB floppy, but you won't get the userland root filesystem on there. Even tomsrtbt pulls a few stunts -- I think they managed to get about 1.72MB on the floppy.
You can do Linux on two floppies. I've even got an ancient 8MB lappie that I might try this on, just for S+G.
When someone who makes a living selling expensive, proprietary tackle and bait wants to get involved with a project teaching people to fish, you should suspect an ulterior motive. Closed Source software is toxic stuff.
Two of the Four Freedoms -- freedom to run and freedom to share -- can be taken by force if necessary, but the other two -- freedom to inspect and freedom to improve -- can't, because they depend on access to the Source Code.
What is worse is, 25 years or so ago, when attitudes were being formed, you didn't need the Source Code so desperately; because most software was written in straight machine code, and physical limitations on memory and storage space meant that programs were smaller. So analysing a binary wasn't anything like as intractable as it is today. You didn't even need any special software tools: it was possible to disassemble the code by hand and brain alone. The entire instruction set of an 8-bit processor will fit onto one side of A4. Changing a machine code game to get a more readable charset, different control keys (there were two major camps in BBC-land; the Snapper faithful with Z and X for left and right, : and / for up and down, and the Contrarians preferring A and Z for up and down and _ and cursor down for left and right), not to mention the usual infinite lives / energy, or even altered graphics (giving the protagonist an enormous todger was always a firm favourite) wasn't difficult. Of course, there were also magazines with type-in listings, and you were more or less encouraged to tinker with them -- many BASIC programs could be hacked, if they didn't depend too heavily on machine-specific features, to suit another machine's dialect.
Since then, everything has gone compiled; and binaries that came from a compiler aren't meant to be understood by humans. None of this is obvious to non-experts.
OLPC was supposed to have introduced the rest of the world to computers as a blank slate. With Closed Source software on board, it's going to end up stamped indelibly with one particular vendor's vision of what computers should be like.
I'm beginning to think that using an 80x86-class (and therefore Windows-capable) processor was a seriously bad choice in the first place. They should just have waited for the last of the first-generation ARM patents to expire, or even bought them outright and PD'ed them (which would have been cheaper than designing a processor from scratch) -- hell, since they were dealing directly with education ministries, maybe even persuaded governments in the target countries to annul them there. It would have sent out more clearly the message that Microsoft were not welcome.
Yes indeed. Programming languages are a lot like cars. Pascal is a driving school car with an extra brake and clutch on the passenger side. Modula-2 is a dodgem car with only one pedal and two gears and it isn't allowed on the main roads. ADA is a military staff car and if you want to drive it, you have to submit six different forms in triplicate to eighteen different departments, some of which are offsite, and then deal with at least one situation where you have to cross out your signature and sign the correction and one where you have to try to get some order forms out of the stationery stores without an order form for the order forms order. C is an engineer's car; it's held together with bits of string, there's no synchro so you have to double-declutch and there's a special technique for starting it, which nobody except its rightful owner has ever mastered. Python is a boy racer's car with blacked-out windows, fluffy dice, air horns, MAX POWER stickers and a riduculously loud stereo -- but its owner still hasn't got a girlfriend. Perl is a Ford Transit that's looked old and beaten-up since it was new, but it still gets you there.
Then it looks to me as though you don't realise just how toxic Caged software is. What you dismiss as "philosophical and political baggage" is immunisation against the damage that Caged software creates. Without the Four Freedoms -- freedom to run, freedom to inspect, freedom to share and freedom to improve -- software is reduced to a rope around the user's neck. They can lead you anywhere they want to take you; and when they're done with you, they can strangle you. And while freedom to run and freedom to share can be taken by force if necessary, freedom to inspect and freedom to improve are -- unless and until someone invents a working decompiler -- entirely contingent upon access to the Source Code.
I started off, like tens of thousands of other programmers today, on a close and proprietary system - an PC of some flavor, as BASIC interpreter, and a couple of crappy books. A kid with an XO and access to the 'net is orders of magnitude better off than we were.
But it's not really a like-for-like comparison.
In the 8-bit days, there really wasn't such a thing as "Caged software". Sure, there were restrictions on copying, and even some attempted restrictions on use; but when everything including the RAM, ROM, frame buffer and I/O had to fit into 64 kbytes of addressable space, then freedom to inspect and freedom to improve actually could be taken by force. Because no binary small enough to fit in that space was beyond human comprehension. Plus the machine code would have been written by a human, not a compiler. People could -- and did -- disassemble code. "The ZX Spectrum ROM Disassembly" was a bestseller and probably sold Spectrums to people who wouldn't otherwise have bothered with one.
Nowadays we're lazy and everything is coded in high-level languages. This
#include <stdio.h> int main() { printf("Hello, World!"); };
is 64 bytes of source. When compiled statically and stripped, the binary is 543776 bytes.
Now, the amount of time saved by not scrabbling frantically about trying to save a byte or two somewhere (read anything about programming the Atari 2600, if you want to know more) probably has more than made up for those wasted bytes. But it's still created a monster. Without those 64 bytes of Source Code, you haven't a hope in hell of understanding what that 543776 byte binary actually does. Displaying "Hello, World!" on a Beeb or a Commodore 64 would take (working from memory) 36 bytes, and anyone who was familiar with the machine would be able to understand, just from looking at those 36 bytes of machine code, what it was supposed to do. Now, since we used a ROM call (which is a bit more like a shared library) for outputting characters on the 8-bit boxes, I suppose we should compare like-for-like. My above "hello" example then gives a 4496 byte stripped binary when dynamically linked. It's still not what I would call tractable.
That generation of kids will be just like the West - 99.99999% of them simply won't care. Software is something they install and expect to Just Work. The price tag and the philosophical and political baggage is simply irrelevant to them.
Maybe; but for the sake of the 0.00001% of them who do care, the Source Code is absolutely vital because nothing else will do the job: without the Source Code, two of the four Freedoms are lost. Most people's kitchens don't go on fire, but the law still requires them to have an extinguisher. Most people don't get pregnant at the wrong time, but the law still allows them to get an abortion. Because the alternative is far worse for Society at Large.
Now, it's entirely possible that someone will come up with a usable decompiler at some time in future; and that will make Caged software impossible again. But it would be remiss of us to gamble the entire collective future IT industries of the developing world on such an eventuality.
that freedom exists regardless of price tag on the OS or the apps.
Way to miss the point! It's not free as opposed to expensive, it's Free as opposed to Caged.
(Aside the from the very minor and likely to be little used ability to look 'under the hood' and modify the code.)
It's not "very minor and likely to be little used", that's the whole freaking point. It's vitally important to be able to poke about inside. Whilst it's by no means certain that everybody will do so, it's important for them to have the opportunity to. Because there's no way of knowing in advance who is going to be a programmer.
Imagine a whole generation of kids growing up never having been exposed to proprietary, Caged software. A whole generation of kids where some have learned to program their OLPCs, and shared the programs they wrote freely. Basically, those kids are going to be used to the whole Free software ethos in a way that most people in the West don't get -- and there's no way in hell they'd ever want to use a piece of Caged software.
No processor manufacturer will be able to undermine anything, because the patents covering the first-generation ARM processor are expiring soon -- and while early ARM chips were considered excessively RAM-hungry (every instruction occupies a 32-bit word) modern 80x86 devices are also RAM-hungry -- especially when running Windows -- so RAM prices have fallen to the point where it's economically viable to use old-skool ARM with a fully-populated memory map (you'd probably have to use bank switching; the addressing schema is only 24 bits wide, giving 16M * 32 bit words. ARM, like its spiritual predecessor the 6502, doesn't differentiate between memory and I/O buses). And did I mention that it manages all this with about 24 000 transistors?
It would hardly be beyond the bounds of feasibility to set up a clean, modern factory in the third world somewhere to make patent-free ARM clones for use in mark II OLPC machines. Since all the software is Open Source, it doesn't matter what the underlying processor architecture is just so long as there's a port of GCC available for it.
Actually, maybe that is exactly what all the major players are scared of.....
Sugar doesn't need to be cross-platform! It already runs on GNU/Linux -- and any PC running Windows can be persuaded to run GNU/Linux, a lot more easily and cheaply than the other way around. If developers are really so averse to creating a small (because OLPC itself has limited RAM and storage anyway) partition from which to run GNU/Linux, they can always do their development work from a liveCD.
All this smacks of an attempt to subvert a noble effort to teach people to fish into a way of selling even more expensive, proprietary tackle and bait.
There are more adverts on satellite (and digital terrestrial, and cable) than there are on analogue terrestrial television. ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel 5 are subject to quite harsh restrictions on advertising, which don't apply to the likes of Sky or UKTV. A half-hour BBC show expands to 40 minutes on UK Gold.
I'm not even sure what products are being advertised since I ditched Virgin Media for Sky Plus. Having a big ugly dish on the house is not good (makes it look like a Council house -- fortunately it's around the back so not visible from the street) but missing out on The Simpsons, Weeds and Lost was worse.
Because/dev/null can get full, if you put too many ones into it! Then you have to dd/dev/zero into it to balance it out. The zeros and ones end up annihilating one another and the cosmic balance is restored.
This was an advertorial, pure and simple. Advertising masquerading as editorial content. In UK newspapers and magazines, such content must be labelled as an advertisement. Seems that this does not apply to websites in less civilised nations.
I was just waiting for the bit where a HDD caught fire and they managed to recover 90% of the data from a reflection of some of the smoke in a bystander's eye, as captured in a photograph on a mobile phone. Or the example of the parent whose little darling brought home a "kewl new game" from a friend at school which, after trying it out on the family PC with several generations' worth of photographs, home movies and so forth, turned out to be DBAN -- but DriveSavers recovered everything and even managed to render Grandad's old scanned sepiatone photographs into 48-bit colour.
Hint: IT professionals, with a very few exceptions where it is genuinely relevant, do not use Adobe Flash content on their websites.
It depends whether the fault lies within the controller IC or one of the Flash memory ICs. If the former, your data might be recoverable in full. If the latter, it's more doubtful.
Arm yourself with some SMD rework tools and as many different manufacturers' Flash memory developers' kits as you can blag, and you ought to be able to set yourself up in business rescuing SSDs.
There is no practical difference between deionised and distilled water. The former is usually cheaper, since a deioniser can't be repurposed for purifying other things besides water and so doesn't make your premises subject to periodic inspections.
Air-conditioner runoff is also free of soluble minerals; but, never having been heated above room temperature, it is quite likely to contain bacteria and/or fungal spores. Boil it before using it to wash anything that you might touch with your bare skin.
Not necessarily true. You just need to locate another identical flash drive, and swap over the memory chip (the one with two rows of pins spaced stupidly wide apart). Be careful with the unsoldering and soldering, for fear of ripping the tracks off the board -- these devices tend to be built on FR4, which is not renowned for its copper-to-substrate adhesion. Use plenty of flux (if you can breathe, then you aren't using enough).
It still might not work if the controller failure took out the flash memory with it, but in practice this is rare.
Yes, it's dodgy. The need to compile the wrapper ensures that the user did the non-infringing Act of Fair Dealing, which is within the letter of the GPL if not the spirit -- creating a "You changed it! It's your fault anything happened!" situation.
Personally, I think anyone who tries to conceal Source Code from users is extremely dodgy anyway. Unfortunately, the Law of the Land is on their side for the time being:-( Were I Minister for I.T., I would pass a law requiring all software vendors to supply all users with Source Code, whether or not they were allowed to pass on copies to third parties -- and authorising the use of reasonable force against offenders.
H.264 decoding is a purely mathematical operation, which lies outside the scope of patentability. You might be able to patent a particular device capable of performing that operation, but not the operation itself. Any device differing substantially from the implementation described in the patent would not be covered under the patent.
You know, if you had a sensible legal system where lawyers could not demand a penny in payment before a verdict was delivered, then it would be much harder for unscrupulous corporations to drag out court cases to the point where people who are in the right can't afford to fight on. Just saying is all.
Fair Dealing, or Fair Use if you prefer, refers to certain uses of copyrighted material which are expressly permitted by copyright law -- such as research and study, commentary and criticism, certain educational uses, and using your own property for its rightful purpose (making a copy of a computer program in memory for the purpose of running it is not covered by copyright law). Plus whatever the courts decide -- if you are taken to court for copyright infringement, use the defence that your use of the copyrighted material was fair and the jury agree, then you go free and whatever you did becomes legal for everyone thereafter. This is why nobody has ever been done for transferring CDs they owned to cassette or MP3; the BPI, RIAA &c. daren't risk legalising it because they make too much money out of pretending it's against the law.
If you dynamically link a Caged program (which you have the necessary permission to use) against a GPL library (which you also have the necessary permission to use), then you are dealing fairly with / making fair use of the copyrighted works in question. And since the Law of the Land tells you that you can do this, nothing can stop you -- even if you agreed to it and signed a contract in blood. That's what that catch-all phrase, "Your statutory rights are not affected" accompanying all legalese means.
When you come to distribute the linked work, however, you are stepping beyond the bounds of Fair Dealing / Fair Use into "explicit written permission required" territory. But the copyright holders of the Caged application have not given you permission to distribute its Source Code, and the copyright holders of the GPL library have only given you permission to distribute it if you supply the Source Code of the application which links to it. It's the classic "deadly embrace" situation: there's no way you can comply with the requirements of either licence without breaching the other.
Note that the nVidious drivers require you to perform some deliberate act (compiling a small program) before you can make any use of them; this is as much as anything about proving intent.
Slashdot Mirror
That's just freaking awesome.
Every time I think I've seen it all, I see something new.
If Britain joined the Euro (which is unlikely to happen now; until only the last century we were still using pounds, shillings and pence, and it would have been groats and farthings if the press had their way), more of the world's business would be transacted in Euros than US Dollars.
Euros are already just as welcome on the world's Black markets as Dollars.
You might be able to get a well-stripped-down Linux kernel and initial ramdisk on a 1.44MB floppy, but you won't get the userland root filesystem on there. Even tomsrtbt pulls a few stunts -- I think they managed to get about 1.72MB on the floppy.
You can do Linux on two floppies. I've even got an ancient 8MB lappie that I might try this on, just for S+G.
Yes, that's what I've been saying all along.
When someone who makes a living selling expensive, proprietary tackle and bait wants to get involved with a project teaching people to fish, you should suspect an ulterior motive. Closed Source software is toxic stuff.
Two of the Four Freedoms -- freedom to run and freedom to share -- can be taken by force if necessary, but the other two -- freedom to inspect and freedom to improve -- can't, because they depend on access to the Source Code.
What is worse is, 25 years or so ago, when attitudes were being formed, you didn't need the Source Code so desperately; because most software was written in straight machine code, and physical limitations on memory and storage space meant that programs were smaller. So analysing a binary wasn't anything like as intractable as it is today. You didn't even need any special software tools: it was possible to disassemble the code by hand and brain alone. The entire instruction set of an 8-bit processor will fit onto one side of A4. Changing a machine code game to get a more readable charset, different control keys (there were two major camps in BBC-land; the Snapper faithful with Z and X for left and right, : and / for up and down, and the Contrarians preferring A and Z for up and down and _ and cursor down for left and right), not to mention the usual infinite lives / energy, or even altered graphics (giving the protagonist an enormous todger was always a firm favourite) wasn't difficult. Of course, there were also magazines with type-in listings, and you were more or less encouraged to tinker with them -- many BASIC programs could be hacked, if they didn't depend too heavily on machine-specific features, to suit another machine's dialect.
Since then, everything has gone compiled; and binaries that came from a compiler aren't meant to be understood by humans. None of this is obvious to non-experts.
OLPC was supposed to have introduced the rest of the world to computers as a blank slate. With Closed Source software on board, it's going to end up stamped indelibly with one particular vendor's vision of what computers should be like.
I'm beginning to think that using an 80x86-class (and therefore Windows-capable) processor was a seriously bad choice in the first place. They should just have waited for the last of the first-generation ARM patents to expire, or even bought them outright and PD'ed them (which would have been cheaper than designing a processor from scratch) -- hell, since they were dealing directly with education ministries, maybe even persuaded governments in the target countries to annul them there. It would have sent out more clearly the message that Microsoft were not welcome.
Yes indeed. Programming languages are a lot like cars. Pascal is a driving school car with an extra brake and clutch on the passenger side. Modula-2 is a dodgem car with only one pedal and two gears and it isn't allowed on the main roads. ADA is a military staff car and if you want to drive it, you have to submit six different forms in triplicate to eighteen different departments, some of which are offsite, and then deal with at least one situation where you have to cross out your signature and sign the correction and one where you have to try to get some order forms out of the stationery stores without an order form for the order forms order. C is an engineer's car; it's held together with bits of string, there's no synchro so you have to double-declutch and there's a special technique for starting it, which nobody except its rightful owner has ever mastered. Python is a boy racer's car with blacked-out windows, fluffy dice, air horns, MAX POWER stickers and a riduculously loud stereo -- but its owner still hasn't got a girlfriend. Perl is a Ford Transit that's looked old and beaten-up since it was new, but it still gets you there.
In the 8-bit days, there really wasn't such a thing as "Caged software". Sure, there were restrictions on copying, and even some attempted restrictions on use; but when everything including the RAM, ROM, frame buffer and I/O had to fit into 64 kbytes of addressable space, then freedom to inspect and freedom to improve actually could be taken by force. Because no binary small enough to fit in that space was beyond human comprehension. Plus the machine code would have been written by a human, not a compiler. People could -- and did -- disassemble code. "The ZX Spectrum ROM Disassembly" was a bestseller and probably sold Spectrums to people who wouldn't otherwise have bothered with one.
Nowadays we're lazy and everything is coded in high-level languages. This is 64 bytes of source. When compiled statically and stripped, the binary is 543776 bytes.
Now, the amount of time saved by not scrabbling frantically about trying to save a byte or two somewhere (read anything about programming the Atari 2600, if you want to know more) probably has more than made up for those wasted bytes. But it's still created a monster. Without those 64 bytes of Source Code, you haven't a hope in hell of understanding what that 543776 byte binary actually does. Displaying "Hello, World!" on a Beeb or a Commodore 64 would take (working from memory) 36 bytes, and anyone who was familiar with the machine would be able to understand, just from looking at those 36 bytes of machine code, what it was supposed to do. Now, since we used a ROM call (which is a bit more like a shared library) for outputting characters on the 8-bit boxes, I suppose we should compare like-for-like. My above "hello" example then gives a 4496 byte stripped binary when dynamically linked. It's still not what I would call tractable.Maybe; but for the sake of the 0.00001% of them who do care, the Source Code is absolutely vital because nothing else will do the job: without the Source Code, two of the four Freedoms are lost. Most people's kitchens don't go on fire, but the law still requires them to have an extinguisher. Most people don't get pregnant at the wrong time, but the law still allows them to get an abortion. Because the alternative is far worse for Society at Large.
Now, it's entirely possible that someone will come up with a usable decompiler at some time in future; and that will make Caged software impossible again. But it would be remiss of us to gamble the entire collective future IT industries of the developing world on such an eventuality.
Imagine a whole generation of kids growing up never having been exposed to proprietary, Caged software. A whole generation of kids where some have learned to program their OLPCs, and shared the programs they wrote freely. Basically, those kids are going to be used to the whole Free software ethos in a way that most people in the West don't get -- and there's no way in hell they'd ever want to use a piece of Caged software.
No processor manufacturer will be able to undermine anything, because the patents covering the first-generation ARM processor are expiring soon -- and while early ARM chips were considered excessively RAM-hungry (every instruction occupies a 32-bit word) modern 80x86 devices are also RAM-hungry -- especially when running Windows -- so RAM prices have fallen to the point where it's economically viable to use old-skool ARM with a fully-populated memory map (you'd probably have to use bank switching; the addressing schema is only 24 bits wide, giving 16M * 32 bit words. ARM, like its spiritual predecessor the 6502, doesn't differentiate between memory and I/O buses). And did I mention that it manages all this with about 24 000 transistors?
.....
It would hardly be beyond the bounds of feasibility to set up a clean, modern factory in the third world somewhere to make patent-free ARM clones for use in mark II OLPC machines. Since all the software is Open Source, it doesn't matter what the underlying processor architecture is just so long as there's a port of GCC available for it.
Actually, maybe that is exactly what all the major players are scared of
Sugar doesn't need to be cross-platform! It already runs on GNU/Linux -- and any PC running Windows can be persuaded to run GNU/Linux, a lot more easily and cheaply than the other way around. If developers are really so averse to creating a small (because OLPC itself has limited RAM and storage anyway) partition from which to run GNU/Linux, they can always do their development work from a liveCD.
All this smacks of an attempt to subvert a noble effort to teach people to fish into a way of selling even more expensive, proprietary tackle and bait.
There are more adverts on satellite (and digital terrestrial, and cable) than there are on analogue terrestrial television. ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel 5 are subject to quite harsh restrictions on advertising, which don't apply to the likes of Sky or UKTV. A half-hour BBC show expands to 40 minutes on UK Gold.
I'm not even sure what products are being advertised since I ditched Virgin Media for Sky Plus. Having a big ugly dish on the house is not good (makes it look like a Council house -- fortunately it's around the back so not visible from the street) but missing out on The Simpsons, Weeds and Lost was worse.
I deliberately start watching late; then I just rewind to the beginning of the programme, and fast-forward through the advert breaks.
Visiting people who don't have Sky Plus is really annoying!
Sulphur itself, in its elemental state as flowers of sulphur, is actually odourless.
However, most sulphur compounds are very smelly indeed. Thioethanol (used in stink bombs) is reckoned to be the smelliest substance in the world.
Oh, and props to them for using the "old-fashioned" spelling!
Because /dev/null can get full, if you put too many ones into it! Then you have to dd /dev/zero into it to balance it out. The zeros and ones end up annihilating one another and the cosmic balance is restored.
Could the same principles be applied to Eurostar trains?
This was an advertorial, pure and simple. Advertising masquerading as editorial content. In UK newspapers and magazines, such content must be labelled as an advertisement. Seems that this does not apply to websites in less civilised nations.
I was just waiting for the bit where a HDD caught fire and they managed to recover 90% of the data from a reflection of some of the smoke in a bystander's eye, as captured in a photograph on a mobile phone. Or the example of the parent whose little darling brought home a "kewl new game" from a friend at school which, after trying it out on the family PC with several generations' worth of photographs, home movies and so forth, turned out to be DBAN -- but DriveSavers recovered everything and even managed to render Grandad's old scanned sepiatone photographs into 48-bit colour.
Hint: IT professionals, with a very few exceptions where it is genuinely relevant, do not use Adobe Flash content on their websites.
It depends whether the fault lies within the controller IC or one of the Flash memory ICs. If the former, your data might be recoverable in full. If the latter, it's more doubtful.
Arm yourself with some SMD rework tools and as many different manufacturers' Flash memory developers' kits as you can blag, and you ought to be able to set yourself up in business rescuing SSDs.
There is no practical difference between deionised and distilled water. The former is usually cheaper, since a deioniser can't be repurposed for purifying other things besides water and so doesn't make your premises subject to periodic inspections.
Air-conditioner runoff is also free of soluble minerals; but, never having been heated above room temperature, it is quite likely to contain bacteria and/or fungal spores. Boil it before using it to wash anything that you might touch with your bare skin.
Not necessarily true. You just need to locate another identical flash drive, and swap over the memory chip (the one with two rows of pins spaced stupidly wide apart). Be careful with the unsoldering and soldering, for fear of ripping the tracks off the board -- these devices tend to be built on FR4, which is not renowned for its copper-to-substrate adhesion. Use plenty of flux (if you can breathe, then you aren't using enough).
It still might not work if the controller failure took out the flash memory with it, but in practice this is rare.
It should still be fine to eat, if you cook it up the same day.
Honestly. If you've got some data you really don't care about ever seeing again, just save it onto a DVD-minus-R.
Yes, it's dodgy. The need to compile the wrapper ensures that the user did the non-infringing Act of Fair Dealing, which is within the letter of the GPL if not the spirit -- creating a "You changed it! It's your fault anything happened!" situation.
:-( Were I Minister for I.T., I would pass a law requiring all software vendors to supply all users with Source Code, whether or not they were allowed to pass on copies to third parties -- and authorising the use of reasonable force against offenders.
Personally, I think anyone who tries to conceal Source Code from users is extremely dodgy anyway. Unfortunately, the Law of the Land is on their side for the time being
H.264 decoding is a purely mathematical operation, which lies outside the scope of patentability. You might be able to patent a particular device capable of performing that operation, but not the operation itself. Any device differing substantially from the implementation described in the patent would not be covered under the patent.
You know, if you had a sensible legal system where lawyers could not demand a penny in payment before a verdict was delivered, then it would be much harder for unscrupulous corporations to drag out court cases to the point where people who are in the right can't afford to fight on. Just saying is all.
Fair Dealing, or Fair Use if you prefer, refers to certain uses of copyrighted material which are expressly permitted by copyright law -- such as research and study, commentary and criticism, certain educational uses, and using your own property for its rightful purpose (making a copy of a computer program in memory for the purpose of running it is not covered by copyright law). Plus whatever the courts decide -- if you are taken to court for copyright infringement, use the defence that your use of the copyrighted material was fair and the jury agree, then you go free and whatever you did becomes legal for everyone thereafter. This is why nobody has ever been done for transferring CDs they owned to cassette or MP3; the BPI, RIAA &c. daren't risk legalising it because they make too much money out of pretending it's against the law.
If you dynamically link a Caged program (which you have the necessary permission to use) against a GPL library (which you also have the necessary permission to use), then you are dealing fairly with / making fair use of the copyrighted works in question. And since the Law of the Land tells you that you can do this, nothing can stop you -- even if you agreed to it and signed a contract in blood. That's what that catch-all phrase, "Your statutory rights are not affected" accompanying all legalese means.
When you come to distribute the linked work, however, you are stepping beyond the bounds of Fair Dealing / Fair Use into "explicit written permission required" territory. But the copyright holders of the Caged application have not given you permission to distribute its Source Code, and the copyright holders of the GPL library have only given you permission to distribute it if you supply the Source Code of the application which links to it. It's the classic "deadly embrace" situation: there's no way you can comply with the requirements of either licence without breaching the other.
Note that the nVidious drivers require you to perform some deliberate act (compiling a small program) before you can make any use of them; this is as much as anything about proving intent.