See this is what I really don't understand. $1000 is approximately £500. I earn that in one day. From here it looks like the US economy must be really going down the pan if $1000 is too much for a high end computer.
Bob This comment has a Patrick Bateman feel to it. Maybe you should add some ways for people to save money like
1) Use taxis rather than limos 2) Buy your downtown pad a terre rather than renting. 3) Feed the cat on tinned catfood rather than getting Dorsia to deliver fresh cooked pan fried turbot whenever the fucking thing miaows. The maid will know where to buy it. 4) Pay for a hooker rather than raping the maid. The upfront cash is far less than lawyers' fees and hush money to the maid and the fucking <ethnic slur> at the agency that supplied her.
I disagree. It is a perfectly valid opinion to think Bush is both a traitor and should be convicted and punished with death. I'd like to see a lot more politicians convicted as traitors and executed, particularly when they sell out the American people by taking lobbying dollars from foreign governments. I think it would be a step in the right direction for cleaning up or dreadfully corrupt political system.
Yeah, executing politicians as traitors does so much good for most countries that tried it. Maybe you're keeping just on the safe side of 'incitement to illegal violence' line but you are clearly hostile to the current constitutional system in which politicians are not generally executed by kangaroo courts on trumped up treason charges.
Maybe you're the real traitor in that you advocate overthrowing that system and killing your political opponents. Don't be too surprised if the Secret Service are checking up on you if you say stuff like this - certainly they would be in the UK.
But the problem to us heathens is that religious texts like the bible are supposed to be infallible morality from God. And the fact that you can dig up stuff which is nasty or silly or both kind of exposes that as bullshit to us.
In fact given that religious texts come from revelation, and most religions believe in the devil, how can you tell whether the bible was a revelation from God or from the Devil?
Now I don't believe in either all the good parts and the bad parts were written by people. But they were written a long time ago when morality was more primitive. E.g. slavery, rape and genocide were regarded as OK by most ambitious people back then. So as a source of morality religious texts are not a good choice.
In the UK, I can say "Gordon Brown is a noxious prick" without any legal repercussions. If I was in the US, I couldn't say that about George W Bush without being arrested.
To quote my journal from yesterday (to which my seemingly most avid reader responded "tltr"):
IMPEACH THE OIL BARON. Then try him for treason, find him guilty, put him in front of a firing squad and shoot the son of a bitch. And his vice Baron, too.
And then charge his family for the bullets like they do in China.!
I'd say that's a bit more harsh than "George Bush is a noxious Prick." (and he is indeed a noxious prick). I'm calling him a traitor to his country and calling for a legal jury to execute him for that crime.
Lets see if they put this geezer who has gone 56 years without going in front of a judge except for traffic violations, divorce, and bankrupcy in jail. I don't think they will. You do realise that
1) What you wrote is close to incitement 2) In the US the Secret Service have been known to track people down for doing that on the Internet
Come on it's not hard
1) "George Bush sucks, was wrong to invade Iraq, is a Pedofile, a Nazi and a Furry and a traitor".
Constitutionally protected speech.
2) "George Bush should be shot".
Not constitutionally protected speech. Expect the Party Van.
It's a sign of a degraded and tribal approach to politics that you are unable to criticise the policies of the Bush administration without stepping over the incitement line by calling for Bush to be killed.
I'm sure once President Obama or Clinton is in office you'll complain that the other tribe keep crossing the line in their attacks too.
If it gets that far. IANAUKL, but I would assume you have some sort of commital proceedings prior to a jury trial? Looking at the text of the legisation (though admittedly without any familiarity with relevant curial authority) this case looks so completely without merit that no prosecutor could ethically proceed and no magistrate would allow it to proceed. Methinks justice would best be served by publically horsewhipping (at least verbally) the arresting officer.
That really is a classic piece of slashdot bullshit. You're not a UK lawyer but you use a lot of legal terminology to make it sound like you know what you're talking about.
This guy has been arrested. He's 'facing prosecution'. I think that means he has been arrested but the Crown Prosecution Service is considering whether to prosecute him. He was arrested under this -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harassment%2C_Alarm_or_Distress#Provisions_of_the_law The Public Order Act 1986, Section 5 states: (1) A person is guilty of an offence if he: (a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or (b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby.
What makes you so sure the case is without legal merit, other than (like you) me you sympathize with the protestors and dislike Scientology and thus don't want it to have merit?
So why this one? If an individual is accused of murdering someone then a jury of his/her peers should decide if he is guilty or not. That's not 100% reliable, but the system needs to take the decision since you have to either punish someone if they are found guilty or let them go if they are found innocent. And the jury probably helps a bit, since the prosecution have to convince more than one person.
But having government bureaucrats decide whether is a cult or a religion doesn't mean anything. Religions IMO suck to varying degrees. Scientology and Islam happen to suck a great deal.
But still, I don't believe it is up to a secular state to decide how much religions suck. And labelling a group a 'cult' or whatever may lead to members of that group being discriminated against. The process is flawed too since it doesn't allow members of the public to veto a conviction.
I'd prefer to let juries to decide on individual cases and punish those individuals. Elected governments make the laws to try to catch all the anti social behaviour and not catch all the non antisocial behviour. But I think having the government decide which organisations are good and which are bad is dangerous. The people that started America believed in freedom of association and religion, not in established churches. I don't think they would have supported a state, no matter how benign, deciding whether a religion, no matter how malign is a cult or not because that seems to be allowing the state to regulate religion. And the state regulating religion is something they were quite really very skeptical of. The amount of harm religion can do is inversely proportional to the amount of power it has. Allowing the state to regulate it opens up the possibility that one religion might capture state power and use it to declare competing religions cults.
I think any reasonable definition of cult should include Nazism and Communism. Certainly the Communism of Mao or Stalin or Kim Il Sung had very cult like overtones. Maybe by the time of Brezhnev it was less religious. But you could say the same thing about Catholicism once it fused with the state. And lots of Nazi imagery shows Hitler as a messianic figure.
In fact I think it's pretty rich that Communists claimed to be non religious and opposed to religion. The guy that wrote "Prophet of Doom", a hostile biography of Muhammad called Nazism and Islam "religiotics", a mix of religion and politics. On the other hand, some religions like Buddhism are not at all cult like - they have sayings like "the higher Buddha is not Buddha". In japan Buddhist temples had Hindu deities in them. So Buddhism is less of cult than National Socialism or Maoist Communist, even though Buddhist claim to religious and Maoists claim to be atheists.
The government responded to this by advising the police and CPS to use existing legal powers to stop people inciting violence at demonstrations. They also decided to amend the Public Order Act 1986.
Now in this case, under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, it seems like the original act was too strict.
However, this guy has to go in front of a jury. A jury is likely to be more sympathetic to him than the "Behead those who insult Islam" types. You can think of the British system pre Human Rights Act as follows
1) Bad things happen like the Sloan Square demonstration. 2) The Media covers them and whips up a firestorm of panic 3) The government gets legal advice as to whether existing legal powers are enough to stop Bad Things happening again. 4) They introduce new legislation and/or brief the police/CPS to use their powers more aggressively. The police arrest people and the CPS decides whether there is a case for them to answer in court. 5) New legislation might cause false positives like this case where harmless people are prosectuted 6) Hopefully the government will advise the police/CPS not to do this in future and possibly amend legislation 7) The people prosecuted should be found not guilty because the jury is briefed, or maybe the judge will throw the case out. Or maybe they will get busted in which case the media will stir up a firestorm and force the government to legislate.
It's kind of funky but the system does have checks an balances. Of course the Human Rights Act allows people prosecuted in step 7 to appeal to the EU Court of Human Rights or judges to strike down legislation which breaks the HRA. Which is not really a good thing if you believe in the concept of "parliamentary sovereignty", but there you are.
And before Americans sneer that this is adhoc, you're right. But this system has led to a stable society where individual freedoms have either increased or stayed constant for hundreds of years, far longer than the US system has existed.
http://www.westernresistance.com/blog/archives/003342.html In all, only four people were brought to face charges on Friday June 26 as a result of the Sloane Square demonstration. These included Mizanur Rahman, as well as 26-year old Umran Javed of Birmingham, who denied one charge of soliciting to murder American or Danish nationals and one charge of using threatening words or behaviour likely to stir up racial hatred. 31 year old Abdul Rahman Saleem (aka Abu Yahya) denied one count of using words likely to stir up racial hatred. 23 year old Abdul Muhid was charged with two counts of soliciting murder to those who insulted Islam.
All those charged except Abdul Muhid were granted bail. Muhid, who had tried to flee the country on May 4 with Anjem Choudary, was denied bail and was kept in custody in Winchester Prison.
Muhid, Abdul Rahman Saleem (aka Abu Yahya) and Umran Javed are still awaiting their trials.
Actually the incitement to religious hatred law that this guy got busted under was partly inspired by that demonstration.
It's silly really. Incitement should be illegal and that's it. Then the "Behead those who insult Islam" types would get arrested and this guy wouldn't. Which seems fair enough to me.
Scientology is a cult created by a second-rate sci-fi author on a bet. El-Ron can suck my sweaty ballsack.
The kid should move to Germany, they recognize $cientology as the dangerous cult it is. Doesn't anyone feel a bit uncomfortable about the German State deciding which religions are dangerous cults?
Couldn't you have at least done an example that doesn't promote bad practices with quoting? Bad quoting practices are useful if you get into a payment dispute with the company that contracted you to write the code.
I would like to know more about this single table relational database concept you just implied exists, where should I start reading?;) Mod parent up. Pointing out subtle redundancy in statements in technical discussions is always Informative.
You don't need GPS for that - a simple RF device will do the circle thing pretty accurately. (Based on distance from the base station).
They already have these.
They typically do work, but there's always the problem of powering the device or worrying about noise / signal strength. If you do shock your pet they will be startled, and may just run off in any direction. They also have to be water proof and fairly rugged.
You can't just slap one of these collars on your dog and forget about it. You're supposed to walk with your dog around the perimeter of the "fence" and train them. In my original comment I thought that more people would understand CAT_DELIVERY_GPS_GUIDED_SHOCK_COLLAR than CAT_DELIVERY_RADIO_GUIDED_SHOCK_COLLAR.
Awesome. So if your pet gets lost you phone up the company and they switch it on. You/they don't even have to go pick up your pet - a course is plotted for it (hopefully AVOIDING streets and freeways) and if it goes off course it's shocked. Actually I was thinking of something simpler. E.g. draw a set of concentric circles centred on your hose. The smallest one is the safe circle, no shocks. The outer ones get more progressively more unpleasant. You could use ultrasonic sound instead of shocks. Then shrink the circles slowly, just slower than the pet can walk. That way it will find its way home. Actually I think pets would quickly learn that the first shock means 'come home now'.
Mod parent up. Insightful and this makes me laugh for some reason -
It's a bit like saying that Joe is the world leader in selling over-$1000 cats by Ebay and air mail. Sure, he only sold one on Ebay, but he's the only guy who sedated the cat and sent it by air mail. The rest of the people bought their cats face to face, or had them delivered by courier in a few cases. Narrow it down to Ebay and air mail, and, bam, Joe has 100% of that market. Maybe I've spent too much time looking at code, but it makes me think
typedef enum CAT_DELIVERY_METHOD_FACE_TO_FACE=0, CAT_DELIVERY_METHOD_COURIER, CAT_DELIVERY_METHOD_AIRMAIL_SEDATED,/* (Added for PROJECT_JOE) */
CAT_DELIVERY_MAX_LEGAL_US=1000,/* Later ones only used outside US */ CAT_DELIVERY_GPS_GUIDED_SHOCK_COLLAR,
CAT_DELIVERY_MAX_NON_LETHAL=2000,/* Past here, Cat is food, not pet */ CAT_DELIVERY_AIRMAIL_FREEZE_DRIED,
Anyhow, the translation you quote is literal but the text requires interpretation.. Minister Amer (vulgarly) talks about a cop's wife secret lusting for thugs, and does not actually condone beating women or raping them. "Another woman takes her beating"? All this bullshit about texts requiring interpretation is typical of nerdy pseudo intellectual French people making up excuses for this sort of brutal bullshit because they are scared of the thugs who make it. It's appeasement, pure and simple. And it's the reason they keep burning down your suburbs, because they think you are weak.
You have excellent paramilitary police. Stop making excuses and send them in to the suburbs whenever there's trouble. In tanks and armed with live ammunition if necessary. And start locking people up for life if they beat people up or rape them. France needs some zero tolerance policing to make these scum fear the system.
Punishment can come later. By closing off entertainment, they have less to watch. In the aftermath, they can take advantage of community spirit to purge dissenters of all stripes.
Hey I agree with twitter. That's never happened before. I...feeel...a..bi~
The worst thing is that Asus probably ended up 'refunding' more than paid for a Windows OEM license. I've heard rumours of $50 for the price the OEM pays, maybe less with the kickbacks from the vendors of all the shovelware they install.
Slashdot Mirror
Bob This comment has a Patrick Bateman feel to it. Maybe you should add some ways for people to save money like
1) Use taxis rather than limos
2) Buy your downtown pad a terre rather than renting.
3) Feed the cat on tinned catfood rather than getting Dorsia to deliver fresh cooked pan fried turbot whenever the fucking thing miaows. The maid will know where to buy it.
4) Pay for a hooker rather than raping the maid. The upfront cash is far less than lawyers' fees and hush money to the maid and the fucking <ethnic slur> at the agency that supplied her.
I disagree. It is a perfectly valid opinion to think Bush is both a traitor and should be convicted and punished with death. I'd like to see a lot more politicians convicted as traitors and executed, particularly when they sell out the American people by taking lobbying dollars from foreign governments. I think it would be a step in the right direction for cleaning up or dreadfully corrupt political system.
Yeah, executing politicians as traitors does so much good for most countries that tried it. Maybe you're keeping just on the safe side of 'incitement to illegal violence' line but you are clearly hostile to the current constitutional system in which politicians are not generally executed by kangaroo courts on trumped up treason charges.Maybe you're the real traitor in that you advocate overthrowing that system and killing your political opponents. Don't be too surprised if the Secret Service are checking up on you if you say stuff like this - certainly they would be in the UK.
I probably wanted the GGP poster to say it explicitly before he sawed his head off. Wouldn't want to kill the wrong person for blasphemy.
But the problem to us heathens is that religious texts like the bible are supposed to be infallible morality from God. And the fact that you can dig up stuff which is nasty or silly or both kind of exposes that as bullshit to us.
In fact given that religious texts come from revelation, and most religions believe in the devil, how can you tell whether the bible was a revelation from God or from the Devil?
Now I don't believe in either all the good parts and the bad parts were written by people. But they were written a long time ago when morality was more primitive. E.g. slavery, rape and genocide were regarded as OK by most ambitious people back then. So as a source of morality religious texts are not a good choice.
To quote my journal from yesterday (to which my seemingly most avid reader responded "tltr"):I'd say that's a bit more harsh than "George Bush is a noxious Prick." (and he is indeed a noxious prick). I'm calling him a traitor to his country and calling for a legal jury to execute him for that crime.
Lets see if they put this geezer who has gone 56 years without going in front of a judge except for traffic violations, divorce, and bankrupcy in jail. I don't think they will. You do realise that
1) What you wrote is close to incitement
2) In the US the Secret Service have been known to track people down for doing that on the Internet
Come on it's not hard
1) "George Bush sucks, was wrong to invade Iraq, is a Pedofile, a Nazi and a Furry and a traitor".
Constitutionally protected speech.
2) "George Bush should be shot".
Not constitutionally protected speech. Expect the Party Van.
It's a sign of a degraded and tribal approach to politics that you are unable to criticise the policies of the Bush administration without stepping over the incitement line by calling for Bush to be killed.
I'm sure once President Obama or Clinton is in office you'll complain that the other tribe keep crossing the line in their attacks too.
However, this guy has to go in front of a jury.
If it gets that far. IANAUKL, but I would assume you have some sort of commital proceedings prior to a jury trial? Looking at the text of the legisation (though admittedly without any familiarity with relevant curial authority) this case looks so completely without merit that no prosecutor could ethically proceed and no magistrate would allow it to proceed. Methinks justice would best be served by publically horsewhipping (at least verbally) the arresting officer.
That really is a classic piece of slashdot bullshit. You're not a UK lawyer but you use a lot of legal terminology to make it sound like you know what you're talking about.This guy has been arrested. He's 'facing prosecution'. I think that means he has been arrested but the Crown Prosecution Service is considering whether to prosecute him. He was arrested under this -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harassment%2C_Alarm_or_Distress#Provisions_of_the_law
The Public Order Act 1986, Section 5 states:
(1) A person is guilty of an offence if he:
(a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or
(b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,
within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby.
What makes you so sure the case is without legal merit, other than (like you) me you sympathize with the protestors and dislike Scientology and thus don't want it to have merit?
So why this one? If an individual is accused of murdering someone then a jury of his/her peers should decide if he is guilty or not. That's not 100% reliable, but the system needs to take the decision since you have to either punish someone if they are found guilty or let them go if they are found innocent. And the jury probably helps a bit, since the prosecution have to convince more than one person.
But having government bureaucrats decide whether is a cult or a religion doesn't mean anything. Religions IMO suck to varying degrees. Scientology and Islam happen to suck a great deal.
But still, I don't believe it is up to a secular state to decide how much religions suck. And labelling a group a 'cult' or whatever may lead to members of that group being discriminated against. The process is flawed too since it doesn't allow members of the public to veto a conviction.
I'd prefer to let juries to decide on individual cases and punish those individuals. Elected governments make the laws to try to catch all the anti social behaviour and not catch all the non antisocial behviour. But I think having the government decide which organisations are good and which are bad is dangerous. The people that started America believed in freedom of association and religion, not in established churches. I don't think they would have supported a state, no matter how benign, deciding whether a religion, no matter how malign is a cult or not because that seems to be allowing the state to regulate religion. And the state regulating religion is something they were quite really very skeptical of. The amount of harm religion can do is inversely proportional to the amount of power it has. Allowing the state to regulate it opens up the possibility that one religion might capture state power and use it to declare competing religions cults.
Fire wants to be free.
Yeah because the German state has never, ever persecuted any religious groups.
I think any reasonable definition of cult should include Nazism and Communism. Certainly the Communism of Mao or Stalin or Kim Il Sung had very cult like overtones. Maybe by the time of Brezhnev it was less religious. But you could say the same thing about Catholicism once it fused with the state. And lots of Nazi imagery shows Hitler as a messianic figure.
In fact I think it's pretty rich that Communists claimed to be non religious and opposed to religion. The guy that wrote "Prophet of Doom", a hostile biography of Muhammad called Nazism and Islam "religiotics", a mix of religion and politics. On the other hand, some religions like Buddhism are not at all cult like - they have sayings like "the higher Buddha is not Buddha". In japan Buddhist temples had Hindu deities in them. So Buddhism is less of cult than National Socialism or Maoist Communist, even though Buddhist claim to religious and Maoists claim to be atheists.
In addition to the Human Rights Act, Britain has subtle legal system which is full of checks and balances.
E.g. post the "Behead those who insult Islam" demonstration there was much hostile media coverage.
http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idarticle=6403
The government responded to this by advising the police and CPS to use existing legal powers to stop people inciting violence at demonstrations. They also decided to amend the Public Order Act 1986.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_and_Religious_Hatred_Act_2006
Now in this case, under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, it seems like the original act was too strict.
However, this guy has to go in front of a jury. A jury is likely to be more sympathetic to him than the "Behead those who insult Islam" types. You can think of the British system pre Human Rights Act as follows
1) Bad things happen like the Sloan Square demonstration.
2) The Media covers them and whips up a firestorm of panic
3) The government gets legal advice as to whether existing legal powers are enough to stop Bad Things happening again.
4) They introduce new legislation and/or brief the police/CPS to use their powers more aggressively. The police arrest people and the CPS decides whether there is a case for them to answer in court.
5) New legislation might cause false positives like this case where harmless people are prosectuted
6) Hopefully the government will advise the police/CPS not to do this in future and possibly amend legislation
7) The people prosecuted should be found not guilty because the jury is briefed, or maybe the judge will throw the case out. Or maybe they will get busted in which case the media will stir up a firestorm and force the government to legislate.
It's kind of funky but the system does have checks an balances. Of course the Human Rights Act allows people prosecuted in step 7 to appeal to the EU Court of Human Rights or judges to strike down legislation which breaks the HRA. Which is not really a good thing if you believe in the concept of "parliamentary sovereignty", but there you are.
And before Americans sneer that this is adhoc, you're right. But this system has led to a stable society where individual freedoms have either increased or stayed constant for hundreds of years, far longer than the US system has existed.
You mean Fair Game. Fair Play is Apple's ironic term for its DRM scheme.
Those people were prosecuted
http://www.westernresistance.com/blog/archives/003342.html
In all, only four people were brought to face charges on Friday June 26 as a result of the Sloane Square demonstration. These included Mizanur Rahman, as well as 26-year old Umran Javed of Birmingham, who denied one charge of soliciting to murder American or Danish nationals and one charge of using threatening words or behaviour likely to stir up racial hatred. 31 year old Abdul Rahman Saleem (aka Abu Yahya) denied one count of using words likely to stir up racial hatred. 23 year old Abdul Muhid was charged with two counts of soliciting murder to those who insulted Islam.
All those charged except Abdul Muhid were granted bail. Muhid, who had tried to flee the country on May 4 with Anjem Choudary, was denied bail and was kept in custody in Winchester Prison.
Muhid, Abdul Rahman Saleem (aka Abu Yahya) and Umran Javed are still awaiting their trials.
Actually the incitement to religious hatred law that this guy got busted under was partly inspired by that demonstration.
It's silly really. Incitement should be illegal and that's it. Then the "Behead those who insult Islam" types would get arrested and this guy wouldn't. Which seems fair enough to me.
The kid should move to Germany, they recognize $cientology as the dangerous cult it is. Doesn't anyone feel a bit uncomfortable about the German State deciding which religions are dangerous cults?
Yup, Godwin's Law is now actually a law.
They already have these.
They typically do work, but there's always the problem of powering the device or worrying about noise / signal strength. If you do shock your pet they will be startled, and may just run off in any direction. They also have to be water proof and fairly rugged.
You can't just slap one of these collars on your dog and forget about it. You're supposed to walk with your dog around the perimeter of the "fence" and train them. In my original comment I thought that more people would understand CAT_DELIVERY_GPS_GUIDED_SHOCK_COLLAR than CAT_DELIVERY_RADIO_GUIDED_SHOCK_COLLAR.
And RF collars have a problem with range.
Awesome. So if your pet gets lost you phone up the company and they switch it on. You/they don't even have to go pick up your pet - a course is plotted for it (hopefully AVOIDING streets and freeways) and if it goes off course it's shocked. Actually I was thinking of something simpler. E.g. draw a set of concentric circles centred on your hose. The smallest one is the safe circle, no shocks. The outer ones get more progressively more unpleasant. You could use ultrasonic sound instead of shocks. Then shrink the circles slowly, just slower than the pet can walk. That way it will find its way home. Actually I think pets would quickly learn that the first shock means 'come home now'.
typedef enum
CAT_DELIVERY_METHOD_FACE_TO_FACE=0,
CAT_DELIVERY_METHOD_COURIER,
CAT_DELIVERY_METHOD_AIRMAIL_SEDATED,
CAT_DELIVERY_MAX_LEGAL_US=1000,
CAT_DELIVERY_GPS_GUIDED_SHOCK_COLLAR,
CAT_DELIVERY_MAX_NON_LETHAL=2000,
CAT_DELIVERY_AIRMAIL_FREEZE_DRIED,
} CAT_DELIVERY_METHODS;
Your mum would leave a dent in Panasonic Toughbook.
You have excellent paramilitary police. Stop making excuses and send them in to the suburbs whenever there's trouble. In tanks and armed with live ammunition if necessary. And start locking people up for life if they beat people up or rape them. France needs some zero tolerance policing to make these scum fear the system.
Punishment can come later. By closing off entertainment, they have less to watch. In the aftermath, they can take advantage of community spirit to purge dissenters of all stripes.
Hey I agree with twitter. That's never happened before. I...feeel...a..bi~ERROR! ERROR! EMEGERGENCY SYSTEM REBOOT!
Sorry, what were we talking about again?
Yeah true. It's cool that the Danish king said he would wear a yellow star if the Nazis made the Jews wear one too.
The worst thing is that Asus probably ended up 'refunding' more than paid for a Windows OEM license. I've heard rumours of $50 for the price the OEM pays, maybe less with the kickbacks from the vendors of all the shovelware they install.