January surprise

A reminder, from "Obama’s Retirement Planner”:

Rules Delayed or "Punted” until 2013 by Obama-EPA:

Greenhouse Gas Regulations
Ozone Rule
Florida Numeric Nutrient Criteria
EPA’s Water Guidance
Stormwater Regulation:
Tier III Gas Regulations:
Boiler MACT Rule
Cement MACT Rule:
Coal Ash
316(b) Cooling Towers Rule
Farm Dust Regulations:
Spill Prevention Control and Countermeasure (SPCC) Rule

All guaranteed economy-killers.

Sending the Democrats packing is only the beginning.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 18:07:36 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Yknow, if every false request cost, say, $50,000...

...this crap would come to a stop really quickly:

Microsoft falsely branded BBC CBeebies, CNN.com and other websites as Windows 8 piracy haunts - and ordered Google to remove them from search results.

Pages belonging to the Beeb’s children’s telly service CBeebies, film reviews site Rottentomatoes and US cinema chain AMC Theaters - as well as web articles by the BBC's technology news department, CNN and The Huffington Post - were among 66 URLs Microsoft wanted to block.  The Windows 8 giant wielded the US's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to censor the search results.
...
The take-down request appears to have been issued by mistake and the URLs generated by software operating on behalf by Microsoft.   The copyright-infringement-hunting bot coughed up roughly 800 URLs on 27 July...

If you wind up a bot and turn it loose without supervision, you should suffer the consequences when it goes crazy.  This past summer the masters of the universe over at Knight Capital got a schooling, and their example scared their whole industry.  The copyright police need to suffer the same.  For this case, $250,000 seems about right.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 16:55:16 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Odds off...

Assuming up and down revisions are equally likely (i.e. 50%), then the probability of 64 consecutive upward revisions is 1/2^64 = 5.42×10^-20.  This is such a small number that it probably wouldn’t occur even once in the entire lifetime of the univese.

RTWT at Daily Pundit.

Related (later, 121008 20:00):

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 21:08:05 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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