Nigeria is ranked sixth most corrupt country in the world by independent watchdog Transparency International.
I saw this and wondered who was more corrupt than Nigeria. In case you're interested, it's Haiti, Myanmarr, Turkmenistan, Bangladesh, and Chad, in that order.
Least corrupt is Iceland. The US is 17th from the top, just above France and just below Germany.
I can't say specifically if the Sony rootkit does that (but it probably does), however there absolutely are DRM kits(although sadly I can't provide a citation as the info is on my laptop) that do run(via auto-install) as soon as the disc is inserted. If you accept the EULA, the software is actually "installed" per se, if you don't it's just loaded into memory but not installed on the PC and not configured to auto-start - a reboot will clear it. However, the fact that the software does that, to my mind, throws many of the claims as to the legality of such software heavily into doubt - when you rely on an EULA for your legal justification, running before the EULA is accepted seems very questionable.
No, it's right. The option to zoom the user interface in OOo is what you get by simply changing to the large font setting in Windows. It does not alter the size of the toolbar buttons.
This is not correct. In OpenOffice 2, the UI scale affects both UI text (menus etc) as well as the size of toolbar icons. It's not as flexible as I first thought (zoom range is only 80-130%), so mark some points off for that. It is *not* the same as simply changing the large font size, which you can do in Windows and OO.o will respect.
As far as keymapping, OO supports remapping of shortcuts. Office cannot map to "any key combination", and neither can OO, and the UI OO has for key remapping is crap, but the functionality is there. The functions that you can map to look comprehensive to me, although I haven't done an exhaustive check, but I haven't done one on Office, either.
Better helpfiles? The Word 2000 helpfile for accessibility is absolutely minimal. It doesn't contain any of the phone numbers or pointers you list from Word 6, although that may be in the printed manual. The OO helpfile doesn't contain any phone numbers either, but does include instructions for enabling the Java Accessibility integration as well as features like the UI zoom, making it roughly equivilent to the Word 2000 one.
Lastly, cut it with the stupid crap about me hating disabled people, and my anti-Microsoft friends. I speak for nobody but myself, and while I'm intolerant of people using a disability as an excuse for not having to change how they work, I have no problem with them requiring and needing support. But handwaving about "better support" without defining what it is is useless. You seem to be really interested in bitching about how everyone hates disabled peopple and how we just hate Microsoft, and that Slashdot sucks for modding us up (newsflash: I have no control over how people moderate what I post, and I don't especially care about it.). I'm actually interested in what, specifically, is lacking in OpenOffice. The features you listed seem to be present.
Going back and scrolling down in the thread you linked, I saw that you did in fact respond with some specifics about accesibility in Office vs Word. Thank - you didn't respond directly to me so I didn't notice until now. I can't respond in that thread anymore so I'm going to waste some bandwidth and do it here. I was in fact a little suprised at the results.
I opened up Word 2000 (I don't have 2003), opened up the helpfiles, and checked the index for accessibility. There are only a couple features mentioned there (I was rather suprised), and only one specifically for accessibility - zooming of the toolbars. Word 2000 can only switch between large & small icons in the toolbars. OpenOffice 2 allows for percentage based zoom of the entire UI (all text and all icons in the UI), as well as the normal document zoom.
There were a couple other features mentioned (like autocomplete and spelling autocorrect) which help accessibility even though they aren't directly related to it, OO.o has those as well.
Thats it for the features mentioned in the Word 2000 helpfile. In your post, you list several items from the Word 6 helpfile. Putting aside the phone support, which I can't comment on and is out of scope for this sort of discussion (I believe Sun provides phone support, including sTTY, for StarOffice customers but I can't confirm that), the only feature you list that is not provided by the OS is the toolbar zoom, which feature OO surpasses with it's interface zoom, and command key mapping, which OO provides. The rest of the features (sticky keys, visual cues, mouse input via keyboard) are all OS features. Some of them requre minimal app support, which OpenOffice provides.
So, purely from the level of application support, OpenOffice seems to match Office 2000, which is better than I thought it would do (I thought Office 2000 had more features than it does), so either 2003 has vastly improved accessibility or (more likely) the issue lies with third party tools like JAWS that have chosen to specifically support MS Office and not other suites. There's not much the OO developers can do specifically about that, and it's a reasonable thing to bring up, but I don't think the claim that OO is itself a lot less accessible than MS Office (at least 2000, which still has the largest installed base) is really supportable.
In terms of pure market principles, legality and morality aside, choosing to pirate a song rather than buy one (especially one that is less functional, being DRMed) is a perfectly normal and sound market decision. When you have two suppliers, and one of them is cheaper and more functional than the other, it's not hard to see which one is going to win. The record industries fascination with DRM and insistence on strictly controlled pricing and availability is ignoring this basic principle, and it's why they had and continue to have such a hard time getting consumers sold on digital music. It's worth noting that it took a famously customer oriented company outside the music industry (the music industry has *never* been customer oriented) to really take legal digital music downloads to the mainstream and to actually make real headway against the illegal services.
If you're seriously telling me that executives at Microsoft don't determine what kind of changes get made to projects, especially major ones like re-working the UI of a core product, and that business concerns, like "how can we make sure that people stick with our products and don't switch" aren't the driving force behind those decisions, then I'm a little worried by what else you might believe. That is what executives do, it's the reason they exist, and it's why companies like Microsoft are businesses and not research labs.
Actually, the OP claimed that Office has more UI designers than OO.o has *developers* - it's right there in the text you quoted - and I'm not sure what my thoughts about Offices' backwards compatability have to do with that.
Because there are design decisions to be made when using software, especially with spreadsheet applications like Excel, and a limit on the number of rows (which you'd determine by guesstimating users needs) can drastically improve the performance, resource utilization, and ease of developing the software. Generally speaking, exactly the same reasons why every other spreadsheet application out there has a limit on the number of rows. It's not "crippling" the application, it's accepting reasonable limits in order to achieve performance goals.
Yeah, of course nobody would ever switch away from Office. Except, you know, like Massachusetts. Or... Europe. Because of course integration that prevents you from ever moving off it is a selling point to everyone, and a product that isn't even bundled with Office is why nobody will ever move off of it, and everyone uses the Outlook/Office integration, because "Send this via email" isn't available in any other platform.
The people who work for Microsoft aren't evil monsters -- they're engineers and designers doing their best to do their job.
True as far as it goes, but horrible naive. Microsoft has more executives than they do engineers and designers combined, and if you think the business goals of Microsoft do not dicatate what changes get made and when you're totally out of the loop.
Their UI people know what they're doing.
Ahem. Microsoft has delivered some of the most braindead UIs ever developed. Granted that UI is a hard thing to pin down well and it's highly subjective, but MS has *never* been on the forefront of good UI design.
I'd hazard a guess they've got more UI designers than a project like OO has developers.
You'd be wrong, though.
Yeah I'm sure they're petrified about that.
The fact that Microsoft goes to *enormous* lengths to keep people from moving off of Office (to the point where companies will simply mention it in negotiations to get a break on site license costs) speaks otherwise. Is MS quaking in it's boots? I seriously doubt it. Does the development of low cost, highly functional, heavily supported office suites threaten the market dominance of Office? Absolutely. MS doesn't maintain it's monopoly by just sitting around.
The thing neither of you are saying is which release of Ubuntu you used and what timeframe you installed them in. The current version of Ubunut includes OO 2, and it has been backported to the previous version, which didn't ship with it. I do not believe, however, that the OO 2 packages are considered upgrades for the OO 1 ones, because it's possible to run them in parellel. So if you installed from an older release you would have OO 1, and you would not have been prompted to upgrade. Installing OO 2 from the repository via Synaptic will probably work fine.
In-house stuff tends to work *better* than Office under Wine. Office makes extensive use of rare and obscure API calls (even when there are better ones) and for reasons unknown to me provides all of it's own (extensive) widget and UI scaffolding. In-house apps tend to use Windows provided interfaces (mostly via MFC). Really, Office is almost a platform of it's own - it installs a lot of "platform" style stuff, like hooking & replacing the standard clipboard, the "find fast" crap on older versions, etc.
Office may be common, but it's hard to emulate. More "normal" apps, especially your standard "whipped up in MFC in 3 months by our in house dev team" stuff is far more likely to run without a hitch.
None of the above, because you're likely to be using these sorts of checks a lot of times, in multiple places. Write functions (make them inline or macros if performance is what freaks you out) with descriptive names that perform these checks.
if (name.FitsInBuffer() && name.length > 0)
for example. Of course, in this particular case it'd be better to move the maxLength checks into whatever class name is and throw exceptions.
These kind of long repetetive checks are prime breeding ground for typos and brainfarts that introduce rare bugs, because the repetetive nature of the code makes your eyes skip over small inconsistencies.
Several years ago MS dedicated a lot of work to accessibility in Office in order to get a MA contract. I believe it was between Office 98 and 2000. I would not be suprised if IBM or Sun were willing to make similiar concessions, assuming that the whole process isn't derailed by MS flunkies in government.
1) Wouldn't prior art mean that C isn't legal unless the person/company holds patents A and B (in other words, couldn't patent holders A (inclusive) or B go after patent holder C for infringment?)
No, you can patent innovations that derive from other patents, including combinations.
2) In closed source, how can it be determined (legally) that someone is infringing on another's patented algorithm?
(Software) patents cover behaviors, not just implementations. If your patent covers a method of embedding data in documents, you can generally tell from the applications behavior if it infringes - at least enought to start a lawsuit and begin discovery.
That being said, I don't know a thing about patents, and they kinda scare me (I picture a patent-boogeyman when I think about it) or is that what they are supposed to do?
Pretty much, yeah.
My quick & dirty solution to our patent troubles:
Shorten the terms. You get 5 years for free, and you pay logarithmically increasing fees after that. By holding a patent, you're withholding knowldge from the public good, and that should be taxable.
Mandatory licensing. A patent is there to encourage you to profit off your invention, to make it more likely that you will produce things based on it and thus benefit the public good. If you can't make a usefull product based off your license, then someone else can. This has the side effect of removing patent MAD.
Require implementation. You don't have to do it when you file - it can be in the "patent pending" phase - but when that time is up you either need a practical implementation or you lose your patent. Speculative patents are stupid.
Reduce burden of proof to legally challenge a patent - the patent office is clearly not capable of fully validation patents, so the legal presumption that it is needs to be removed.
Independent invention should be de-facto evidence of obviousness and the burden should be on the patent holder to demonstrate it's non-obviousness. If the patent is still ruled non-obvious, the independent inventor gets a reduce rate on the mandatory license fee.
Increase the number of challenges to patent validity based on form. A person "skilled in the art" should be able to accurately re-create a patent soley from the patent application. Expert testimony to the contrary should be a major blow against the validity of a patent.
Patent protection cannot be claimed on something that would be wholy protected by other IP law. No storyline patents, because any implementation of your storyline would be protected by copyright. Most software patents go away for the same reason. Patented hardware that required software to run is still okay, because the copyright covers the software and hardware covers the innovation in hardware. This would still allow some business and process patents.
I said fair use *right*, not fair use *law*, and that usage was intentional. And while it's hard to make a blanket statement that something *is* fair use, it's much easier to state that something is *not* fair use. Certainly, there is nothing in the the Copyright Act, which does in fact set forth guidelines for what can be considered fair use and therefore is as much "fair use law" as anything can be, that is obviously applicable.
Incorrect. US copyright law *specifically* allows the copying neccesary for use, and has since 1977.
Your GPL statement is totally wrong in all ways since the GPL doesn't cover use, only distribution.
The legal basis of EULAs is in contract law, and exists only because you were presented with the EULA. It's extremely shaky legal ground, although some jurisdictions give them explicit legal power (UCITA), and there have been some cases that accept thier force. Note that at least one of those cases only accepted EULAs as tenable because they were already commonly accepted to be tenable, so fuck you to all those people who never compained about them, you ruined our chances to actually do something. In the absence of an EULA, normal copyright law with regards to purchases and fair use applies - you can buy a CD from a store, install the software on it, and run it, you can make archive copies, and you are prevented from distributing it. In short, everything you need to protect your rights as the copyright holder and to make money from your software. There is no public interest served by EULAs, and tremendous good would be done by eliminating the.
I almost hope they do and win. It would be incredibly awesome if Sony vs Lame et all become the landmark case defining as fair use the ability to distribute other peoples object code without permission for the purposes of demonstration. All those copyrighted windows themes? No more! Want to sample a top 10 hit for the alert sound in your new email client? Go for it! Distribution of Windows source code for purposes of interoperability?
Of course, it won't happen. Sony will cease distribution of the rootkit (already has, I think?), Level4 or whoever will write a new one, and Sony will be on the phone with their friends at Fraunhoffer to make this LAME threat go away.
It is a techncial copyright violation (and there is no fair use right that covers it) to distribute LAME code in object format, no matter how it is used, or even if it is not used at all. Just like it would be copyright infringment for me to ship my app with a tarball of the Windows source code in it.
To my knowledge, there is no fair use right that covers distribution in any form except for first sale, which doesn't apply here and only arguably applies to digital distribution at all.
This is still wrong - in fact, the LGPL is specifically designed to *prevent* this. Remember that one of the freedoms the LGPL is trying to protect is the right of the end user to modify and customize software. If you link against LGPL source, you *must* distribute your software in such a way that the LGPL portion can be modified and replaced if neccesary. In the case of native compiled applications, that means using a shared library, and *not* statically linking.
Many LGPL projects contain specific language exempting this condition, as long as you use an unmodified library, and there are serveral "LGPL-like" licenses with the same exemption, but I do not believe that LAME is one of them. Sadly, I can't confirm this as our silly work censorware thinks any site about LAME is for downloading pirated MP3s.
If you are distributing a binary linked to an LGPL library, you must provide it in such a way that the LGPL library can be replaced with a modified version. If you're distributing a statically linked exe (which is what Sony is doing), this means you must provide the source for your application. Many LGPL projects have specific exemptions from this clause (which would allow you to distribute static executables of an unmodified library), to my knowledge LAME is not one of them.
D is a fantastic language and the only modern language that even acknowledges that RAII is awesome, and that GC solves only one resource management problem. Lack of resource management tools (memory is *not* the only resource!) and determentistic finalization are sever weaknesses in Java.
This is basically what happens when you get tearing - data changes halfway between a screen refresh. Old-school video game authors had went to enormous lengths to make sure that they got data into the framebuffer in sync with the monitors scanlines.
There was some old Atari game that needed some extra memory and actually stored it in the framebuffer, pulling it out as it needed it just ahead of the scan rate. Crazy low level programming.
Yes. Everything is an object in Python. Note that your statement wasn't true until recently (you couldn't inherit from most of the built-in types until 2.3), but it was still a pure OO language in that everything was an object.
Of course, there is still some debate about what "Object oriented" means, and what it means to be "pure" OO. And by debate I mostly mean a combination of Usenet flaming and the academic equivilent of trash-talking. Suffice it to say that there is not a universally accepted definition of "object oriented", much less "pure object orientation".
Thats what I mean by protection - in most cases, the judge wouldn't permit the prosecution to present lack of evidence as evidence. It's not hard and fast - the whole "you have something to hide" mindset is taking hold nation wide, and there was a recent case where the prosecution was allowed to present the fact that the defendent used PGP as evidence, but there is still some fairly firm legal ground to stand on when you claim that securing your hard drive is not evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw this and wondered who was more corrupt than Nigeria. In case you're interested, it's Haiti, Myanmarr, Turkmenistan, Bangladesh, and Chad, in that order.
Least corrupt is Iceland. The US is 17th from the top, just above France and just below Germany.
Source: http://www.transparency.org/cpi/2005/cpi2005.sourc es.en.html
I can't say specifically if the Sony rootkit does that (but it probably does), however there absolutely are DRM kits(although sadly I can't provide a citation as the info is on my laptop) that do run(via auto-install) as soon as the disc is inserted. If you accept the EULA, the software is actually "installed" per se, if you don't it's just loaded into memory but not installed on the PC and not configured to auto-start - a reboot will clear it. However, the fact that the software does that, to my mind, throws many of the claims as to the legality of such software heavily into doubt - when you rely on an EULA for your legal justification, running before the EULA is accepted seems very questionable.
This is not correct. In OpenOffice 2, the UI scale affects both UI text (menus etc) as well as the size of toolbar icons. It's not as flexible as I first thought (zoom range is only 80-130%), so mark some points off for that. It is *not* the same as simply changing the large font size, which you can do in Windows and OO.o will respect.
As far as keymapping, OO supports remapping of shortcuts. Office cannot map to "any key combination", and neither can OO, and the UI OO has for key remapping is crap, but the functionality is there. The functions that you can map to look comprehensive to me, although I haven't done an exhaustive check, but I haven't done one on Office, either.
Better helpfiles? The Word 2000 helpfile for accessibility is absolutely minimal. It doesn't contain any of the phone numbers or pointers you list from Word 6, although that may be in the printed manual. The OO helpfile doesn't contain any phone numbers either, but does include instructions for enabling the Java Accessibility integration as well as features like the UI zoom, making it roughly equivilent to the Word 2000 one.
Lastly, cut it with the stupid crap about me hating disabled people, and my anti-Microsoft friends. I speak for nobody but myself, and while I'm intolerant of people using a disability as an excuse for not having to change how they work, I have no problem with them requiring and needing support. But handwaving about "better support" without defining what it is is useless. You seem to be really interested in bitching about how everyone hates disabled peopple and how we just hate Microsoft, and that Slashdot sucks for modding us up (newsflash: I have no control over how people moderate what I post, and I don't especially care about it.). I'm actually interested in what, specifically, is lacking in OpenOffice. The features you listed seem to be present.
I opened up Word 2000 (I don't have 2003), opened up the helpfiles, and checked the index for accessibility. There are only a couple features mentioned there (I was rather suprised), and only one specifically for accessibility - zooming of the toolbars. Word 2000 can only switch between large & small icons in the toolbars. OpenOffice 2 allows for percentage based zoom of the entire UI (all text and all icons in the UI), as well as the normal document zoom.
There were a couple other features mentioned (like autocomplete and spelling autocorrect) which help accessibility even though they aren't directly related to it, OO.o has those as well.
Thats it for the features mentioned in the Word 2000 helpfile. In your post, you list several items from the Word 6 helpfile. Putting aside the phone support, which I can't comment on and is out of scope for this sort of discussion (I believe Sun provides phone support, including sTTY, for StarOffice customers but I can't confirm that), the only feature you list that is not provided by the OS is the toolbar zoom, which feature OO surpasses with it's interface zoom, and command key mapping, which OO provides. The rest of the features (sticky keys, visual cues, mouse input via keyboard) are all OS features. Some of them requre minimal app support, which OpenOffice provides.
So, purely from the level of application support, OpenOffice seems to match Office 2000, which is better than I thought it would do (I thought Office 2000 had more features than it does), so either 2003 has vastly improved accessibility or (more likely) the issue lies with third party tools like JAWS that have chosen to specifically support MS Office and not other suites. There's not much the OO developers can do specifically about that, and it's a reasonable thing to bring up, but I don't think the claim that OO is itself a lot less accessible than MS Office (at least 2000, which still has the largest installed base) is really supportable.
In terms of pure market principles, legality and morality aside, choosing to pirate a song rather than buy one (especially one that is less functional, being DRMed) is a perfectly normal and sound market decision. When you have two suppliers, and one of them is cheaper and more functional than the other, it's not hard to see which one is going to win. The record industries fascination with DRM and insistence on strictly controlled pricing and availability is ignoring this basic principle, and it's why they had and continue to have such a hard time getting consumers sold on digital music. It's worth noting that it took a famously customer oriented company outside the music industry (the music industry has *never* been customer oriented) to really take legal digital music downloads to the mainstream and to actually make real headway against the illegal services.
If you're seriously telling me that executives at Microsoft don't determine what kind of changes get made to projects, especially major ones like re-working the UI of a core product, and that business concerns, like "how can we make sure that people stick with our products and don't switch" aren't the driving force behind those decisions, then I'm a little worried by what else you might believe. That is what executives do, it's the reason they exist, and it's why companies like Microsoft are businesses and not research labs.
Actually, the OP claimed that Office has more UI designers than OO.o has *developers* - it's right there in the text you quoted - and I'm not sure what my thoughts about Offices' backwards compatability have to do with that.
Because there are design decisions to be made when using software, especially with spreadsheet applications like Excel, and a limit on the number of rows (which you'd determine by guesstimating users needs) can drastically improve the performance, resource utilization, and ease of developing the software. Generally speaking, exactly the same reasons why every other spreadsheet application out there has a limit on the number of rows. It's not "crippling" the application, it's accepting reasonable limits in order to achieve performance goals.
The people who work for Microsoft aren't evil monsters -- they're engineers and designers doing their best to do their job.
True as far as it goes, but horrible naive. Microsoft has more executives than they do engineers and designers combined, and if you think the business goals of Microsoft do not dicatate what changes get made and when you're totally out of the loop.
Their UI people know what they're doing.
Ahem. Microsoft has delivered some of the most braindead UIs ever developed. Granted that UI is a hard thing to pin down well and it's highly subjective, but MS has *never* been on the forefront of good UI design.
I'd hazard a guess they've got more UI designers than a project like OO has developers.
You'd be wrong, though.
Yeah I'm sure they're petrified about that.
The fact that Microsoft goes to *enormous* lengths to keep people from moving off of Office (to the point where companies will simply mention it in negotiations to get a break on site license costs) speaks otherwise. Is MS quaking in it's boots? I seriously doubt it. Does the development of low cost, highly functional, heavily supported office suites threaten the market dominance of Office? Absolutely. MS doesn't maintain it's monopoly by just sitting around.
The thing neither of you are saying is which release of Ubuntu you used and what timeframe you installed them in. The current version of Ubunut includes OO 2, and it has been backported to the previous version, which didn't ship with it. I do not believe, however, that the OO 2 packages are considered upgrades for the OO 1 ones, because it's possible to run them in parellel. So if you installed from an older release you would have OO 1, and you would not have been prompted to upgrade. Installing OO 2 from the repository via Synaptic will probably work fine.
Office may be common, but it's hard to emulate. More "normal" apps, especially your standard "whipped up in MFC in 3 months by our in house dev team" stuff is far more likely to run without a hitch.
Several years ago MS dedicated a lot of work to accessibility in Office in order to get a MA contract. I believe it was between Office 98 and 2000. I would not be suprised if IBM or Sun were willing to make similiar concessions, assuming that the whole process isn't derailed by MS flunkies in government.
No, you can patent innovations that derive from other patents, including combinations.
2) In closed source, how can it be determined (legally) that someone is infringing on another's patented algorithm?
(Software) patents cover behaviors, not just implementations. If your patent covers a method of embedding data in documents, you can generally tell from the applications behavior if it infringes - at least enought to start a lawsuit and begin discovery.
That being said, I don't know a thing about patents, and they kinda scare me (I picture a patent-boogeyman when I think about it) or is that what they are supposed to do?
Pretty much, yeah.
My quick & dirty solution to our patent troubles:
I said fair use *right*, not fair use *law*, and that usage was intentional. And while it's hard to make a blanket statement that something *is* fair use, it's much easier to state that something is *not* fair use. Certainly, there is nothing in the the Copyright Act, which does in fact set forth guidelines for what can be considered fair use and therefore is as much "fair use law" as anything can be, that is obviously applicable.
Your GPL statement is totally wrong in all ways since the GPL doesn't cover use, only distribution.
The legal basis of EULAs is in contract law, and exists only because you were presented with the EULA. It's extremely shaky legal ground, although some jurisdictions give them explicit legal power (UCITA), and there have been some cases that accept thier force. Note that at least one of those cases only accepted EULAs as tenable because they were already commonly accepted to be tenable, so fuck you to all those people who never compained about them, you ruined our chances to actually do something. In the absence of an EULA, normal copyright law with regards to purchases and fair use applies - you can buy a CD from a store, install the software on it, and run it, you can make archive copies, and you are prevented from distributing it. In short, everything you need to protect your rights as the copyright holder and to make money from your software. There is no public interest served by EULAs, and tremendous good would be done by eliminating the.
Of course, it won't happen. Sony will cease distribution of the rootkit (already has, I think?), Level4 or whoever will write a new one, and Sony will be on the phone with their friends at Fraunhoffer to make this LAME threat go away.
To my knowledge, there is no fair use right that covers distribution in any form except for first sale, which doesn't apply here and only arguably applies to digital distribution at all.
Many LGPL projects contain specific language exempting this condition, as long as you use an unmodified library, and there are serveral "LGPL-like" licenses with the same exemption, but I do not believe that LAME is one of them. Sadly, I can't confirm this as our silly work censorware thinks any site about LAME is for downloading pirated MP3s.
If you are distributing a binary linked to an LGPL library, you must provide it in such a way that the LGPL library can be replaced with a modified version. If you're distributing a statically linked exe (which is what Sony is doing), this means you must provide the source for your application. Many LGPL projects have specific exemptions from this clause (which would allow you to distribute static executables of an unmodified library), to my knowledge LAME is not one of them.
D is a fantastic language and the only modern language that even acknowledges that RAII is awesome, and that GC solves only one resource management problem. Lack of resource management tools (memory is *not* the only resource!) and determentistic finalization are sever weaknesses in Java.
There was some old Atari game that needed some extra memory and actually stored it in the framebuffer, pulling it out as it needed it just ahead of the scan rate. Crazy low level programming.
Of course, there is still some debate about what "Object oriented" means, and what it means to be "pure" OO. And by debate I mostly mean a combination of Usenet flaming and the academic equivilent of trash-talking. Suffice it to say that there is not a universally accepted definition of "object oriented", much less "pure object orientation".
Thats what I mean by protection - in most cases, the judge wouldn't permit the prosecution to present lack of evidence as evidence. It's not hard and fast - the whole "you have something to hide" mindset is taking hold nation wide, and there was a recent case where the prosecution was allowed to present the fact that the defendent used PGP as evidence, but there is still some fairly firm legal ground to stand on when you claim that securing your hard drive is not evidence.
Your attitude is a common one, and thats unfortunate. Fortunately, there is some protection. Absence of evidence is not evidence.