Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2000 20:18:21 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in (Rahul Siddharthan) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: On "intelligent people" and "dangers to BSD" Message-ID: <200003242018.NAA08726@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0003241431470.6944-100000@theory3.physics.iisc.ernet.in> from "Rahul Siddharthan" at Mar 24, 2000 02:38:17 PM
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > See <http://www.unisys.com/unisys/lzw/>. 1999 was the last year > > in which the patent was in effect. You will see that it has the > > same patent number as the one I referenced previously. > > That page still says, in March 2000, > More and more people are becoming aware that the reading and/or > writing of GIF images requires a license to use Unisys patented Lempel > Ziv Welch (LZW) data compression and decompression technology, > including United States Patent No. 4,558,302, .... > > So are they wilfully deceiving the public? No, not really. They are selling an idea, and the public is buying it for non-logical reasons. The public is willfully populated by morons, whose right to reproduce and vote is willfully protected by politicians, whose only possible chance of election is to maintain the population of morons. It's called a feedback loop. It is to be expected that morons will pay for free things, valueing them more highly for the fact that they have paid for them, and thus somehow invested them with more value than their otherwise identical free counterparts. ... "How do you know someone's crazy?" "Well, their wife, or their children, or their mom or their uncle, or someone else signs a piece of paper saying they're crazy." "And then you come and take them away and lock them up?" "Exactly." "What if they sign a piece of paper saying that they're not crazy?" "We tear it up. Crazy people will sign anything." -- Alan Sherman, _The Rape of the A.P.E._ Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200003242018.NAA08726>