We knew someone at a sister company that was infected with CryptoLocker. He had no backups (they have no IT infrastructure) so he paid the ransom to recover his files. It appeared to start decryption, but the machine was old and we had to let it run over the weekend to complete. Windows Security Essentials had to be disabled in order for the decryption to work, but it re-enabled itself and blocked the decryption. By the time Monday rolled around, the decryption sever had been shut down or his ransom window had expired and so he ended up losing his data anyway.

Begun the Drone War has...

For the record, Dell has the same option, although I have never bothered to sign up for it. I've never had a problem with any of their Optiplex desktops or Latitude laptops (all business-class machines) that wasn't solved by a short call to their support department followed by a next-day visit from an onsite technician to replace the bad part. We do pay extra for a 4-year warranty on all equipment plus accidental damage protection for laptops (which covers physical damage caused by the user). I haven't kept track of failure rates, but have had very few hardware problems in over a decade of buying hundreds of computers from Dell. That said, it would be a cold day in hell before I ever bought one of their consumer-class machines.

I think you've got it backwards and Tolkien was right. As I remember, the Ents were complaining that the much smaller hobbits were being too hasty. Their Entmoot took several hours just to get through the meet & greet stage and it took them a day or two to come to a decision to do something.

Absolutely. Security through obscurity is always the best security.

Same here. If the instructor was any good, I would be totally engrossed in what the they were saying that I barely remembered to write any notes. When I would go back to my notes for review later, I'd find just a couple of hastily-written, disconnected, and out-of-context facts that didn't mean anything to me. If I would try to write down everything the instructor put on the chalkboard, I couldn't follow what he or she was saying and retained even less. So, like most other college students, I just crammed the day before a test. Fortunately I'm a good test-taker and was able to retain enough information long enough to do well!

In that case, maybe they should hire security guards to keep all those thieves and vandals at bay.

Well, I guess since we spend so much time rebooting Windows, the boot time savings are helpful. Once you're done applying Windows Updates, however, who really cares if it boots in 10 seconds or 30?

They recently started offering non-games through Steam.

I have users that move the taskbar+Start Menu to various sides of the screen to better suit their needs. Users with wide screens tend to put the taskbar on the left or right side because there's more room horizontally. I have never used the physical power button to shut down any computer unless it was unresponsive and couldn't be shut down any other way. I have started using the Start Menu + type the name since Windows 7 since the "Classic" start menu was no longer available and things have been moved around, renamed, or hidden just to make that option a necessity. Windows 7 is fine for most things, but there are still a few annoyances. Fortunately they are minor and don't impact my workflow very often: - Windows Explorer with that annoying Libraries crap that I don't use and can't remove. Yes there are registry settings that can hide that, but it tends to break other things that don't seem related. At least I have been able to keep it minimized most of the time so it's only wasting 2 lines of screen space (Libraries icon plus blank line). - Programs and Features keeps re-arranging the list as it finds more programs to add. I'll click on a program to remove only to find that it selected something else. I'll never understand why it can't generate the list alphabetically so things aren't inserted at the top. - Network and Sharing Center is useless and takes additional clicks to get to the adapter settings. My favorite parts are how it frequently tells you you have no internet access until you launch a browser and actually pull up a website, or when it arbitrarily decides what type of network you're on and doesn't let you change it without some Googling. - Control Panel with it's unusable Category view. At least you can change this to Icon view, but then can't change to sorting by columns instead of rows.

Yes, and each vault belonging to the Bank is considered a Bank Vault, so as to differentiate it from other types of vaults (e.g. a Seed Vault).

Of course that quality is lowered somewhat by all the idiots who reply with nothing more than, "This!"

At least if Windows 7 doesn't recognize your video card, it will at least show a bad quality GUI. With Linux, your video card isn't recognized, if you're lucky, you'll be stuck at a command prompt with an X-windows error that says something like, "No Screens Found" (which is ironically displayed on your screen).

When the PlayBook came out, their app store consisted of about 15,000 temperature conversion apps, none of which were free.

TMI;DNR