I believe I got hit by this about a week ago when I clicked on an advert linked on Chicago Tribune's website.

A fullscreen message appeared saying my computer had been encrypted and I had to pay $300 to decrypt it. I pulled my network cable out and had to power off my PC because the keyboard would not work. I was able to boot back up, but when I logged in both regularly and in Safe-Mode, a full white screen saying "please connect to the Internet" appeared and I couldn't use the keyboard again.

I pressed F8 on boot and booted into Safe-Mode Command line only. Once I logged in and saw the command line, I typed rstrui.exe (windows System Recovery) and using the Restore Wizard, restored to a checkpoint from a day earlier. I restarted my PC again and let it boot normally and once I was able to log in without seeing the message, reconnected my network cable.

My PC was never encrypted. The message only said it was. The clincher was before I booted Windows in Safe-Mode, I used a Knoppix DVD to mount the Windows partition and copy off my personal data before I started the recovery process. The data was perfectly readable and not encrypted.

Take a closer look towards Iapetus. There's a monolith there that's full of stars.

The 'heat vision' idea might work. Too bad we don't have anything that could direct microwave/RAdio energy into space to Detect And Range the object.

But the California scientists azure us that the system will work.

How about 10?

Some people know when to stop digging the hole they're in.
Other people, at that moment, take out the blasting caps and dynamite.

There is a fine line between sharing a link with someone and inflicting it on them.
I'm pretty certain goatse falls on the latter side.

There is a huge decrease in what is available if we go streaming only.

Out of the 13 DVDs in my queue, only 2 are available by streaming.
Most of those unavalable are Criterion Collection movies by Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman.

If they remove Babylon5 from my streaming queue before I'm done watching the whole series, I'm going Narn on someone ass.

Get that 1-up!
Smack my Peach up!

My wife was never into 1st person shooters. Frighteningly enough, she WAS into Mortal Kombat Armeggedon. The sadistic creativity she showed while playing it was light-years beyond what my buddies in college showed.

The ICD-10 codes for being a dickless idiot would be:
Q56.4 Indeterminate sex
F79.1 Unspecified mental retardation with significant impairment of behaviour requiring attention or treatment

Sacre Bleu! Merde!

Sorry to be a Grammar Nazgul, but they ride Warg's

You don't know the half of how trivial that payment is.
Speaking from first-hand experience with the Danieli v. IBM overtime lawsuit , IBM settled that lawsuit for $7.5 Million. The total amount of time it took them to agree to that amount once the lawyers were all together? 2-3 hours. That's right. For the privilige of claiming no wrong doing, they paid $7.5 Million.

The same bribery thing happened in the late 90's in Argentina. A couple of IBM South America execs were facing prison time over that one. Why isn't there jail time this time around?

This guy was really 1337. I never thought of a logic bomb to beat Whack-a-mole.
My own exploit involved a brute-force attack, but the results were hit or miss.

You have to ask?

We have a Govorner busting unions in Wisconsin. (FYI - I'm not fully pro-union, but I am pro-"people need a voice" and pro-bargaining.)

We have corporations convincing the SCOTUS that they need to be able to donate as much as they want to elected officials. (Funny how they don't want the common man to have the same influence as they do, or even a voice to object)

We live in a Corporate Fascist state. You're damn right be be scared.

We are moving to a country of Corporate Royals and Working Serfs. Guess what side of the boot tread you are.