Posts by Scott 71

Forgot your ThinkPad password? Get new hardware

How much is your data worth?

The whole point is that IBM, and now Lenovo, are doing what they can to make it extremely difficult to break drive security. Resetting a power-on password is no big deal. It doesn't unlock any data, it's a very superficial level of security.

I would put forth that, if the confidentiality of your data isn't worth more than the price of your laptop, you probably shouldn't set that password. There are DIRE WARNINGS that inform the user of these consequences prior to setting the supervisor password. No, a field tech can't do anything with the encryption chips on the system board. IBM and Lenovo seem to be of the mind that they won't even trust a board once they've messed with jumpering and resetting the chip, so they won't even mess with trying to "rehab" boards with that password set. The selling point is that it's so non-trivial to reset one of these passwords (which would enable the recovery of the data) that your average burglars or laptop snatchers are simply not going to have the skills to compromise the data. They might be able to sell the machine for parts, but your business or agency is likely not going to be embarrassed by having all your clients' or patients' personal information sold off. Your company secrets are less likely to find their way into the hands of your competition. Your data is really as safe as it's going to get on a device that is ostensibly going to be exposed to leaving secure facilities and is rather easy to walk-off with.

Avatar renders this earthly life meaningless

Reality check

I think the real problem with life today is that too many people have too much leisure time, and they get to thinking too much, and then go to movies or other diversions that make them think even more. The more primitive the society, the harder every individual has to work in order to simply survive. That, of course, consumes a great deal of time, which leaves less time for being depressed. Thanks, but living in a cabin in the Rockies that has no central heat is enough work; if I gave up my technology in order to live any closer to nature up here, it would be my full-time occupation.

Up here, it's the cold and snow. In a jungle, it would be the humidity, insects, and disease. In other areas, the challenges nature presents are drought and heat. These whiners need to toughen-up and stop taking the conveniences in their cushy lives for granted. Things in nature are never as glamorous as they appear on a movie or television screen, they just don't know how nice they have it. Especially if mom is still providing them with a place to live, FFS. That was a rather amusing read!

@Tim Hall

The World of Warcraft makes planet Earth look like a paradise. Azeroth is a craptactular cesspit of overpopulated, diseased wildlife in various stages of perpetual killing rages, blighted countryside, dozens of factions of species with higher cognitive functions that want to kill everyone and everything else and rule the world, and thousands of mercenaries who roam the countryside, killing each other and everything they happen across in hopes of obtaining a little coin, trinkets, or shiny new armor that will make them even better at killing everything.

Nobody in their right mind would want to live there.

What if you had a launch party and nobody came?

@AC 14:42

Wow, such a profound lack of reading comprehension and knowledge on a subject!

"Click away on some graphical thing" clearly refers to a GUI installer, not an image manipulation program, the context makes this obvious. And no, there's no downloading tarballs and dealing with the CLI for APT to obtain most common programs on the popular desktop Linux distributions. The user simply has to go to the "add programs" menu item, browse through the categories, click on the program, and it installs. All dependencies and kernel module building are handled behind the scenes, invisible to the user.

Moreover, at least with Ubuntu, the most recent stable proprietary ATI drivers are in the repository. The user only has to upgrade when the software update notifier determines there's a newer version available. I believe the proprietary NVIDIA and ATI drivers have been installed by default for a while now on K/Ubuntu, with the option to switch to the "free" drivers for those who insist.

I'm also guessing that someone hasn't done a Win XP install recently on newer hardware. It just starts out with frustration when the XP installer can't find your hard drive because it doesn't support many storage controllers (especially SATA ones) which have come out within the past 4 years or so, and the networking chipsets also require drivers because the ones built-in to XP are so outdated. It's kind of difficult to download your network drivers when you're in a Catch-22 like that. So let's just face it-- your nonsense is just that. It generally takes someone who knows what they're doing to install and configure ANY operating system from disc. Well, except that K/Ubuntu and other Linux live CDs often just work and don't need any geek help until a user gets beyond the most common things desktop computers are used for.

Magpies hold funerals for fallen feathered friends

@Sarah Bee

I couldn't have explained the notion of rituals better myself, and I have a degree in macrobiology. I think "death ritual" may be the best way to describe what Dr. Bekoff wrote about.

I think what most scientists are opposed to is *gratuitous* anthropomorphism. I didn't take any courses with Dr. Bekoff, but his colleague at CU, Dr. David Chiszar, really made a point of discussing this topic. And rightly so. Gratuitous anthropomorphism is the practice of taking an animal behavior and attributing human motivations to it at a prima fascie level. This is a problem because it keeps from digging deeper and actually doing any meaningful investigation. HOWEVER, and any scientist will likely agree, animals and humans share most of the same prime motivators, so you can rule-out a common motivator for a similar behavior.

Gratuitous anthropomorphism would say that the magpies held a "funeral" to bid their fallen comrade farewell and brought grass for it to thrive in a corvid afterlife.

Scientific inquiry would try to distinguish coincidental behaviors from those that the animals behaved in as a direct result of encountering a non-responsive comrade. This is much different from taking a hardline that animals can't experience emotional responses or do anything for reasons that would remotely resemble human motivations.

Based on the abstract that the Reg presents, it sounds like bringing grass to the corpse was a deliberate act and not a coincidence. I'm guessing Dr. Bekoff didn't observe them attempting to eat their dead comrade, and like most animals, birds explore their world with their face-- their beaks are their primary means of manipulating objects in their environment. Their "death ritual" is quite likely nothing more than them attempting to elicit a response from a fallen comrade before abandoning it as dead. That's a little something that humans would consider "closure", and we do similar things for similar reasons. It keeps us from abandoning our friends and offspring just because they're taking a nap or took a hard knock on the noggin and are out-cold for a few moments, and puts us in a place we can just move on with things and stop being concerned with the welfare of those no longer with us when they are really deceased.

I'm curious as to the grass bit. I highly doubt it would be an offering to the dead. The most likely motivators would seem to be either providing something to tempt the fallen into responsiveness, or maybe the odor of plucked grass has an effect similar to smelling salts on corvids? Maybe it's just a bizarre habit that one magpie learned by observing an eccentric magpie long ago. Further research would be required and hopefully will be done because that's a pretty interesting behavior to get to the bottom of.