Those are rather unusual cases - under normal use (direct linking or use as a shared library), a GPL library imposes GPL on the entire application that uses it. Yes, it may be possible to use a GPL library without imposing GPL terms on the application, but it takes a good deal of effort to try and do so, like running the library in a separate process space and highly constraining communications with it...

See FAQ entry: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NFUseGPLPlugins

The FAQ section you linked to is specific to the LGPL. The LZO library is licensed under the GPL, which means any application that uses it, and is distributed publicly, must be released with full source licensed under the GPL. This is an important distinction between the LGPL and GPL...

Those of us who worked and actually innovated in VR in the late 80s and early 90s have always been a little worried about Worlds, as they liked to run off to the patent office with all the ideas the collected from the rest of us. All of their patent claims existed in other products - even their first patents were an attempt to claim basic VR tech shown several years before by several groups, including the one I worked with (OnLive Traveler). There is plenty of prior art to invalidate these patents, but in our glorious patent system it will cost millions to do so. And like SCO, their legal zombie remains keep trying to extend old claims and collect something for the little invalid patent portfolio that was passed on when they shut down. The software patent apocalypse continues....

Irrespective of how you might choose to translate the Hebrew word, pronounced without the missing sounds as "Yad-Hey-Vad-He", it is a personal name. Words like Adonai are titles, translated in English as "God", "Lord", which leads to to ridiculous translations like "the Lord my Lord said untoeth my Lord". Why should Christians maintain a Jewish superstition? (Didn't Jesus say he made God's name manifest? Did he say Lord? Didn't he teach his followers to pray for the sanctification of his Father's name? What name was that?) I've always found it amusing and sad that the 'author' of the Bible has had his name removed and replaced by titles, and this continues to be justified by people who claim to follow Jesus teachings.

I've also found it interesting how many smart people who studied the Bible came to the conclusion that the Trinity was a pagan teaching unsupported by scripture, Issac Newton being one of my favorite examples.

I first approached the Bible as an agnostic leaning towards atheism, read with an open mind, and a goal of proving my parents wrong. At the time my idea of light reading was books on particle physics and molecular and evolutionary biology, I came away with two strong opinions - 1) the Bible was a much more interesting book than its critics gave it credit for, especially in the few places it touched on science and the many places where it touched on archaeological history, and 2) what most people who call themselves Christians believe has very little to do with the book they claim to base their beliefs on - modern churches and teachings are nothing like first century Christians. Studying the bits of of history of Christianity that survived the many purges and burnings explains very well why this is the case.

The primary concern the clergy had with the laity having Bible's in their own language was that they might actually read it and compare what it said to what was being taught from the pulpit. Christianity has had almost 2000 years of significant forks - its history is rife with individuals trying to make their church more popular by blending in local non christian concepts, softening the tone of unpopular language, and removing or changing phrases that might offend. My favorite data point - God's name appears almost 7000 times in the original texts, yet most modern translations have dropped that to between three and zero! Why? Because 'its tradition not to use it', and 'it might confuse people who should believe that Jesus is God', which is hard to make people accept if the Bible is left in its original state as referring to Jesus as the Son of an Almighty God with a different name that most Christians have been told they should not even pronounce.

The power of the clergy came from them telling the people that the Bible was best left in Latin, they should believe what they were told, and follow what the King said. Their telling people to obey the King kept their comfortable relationship with the ruling classes. For a long time anyone in possession of a Bible in English would be executed, most often because they quickly realized the Trinity was a false teaching. For example, the last person officially burnt alive for this in England was a medical student in 1612.

Fun quote: "Canon 14. We prohibit also that the laity should not be permitted to have the books of the Old or New Testament; we most strictly forbid their having
any translation of these books." - The Church Council of Toulouse 1229 AD

This is the real reason why most large companies now have email retention policies and auto-delete everything after 30..90 days.

It is a cheaper "fix".

You miss the point - the researchers discovered an application of the laws of physics to cryptanalysis. Cool, interesting, but not inherently patentable. Then they patented every way to fix that problem, many of which would be obvious to someone skilled in the art.

If I discover that 1+2 = 3, I cannot patent that equation. If I discover an application of that equation to a physical problem, the intent of the framers in patent law was that only a non obvious application may be patented. The fact that they discovered the problem doesn't (at least by law) eliminate or nullify the PHOSITA requirement.

The researchers found a hard to find problem, then patented the obvious solutions to that problem.

This is one of the problem with patents in general - patents are being issued where the person "skilled in the art", i.e. someone who has the same degree of specialization, would have developed the same solution, and the USPTO no longer makes a reasonable effort to prevent that.

Not everyone who complains on Slashdot is naive on patent realities, and the problem is real and ugly.

Aside from the legal fiction of the PHOSITA (Person Having Ordinary Skill In The Art), the intent of this clause by the framers was that it should not be possible for anyone to obtain a patent on something that would be obvious to someone working in the field.

In this specific case, once the feasibility of power vector side channel attacks was understood, any ideas that should have been obvious to someone having ordinary skill in the applicable fields (cryptanalysis of side channels, EE, FPGA layout internals) should not be patentable.

While credit must be given to researches who discovered these attack vectors, the fact remains that the patents they obtained are broad enough to intersect essentially every idea a PHOSITA would come up with. While it is possible to interpret claims narrowly through the context of the background and description, juries often (especially in East Texas) fail to narrow interpretations sufficiently, and just attempting just a narrow interpretation will still cost you $1-3M in legal fees.

If your job includes evaluation of risk of patent infringement (which mine does, for one of the worlds largest companies) then you would understand that the combination of lowering the bar on "obvious" and "prior art", along with the challenges that venue shopping presents, have created a situation where it has become nearly impossible to do anything interesting without infringing many patents that should NOT have been issued.

An interesting blurb from the Actel linked page:

Many of the fundamental techniques used to defend against DPA and other side-channel attacks are patented by Cryptography Research, Inc. ... One of CRI's businesses today is licensing this portfolio of very fundamental patents. Nearly all the secure microcontrollers used in smart cards, set-top boxes, SIM cards for GSM phones and Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) for personal computers are built under license to CRI, amounting to about 4.5 billion chips per year in total.

Yet another critical set of concepts which should be obvious to anyone working in the field locked behind a paywall due to USPTO incompetence and/or malfeasance...