I seriously thought the candle on the cake was going to cause the igloo to melt..

The term "root" is to be understood as "administrator rights". So once you have opened the PDF or whatever your compromised phone downloads and installs another program that persists after the phone has rebooted. In turn, this program can keep sending those sms or log your data or whatever it does.

"The MAME OS X source is released under an MIT license. However, the core MAME source is covered under its own license. It is not an Open Source license. Thus, the resulting binary is covered under MAME's license, and is subject to its restrictions." http://mameosx.sourceforge.net/license.php

Arch Hurd is already available so no need to wait for Debian to release anything if you want to try it out. http://www.archhurd.org/

GPL=! copyright. That's the first thing to understand. Copyright gives you a number of rights, such as the right to distibute the work as you see fit. By licensing the work with the GPL you don't lose the copyright (in the sense of droit moral at least) only some of the rights associated with copyright ("the four freedoms" etc). Bottom line: if the libraries are published under the LGPL you can use them in a derived work without publishing it under the LGPL, if they are licensed under the GPL you must license the derived work under the same GPL license as the original work (or a newer version of the GPL).