If you have evidence of it, please write to ICANN to complain about the obvious WHOIS data mining for marketing/e-mail spam purposes....

They do allow outbound transfers (it's a requirement of being an accredited registrar) but it's a giant pain in the ass. I used to do customer domain management for my company and getting the auth code and domain unlocked from these guys was an exercise in frustration.

Considering their "piece of paper" form that they send out is enough to get a transfer to other registrars: I do believe they must honor the same process. If a written form is presented to them, they must take it as authorization for the transfer, otherwise the other domain registrars who are harmed by it would have fought this practice away a long time ago.

Up to you whether you think this is good governance or not.

ICANN always argued that regulation / enforcement / policing of the registrars was not their job in response to complaints about many registrar's activities --- such as GoDaddy's onerous "60 day hold/no registrar transfer period" after you renew your domain or change the name of any of your WHOIS contacts.

Why not got one step further - the fines imposed on the employer could be set at the difference between the actual wage earned and the (minimum wage + $1/hour).

Let's also set a higher than normal minimum wage for illegal/undocumented workers, a so called "employer penalty minimum wage" of 25% higher.

Also.... for each illegal: if the farm employer paid them in cash or cannot otherwise prove beyond a shadow of doubt any particular payment, then it shall be assumed the employer made every effort to defraud the employee of wages and hours worked and that the payment was actually $0, so the entire minimum wage is due fir the maximum conceivable number of hours the employee might have worked.

Similarly... if they cannot show affirmative documentation of the hours worked: then it will be assumed an illegally numerous 16 hours a day for every day since hiring. Burden of proof on the employer to show what was paid and how many hours or days the employee worked.

Which reverses your original comment. It's the electrics that are being relatively subsidized, when compared to gas/diesel powered cars.

That's not true; the Net subsidy is: (Tax credits for operating vehicle) + (Uncharged Cost for Externalities). The gasoline tax is a charged cost for one specific externality: the impact on road infrastructure built using collective taxpayer funds.

In some areas such as London there is a congestion fee which helps charge for even more of the externalities produced by vehicles.

Although the gasoline tax does currently have a disparately positive impact on high fuel-mileage vehicles or vehicles which do not require gasoline to operate:

This does not mean there is a relative subsidy higher than gasoline vehicle subsidy for the electric, since the poor mileage gasoline vehicles generate other externalities which are not charged for, such as localized pollution, which would be extremely expensive or difficult to abate.

About a 15% tax on energy for gas powered vehicles. What's the energy tax on all those shiny electric plug ins?

They need to work on adding taxes that will cover electric plug ins, etc. The government is reluctant to do so; however, funding for transportation infrastructure has to come from somewhere ---- and it should come in proportionate amounts from those who use that infrastructure most heavily.

This is not an energy tax per se. This is a tax largely for road usage that goes to the united states highway trust fund; the tax certainly goes a ways to help cover the financing of the national highways, however: the tax is inadequate, even for that; the trust fund has become insolvent, largely due to congress' reluctance to increase the tax even to meet inflation, so it doesn't even cover what it is supposed to cover.

If you operate your gasoline vehicles exclusively on a farm, you can get all the fuel used on your farm free of the tax, or get a quarterly refund check for all the fuel taxes.

as for the cars and global warming thing, cars contribute somewhere between 1% and 5% of bad greenhouse gasses

Greenhouse gas release is not the only negative effect of vehicle emissions. They also release materials such as CO1 and Nitrogen-based compounds with negative health effects on the local environment and human populations, they cause smog and other issues.

Chemical plants are not mobile like Vehicles are. Emissions by chemical plants are at a fixed location and in the future can be regulated or mitigated much more effectively as a result.

just because they do something wrong means they should do more wrong?? no, just no

Except it's not something "more wrong"; it is just something you seem to disagree that they should do. A number of consumers might have already made an investment to purchase a fossil fuel vehicle, and therefore, have a conflict of interest in regards to this matter which disqualifies them from making a fair judgement about the cost to society as a whole and the public of allowing citizens to operate such equipment.

I am essentially neutral on the matter whether they attempt to correct the problem by subsidizing manufacturesr of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles OR make owners of fossil fuel vehicles and manufacturers start paying for the share of emissions release caused by their activities (manufacturer tax for emissions during manufacturing, operator tax for expected emissions based on emission estimation formulae taking into account number of power-on hours total miles driven, and average mileage, to attempt to calculate quantity of fuel burned).

end of discussion, the government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers

The problem is the government is already unfairly picking winners and already subsidizing fossil fuel vehicles by failing to require that manufacturers and operators of fossil fuel vehicles pay for the pollution they generate in order to internalize the externalities.

The fact is.... new development is always expensive. And, economics doesn't favor improvement of society, when the actors are not required to pay for the damage they are causing and the point of the new technology requiring major investments in development and infrastructure is to mitigate such damage.

Why not? Because if you hand out $20,000 to buy a car, you just increase the price of every car by $20,000. It is basic economics.

OK... would it please you if they implement their subsidy by creating a $10,000 tax on the purchase or transfer of any vehicle; used or new? Then waive that tax for buyers of a new or used certified hydrogen-only vehicle and pay the manufacturer $10,000 directly, for each one sold.

Fuel cells are for idiots who want to pretend that the hydrogen comes from someplace clean and green for free.

The CO2 has a less harmful affect on human health and the environment than the smog which collects when other nitrogen compounds emitted when burning fossil fuels.

Furthermore, the Hydrogen can produced in centralized locations which means the method of production can be more easily changed in manners which minimize any release.

Consider: If there were no constitution, what would be the legal basis for Parliamentary supremacy?

The legal basis being the monarch in a sovereign monarchy has absolute power; England is a sovereign monarchy, and the courts rely on this sovereignty to get to say anything.

The monarchy was then forced to cede many of their God-given powers after the Glorious revolution in 1689; at which time parliament passed the Bill of Rights asserting Parliament to be supreme, even over the monarch, and the "truce" between Monarchy and Parliament, effectively forever moved the supreme source of law to Parliament by agreement.

New acts of parliament supercede previous laws regardless of source due to Parliamentary Supremecy, a fundamental pillar of English law.... Parliament is the supreme law-making body: its Acts are the highest source of English law.

Unlike in other countries such as the US, there is no such thing as an unconstitutional law, or an act of parliament being "illegal" if properly passed, because there is no constitution in the UK, and an act of the parliament duly passed is supreme.

Maybe, but I am sure that is not what this is about. Dell is trying to get more business from members of the Bitcoin community who get all excited and extremely enthusiastic and start buying when a vendor starts accepting their coins.

In other words.... it's not about Bitcoin users being technical or not..... just a way to drum up some additional business for Dell, and to increase margins for some transactions, since banking fees will be much lower.

The perspective is supposed to be from that of the microcomputer revolution, which was to have ended that elitism of mainframe and minicomputer "once and forever".

You're just continuing the same idiocy of the article. The point is programming is not hard because language designers are elitists.

Programming is hard because it is solving a fundamentally hard problem of converting human language into extremely detailed formal procedure which can be executed by a machine, and you have to know how the machine works to do it effectively -- this is a fundamental knowledge barrier.

This is nothing discriminative or exclusionary, but fundamental. It's like saying Calculus is hard to grasp, therefore the culture of mathematics unfairly excludes some groups.