Since it's better for the environment it MUST be done, at all costs
Which basically sums up most of the "green" leftie types in California; they refuse to learn economics, considering money to be "dirty and beneath them", and insist upon using the power of government to force their neighbors to live how they would have them live. They may have a softness in their heart for the working person, but unfortunately that softness very often extends to their heads as well because they end up hurting most the people whom they would most like to help with their misguided policies and out-of-control spending.
That reminds me of a particular line from the film, My Cousin Vinny:
Vinny Gambini: I object to this witness being called at this time. We've been given no prior notice he would testify. No discovery of any tests he's conducted or reports he's prepared. And as the court is aware, the defense is entitled to advance notice of all witness who will testify, particularly those who will give scientific evidence, so that we can properly prepare for cross-examination, as well as give the defense an opportunity to have his reports reviewed by a defense expert, who might then be in a position to contradict the veracity of his conclusions.
Judge Chamberlain Haller: Mr. Gambini?
Vinny Gambini: Yes, sir?
Judge Chamberlain Haller: That is a lucid, intelligent, well thought-out objection.
my hot water tank won't last long enough for me and 3 room mates to take showers one after another
A problem no doubt exacerbated by the propensity of various local California governments to regulate the maximum flow of shower heads sold in their jurisdictions or mandate "low flow" shower heads (as immortalized in the Seinfeld episode The Shower Head). Low flow just means that people just take longer showers because it takes longer to rinse the shampoo out of one's hair. So not only does it NOT save water (longer showers), but it wastes more energy heating up the water (smaller droplets from the low flow head lose heat more quickly as they fly through the air, causing people to bump up the heat a few notches to get the same feeling that they would have with lower heat and larger droplets from a "regular" shower head). If you want people to conserve scarce resources then quit regulating the size of my shower head or television and remove, or at least raise, the price ceilings on electricity so that people don't waste it because the underlying commodity is too cheap to care.
I also use Paint.NET and while it certainly is no Photoshop (can we please have some more layer lighting options in the base program, pretty please?) I agree that it is much better than Paint. In fact, Microsoft could do a lot worse than simply ditching Paint and including Paint.NET instead as the default graphics editor for Windows. This would achieve a dual purpose: it would improve the default photo editing experience in Windows AND it would promote the.NET platform to a wider audience who might then be more willing to try other.NET apps after having a good experience with Paint.NET.
It is actually not too difficult to remember longer passwords. You already remember multiple 8 character passwords, right? If you can do that then you can create longer passwords by combining them. For example, I have 32 character sequences (not English words and including numbers and symbols) that I have committed to memory and use on a regular basis when I require enhanced security.
Obviously, they are not attempting to crack the passwords from within the system in question; they have made copies of the ciphertexts onto data storage controlled by them and accessible by the PS3s involved in the cracking effort.
Only Tom Cruise, with his awesome mental powers, can free Senator Xenophon from the clutches of the evil psychiatrists and their terrible leader, Lord Xenu himself! (To hear the exiting conclusion of Incident II: suggested donation of $23,148,855,308,184,500.00)
Did you learn nothing from the dot-com bust? A business must earn money. If people pirate your wares and cause loses then what is the point? The Chinese Government pretends to care about copyright and patents while in actuality they care about who pays them the most to do something. By the time one endures all of the corruption, knock-offs, copying, theft, etc that goes on in China it always "just on the verge" of being profitable. Some businesses are profitable in China, but software is not among them right now and probably never will be. The Chinese are the ultimate pragmatists: inward looking, amoral, and opportunistic. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
If the Nordic countries are the "heaven of social democracy", as you put it, then why not simply move there and leave the United States to those who value freedom? If you want socialism or "social democracy" (they are more 'polite' than the original red flag waving sorts I suppose) then it is available in any number of places around the world (especially in Europe). If, On the other hand, you want real freedom, including the freedom to fail or to succeed famously without the government standing on your shoes, then the Unites States is just about the last bastion remaining. Capitalism, freedom, and individualism are what has made the United States into a global power with the highest per capita income in the world. If you want Europe then go to Europe, it is already there waiting for you. On the other hand, what we have achieved here in the United States is much rarer, possibly unique, in the course of human history and I don't think that we should give that up for cheap healthcare and nanny-state platitudes.
You do have to wonder if the widening gap between rural and city male voting behavior might actually be attributable to exposure to these sorts of chemicals, in all seriousness.
as evidenced by the recent rise of the metrosexual?
Most people associated with the ACLU probably think Ron Paul is the antichrist
Yes, because Ron Paul advocates hard work, sound monetary policy, and personal responsibility; all of which are anathema to the liberal Democrats. In many ways Ron Paul represents the "original formula" of American Values; something that we have gotten away from beginning in the later half of the 20th century and continuing, almost uninterrupted, until today. Now, Obama has grasped the steering wheel with both hands, turned it hard left, and romped on the gas. Where will we end up? Nowhere we want to go that's for sure.
But how can it be perfect if the we cannot protect those who need protection most from those who would steal their money.
As PT Barnum once said, "the fool and his money are soon parted". This notion that the government has to step in and protect people from themselves is completely misguided; it treats everyone like grown up children who cannot take responsibility for their own choices. Do you want to live in the real world and be treated like an adult? If your answer is yes, you have to be willing to let people make their own decisions, no matter how stupid, and own their failures. That is what it means to be an independent adult.
If $1 gets spent by ACORN in a questionable manner, an act of congress is immediately enacted,but when those not so well off are robbed, we can't even make the criminal parties stop, much less put them in jail.
Personally, I was glad to see ACORN go. They were a criminal gang of election fraudsters and two-bit street hustlers who were out of their league and got what was coming to them. Did they honestly believe that they wouldn't be infiltrated and exposed? Their operational security was a joke and they paid the price. Good riddance.
I also use T-Mobile for GSM, but the problem is that their network isn't very good here in the United States; at least not compared to Verizon. There is a reason why Verizon can drag their feet on smart phones, nickle and dime their customers to death, cripple phones, and generally be asshats; the network. Verizon has the largest network coverage in the United States, so many people are willing to put up with their bullshit to get access to it. Why does mobile service suck so hard here in the United States compared to Europe or Japan? Surely there must be reasons?
Improving the products of private companies benefits primarily the private companies because any additional profits from increased sales accrue to the owners and not taxpayers. Investments in technology can be done quite adequately by the private sector. IMHO, unless the technologies in question have a clear public use, as part of other necessary functions of government, research and development should be left to the private sector and private money.
It's this back and forth that makes me wonder if we'll ever get or stay married.
And yet you are still together; it sounds like you are already married, so why not just formalize the situation if for no other reason than the tax benefits? Besides, its the quirky marriages that seem to work out best; every yin needs its yang after all.
But there has to be exceptions, and this one, I think falls under such exceptions.
If your fancy-pants smartphone gets p0wned nobody gets killed. If you want a reliable emergency phone there are cheaper basic alternatives. Think about this whenever you think about the government spending money: if the government is going to spend money it first must take it from somebody else by force (taxes aren't optional...and yes inflation is a tax too). That is an extremely disagreeable process which should be reserved only for the greatest collective needs of society. This should include the branches of government mandated by the US Constitution, the courts, the police, the military and not much else. I completely disagree that improving your iPhone rises to that level of public urgency. Sheesh, the sense of entitlement of the leftie cultists of Apple really is galling sometimes.
That is absolutely correct. Why should public money go to yet another private company? Is Apple going to give the US Treasury a cut of the profits from future iPhone sales (not likely)? The whole bailout mentality is such bullshit; what ever happened to taking responsibility for one's own successes and failures? Another 200,000 ordinary Americans lost their jobs last month, joining millions already on the unemployment rolls. The taxpayer is drowning in red ink, our kids will curse us when they are old enough to realize what we have done, and NSF spends $450,000 on a bullshit project to improve corporate products on the public dime. Apple, RIM, and AT&T have more then two nickles to rub together, let them pay for their own damn product improvement. These damn NSF bureaucrats should spend a month or two working a real job for ordinary working class wages; maybe then they would better appreciate the real value of the money they so frivolously spend.
Effectively they are not primarily educational institutions for students, but a shortcut through the modern social class system.
A shortcut perhaps, but certainly not a guaranteed one. The people making the most money these days appear to be the ones most willing to lie to investors and steal it from taxpayers with "too big to fail" hedge funds and investment bankers leading the charge. In such bullpen trading desk environments I don't think anyone really gives two shits where you got your degree from; if you make money for the firm, you get a bonus and you keep your job. If you don't make money, then you are fired. Unless you actually learned something valuable in your education then the piece of paper is nothing more than an admission ticket to an opportunity to fetch coffee for the veterans and maybe, if you kiss enough butt and give good enough leads to the traders, a chance to become one of them. If that is what it means to be "high class" then I say, "no thanks".
borrow a couple of billion dollars and buy oil on a long dated future.
Is it even possible to buy a futures contract with a term greater than 5 years? I suppose that you could write a non-standard contract and see if anyone was willing to take you up on it, but it might be difficult to place such a large long term bet with a single contract. How many people would be willing to go out 20 or even just 10 years on a billion dollar oil futures contract? Probably not many. Do you trust that they will be able to cover their bet (against you) if you win?
One of my professors once said (in lecture) that students are probably the only consumer group that mostly wants less for their money. Its sad but true that most students these days care more about the piece of paper they receive at the "end" of their "education" than they do about actually learning anything. The universities exploit that by making sure that they get less while charging top dollar in tuition and paying the professors squat. Surely this cannot continue forever before the corporations figure out that degrees from "prestigious" universities do not live up to their mythical reputations.
Relational databases represent several decades of research into how to query data in a fault tolerant scalable way as a standing implementation, re-implementing them is a waste of time.
Except that worthless trade rags keep publishing bullshit PR articles on "the death of SQL" and the "next great database tech" (paid for by the company plugging that next great database tech). What happens next? Some B-Level executive reads this bullshit article on his next airline flight because somebody left the magazine in the seat pocket next to the sky-mall and when he gets back the engineers have to waste a bunch of time defending proven technologies, namely relational databases and SQL, from attacks by this B-Level executive who, armed with his bullshit trade rag knowledge, accuses the engineers of "thinking inside the box". If the executive wins the argument by twisting a few arms (aka cage match negotiator) then he gets promoted and by the time everyone realizes that the next great database tech really isn't he has moved on and the engineers are left holding the bag of shit leftover from the uninformed meddling of MBA asshats.
For those of you wondering, cage match negotiator refers to a management anti-pattern where the negotiator (the manager) takes a "win the argument at any cost" approach to dispute resolution, up to and including driving other team members off the project. The name comes from the cage match format in wrestling where multiple wrestlers enter the cage but only one exits victorious when the match is finished.
Computer Scientists - and Economists - have a habit of assuming that they just need to find the proper model for human behavior, and all the problems will be solved.
I am not an economist, so I cannot speak for the economists out there, but I am a computer scientist (my BS degree is in CS for whatever that is worth) so I can speak for myself as a computer scientist. In this regard I would say that many computer scientists are interested not in modeling human behavior per se, but rather understanding the limits of what can be accurately modeled or computed and to what margin of error. That is why we study the computational complexity and classes of problems which can be computed, so that we know what can be quantified (and to what degree) and what is worth computing. In this way, we do not waste our time on those things which cannot be quantified or cannot be computed in any reasonable amount of time. In AI the term stochastic is used to describe problems which involve randomness (which unless you believe the chaos theorists, cannot be pre-determined) of which the stock market, for example, is in the worst possible category (i.e. it is stochastic, imperfect knowledge, non-zero sum, multiple agent, no static end goal, etc). Only a dishonest or ill informed computer scientist would claim the ability to accurately predict the stock market, which ultimately has a subjective basis (i.e. what people believe things are worth and how they behave according to that belief).
This makes any prediction of human behavior a statistical undertaking at best. Your success will be measured by how much better you compared to a random decision making process. At worst, the statistical anomaly completely wrecks your model - see the Black Swan Theory in Economics.
This is true. However, it is important to remember that the mathematicians and computer scientists who wrote formulas and programs for Wall Street didn't sell them as completely accurate predictors of the future (or at least the honest ones didn't). Very often it was the business types who became so enamored of the "scientific" basis for formulas (which they didn't really understand) that they began trusting them in situations where they shouldn't have (greed can blind the best of us after all). If loses are potentially unlimited and there are random variables which result in loses then there is always the possibility of epic failure or to phrase it another way: running in front of a steamroller to pick up pennies probably isn't worth risking your life, even if 99.99999 times out of a hundred you will be successful.
Slashdot Mirror
Since it's better for the environment it MUST be done, at all costs
Which basically sums up most of the "green" leftie types in California; they refuse to learn economics, considering money to be "dirty and beneath them", and insist upon using the power of government to force their neighbors to live how they would have them live. They may have a softness in their heart for the working person, but unfortunately that softness very often extends to their heads as well because they end up hurting most the people whom they would most like to help with their misguided policies and out-of-control spending.
I say, we here in the USofA lead by example. If folks want to live like US, let's show them how to live.
You first. I am not giving up my car, my house, my TV, or indeed anything else. To paraphrase King Leonidas, "you want them? come and get them".
That reminds me of a particular line from the film, My Cousin Vinny :
Vinny Gambini: I object to this witness being called at this time. We've been given no prior notice he would testify. No discovery of any tests he's conducted or reports he's prepared. And as the court is aware, the defense is entitled to advance notice of all witness who will testify, particularly those who will give scientific evidence, so that we can properly prepare for cross-examination, as well as give the defense an opportunity to have his reports reviewed by a defense expert, who might then be in a position to contradict the veracity of his conclusions.
Judge Chamberlain Haller: Mr. Gambini?
Vinny Gambini: Yes, sir?
Judge Chamberlain Haller: That is a lucid, intelligent, well thought-out objection.
Vinny Gambini: Thank you, sir.
Judge Chamberlain Haller: Overruled.
my hot water tank won't last long enough for me and 3 room mates to take showers one after another
A problem no doubt exacerbated by the propensity of various local California governments to regulate the maximum flow of shower heads sold in their jurisdictions or mandate "low flow" shower heads (as immortalized in the Seinfeld episode The Shower Head ). Low flow just means that people just take longer showers because it takes longer to rinse the shampoo out of one's hair. So not only does it NOT save water (longer showers), but it wastes more energy heating up the water (smaller droplets from the low flow head lose heat more quickly as they fly through the air, causing people to bump up the heat a few notches to get the same feeling that they would have with lower heat and larger droplets from a "regular" shower head). If you want people to conserve scarce resources then quit regulating the size of my shower head or television and remove, or at least raise, the price ceilings on electricity so that people don't waste it because the underlying commodity is too cheap to care.
I also use Paint.NET and while it certainly is no Photoshop (can we please have some more layer lighting options in the base program, pretty please?) I agree that it is much better than Paint. In fact, Microsoft could do a lot worse than simply ditching Paint and including Paint.NET instead as the default graphics editor for Windows. This would achieve a dual purpose: it would improve the default photo editing experience in Windows AND it would promote the .NET platform to a wider audience who might then be more willing to try other .NET apps after having a good experience with Paint.NET.
It is actually not too difficult to remember longer passwords. You already remember multiple 8 character passwords, right? If you can do that then you can create longer passwords by combining them. For example, I have 32 character sequences (not English words and including numbers and symbols) that I have committed to memory and use on a regular basis when I require enhanced security.
Obviously, they are not attempting to crack the passwords from within the system in question; they have made copies of the ciphertexts onto data storage controlled by them and accessible by the PS3s involved in the cracking effort.
Unless the disk was encrypted with 'whole disk encryption'
That may become a foregone conclusion, considering that high quality whole disk encryption tools are freely available to anyone who wants to use them.
Only Tom Cruise, with his awesome mental powers, can free Senator Xenophon from the clutches of the evil psychiatrists and their terrible leader, Lord Xenu himself! (To hear the exiting conclusion of Incident II: suggested donation of $23,148,855,308,184,500.00)
Did you learn nothing from the dot-com bust? A business must earn money. If people pirate your wares and cause loses then what is the point? The Chinese Government pretends to care about copyright and patents while in actuality they care about who pays them the most to do something. By the time one endures all of the corruption, knock-offs, copying, theft, etc that goes on in China it always "just on the verge" of being profitable. Some businesses are profitable in China, but software is not among them right now and probably never will be. The Chinese are the ultimate pragmatists: inward looking, amoral, and opportunistic. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
If the Nordic countries are the "heaven of social democracy", as you put it, then why not simply move there and leave the United States to those who value freedom? If you want socialism or "social democracy" (they are more 'polite' than the original red flag waving sorts I suppose) then it is available in any number of places around the world (especially in Europe). If, On the other hand, you want real freedom, including the freedom to fail or to succeed famously without the government standing on your shoes, then the Unites States is just about the last bastion remaining. Capitalism, freedom, and individualism are what has made the United States into a global power with the highest per capita income in the world. If you want Europe then go to Europe, it is already there waiting for you. On the other hand, what we have achieved here in the United States is much rarer, possibly unique, in the course of human history and I don't think that we should give that up for cheap healthcare and nanny-state platitudes.
You do have to wonder if the widening gap between rural and city male voting behavior might actually be attributable to exposure to these sorts of chemicals, in all seriousness.
as evidenced by the recent rise of the metrosexual?
Most people associated with the ACLU probably think Ron Paul is the antichrist
Yes, because Ron Paul advocates hard work, sound monetary policy, and personal responsibility; all of which are anathema to the liberal Democrats. In many ways Ron Paul represents the "original formula" of American Values; something that we have gotten away from beginning in the later half of the 20th century and continuing, almost uninterrupted, until today. Now, Obama has grasped the steering wheel with both hands, turned it hard left, and romped on the gas. Where will we end up? Nowhere we want to go that's for sure.
But how can it be perfect if the we cannot protect those who need protection most from those who would steal their money.
As PT Barnum once said, "the fool and his money are soon parted". This notion that the government has to step in and protect people from themselves is completely misguided; it treats everyone like grown up children who cannot take responsibility for their own choices. Do you want to live in the real world and be treated like an adult? If your answer is yes, you have to be willing to let people make their own decisions, no matter how stupid, and own their failures. That is what it means to be an independent adult.
If $1 gets spent by ACORN in a questionable manner, an act of congress is immediately enacted,but when those not so well off are robbed, we can't even make the criminal parties stop, much less put them in jail.
Personally, I was glad to see ACORN go. They were a criminal gang of election fraudsters and two-bit street hustlers who were out of their league and got what was coming to them. Did they honestly believe that they wouldn't be infiltrated and exposed? Their operational security was a joke and they paid the price. Good riddance.
I also use T-Mobile for GSM, but the problem is that their network isn't very good here in the United States; at least not compared to Verizon. There is a reason why Verizon can drag their feet on smart phones, nickle and dime their customers to death, cripple phones, and generally be asshats; the network . Verizon has the largest network coverage in the United States, so many people are willing to put up with their bullshit to get access to it. Why does mobile service suck so hard here in the United States compared to Europe or Japan? Surely there must be reasons?
Improving the products of private companies benefits primarily the private companies because any additional profits from increased sales accrue to the owners and not taxpayers. Investments in technology can be done quite adequately by the private sector. IMHO, unless the technologies in question have a clear public use, as part of other necessary functions of government, research and development should be left to the private sector and private money.
It's this back and forth that makes me wonder if we'll ever get or stay married.
And yet you are still together; it sounds like you are already married, so why not just formalize the situation if for no other reason than the tax benefits? Besides, its the quirky marriages that seem to work out best; every yin needs its yang after all.
But there has to be exceptions, and this one, I think falls under such exceptions.
If your fancy-pants smartphone gets p0wned nobody gets killed. If you want a reliable emergency phone there are cheaper basic alternatives. Think about this whenever you think about the government spending money: if the government is going to spend money it first must take it from somebody else by force (taxes aren't optional...and yes inflation is a tax too). That is an extremely disagreeable process which should be reserved only for the greatest collective needs of society. This should include the branches of government mandated by the US Constitution, the courts, the police, the military and not much else. I completely disagree that improving your iPhone rises to that level of public urgency. Sheesh, the sense of entitlement of the leftie cultists of Apple really is galling sometimes.
NSF should not be paying a cent for this.
That is absolutely correct. Why should public money go to yet another private company? Is Apple going to give the US Treasury a cut of the profits from future iPhone sales (not likely)? The whole bailout mentality is such bullshit; what ever happened to taking responsibility for one's own successes and failures? Another 200,000 ordinary Americans lost their jobs last month, joining millions already on the unemployment rolls. The taxpayer is drowning in red ink, our kids will curse us when they are old enough to realize what we have done, and NSF spends $450,000 on a bullshit project to improve corporate products on the public dime. Apple, RIM, and AT&T have more then two nickles to rub together, let them pay for their own damn product improvement . These damn NSF bureaucrats should spend a month or two working a real job for ordinary working class wages; maybe then they would better appreciate the real value of the money they so frivolously spend.
Effectively they are not primarily educational institutions for students, but a shortcut through the modern social class system.
A shortcut perhaps, but certainly not a guaranteed one. The people making the most money these days appear to be the ones most willing to lie to investors and steal it from taxpayers with "too big to fail" hedge funds and investment bankers leading the charge. In such bullpen trading desk environments I don't think anyone really gives two shits where you got your degree from; if you make money for the firm, you get a bonus and you keep your job. If you don't make money, then you are fired. Unless you actually learned something valuable in your education then the piece of paper is nothing more than an admission ticket to an opportunity to fetch coffee for the veterans and maybe, if you kiss enough butt and give good enough leads to the traders, a chance to become one of them. If that is what it means to be "high class" then I say, "no thanks".
borrow a couple of billion dollars and buy oil on a long dated future.
Is it even possible to buy a futures contract with a term greater than 5 years? I suppose that you could write a non-standard contract and see if anyone was willing to take you up on it, but it might be difficult to place such a large long term bet with a single contract. How many people would be willing to go out 20 or even just 10 years on a billion dollar oil futures contract? Probably not many. Do you trust that they will be able to cover their bet (against you) if you win?
One of my professors once said (in lecture) that students are probably the only consumer group that mostly wants less for their money. Its sad but true that most students these days care more about the piece of paper they receive at the "end" of their "education" than they do about actually learning anything. The universities exploit that by making sure that they get less while charging top dollar in tuition and paying the professors squat. Surely this cannot continue forever before the corporations figure out that degrees from "prestigious" universities do not live up to their mythical reputations.
Relational databases represent several decades of research into how to query data in a fault tolerant scalable way as a standing implementation, re-implementing them is a waste of time.
Except that worthless trade rags keep publishing bullshit PR articles on "the death of SQL" and the "next great database tech" (paid for by the company plugging that next great database tech). What happens next? Some B-Level executive reads this bullshit article on his next airline flight because somebody left the magazine in the seat pocket next to the sky-mall and when he gets back the engineers have to waste a bunch of time defending proven technologies, namely relational databases and SQL, from attacks by this B-Level executive who, armed with his bullshit trade rag knowledge, accuses the engineers of "thinking inside the box". If the executive wins the argument by twisting a few arms (aka cage match negotiator) then he gets promoted and by the time everyone realizes that the next great database tech really isn't he has moved on and the engineers are left holding the bag of shit leftover from the uninformed meddling of MBA asshats.
For those of you wondering, cage match negotiator refers to a management anti-pattern where the negotiator (the manager) takes a "win the argument at any cost" approach to dispute resolution, up to and including driving other team members off the project. The name comes from the cage match format in wrestling where multiple wrestlers enter the cage but only one exits victorious when the match is finished.
Computer Scientists - and Economists - have a habit of assuming that they just need to find the proper model for human behavior, and all the problems will be solved.
I am not an economist, so I cannot speak for the economists out there, but I am a computer scientist (my BS degree is in CS for whatever that is worth) so I can speak for myself as a computer scientist. In this regard I would say that many computer scientists are interested not in modeling human behavior per se, but rather understanding the limits of what can be accurately modeled or computed and to what margin of error. That is why we study the computational complexity and classes of problems which can be computed, so that we know what can be quantified (and to what degree) and what is worth computing. In this way, we do not waste our time on those things which cannot be quantified or cannot be computed in any reasonable amount of time. In AI the term stochastic is used to describe problems which involve randomness (which unless you believe the chaos theorists, cannot be pre-determined) of which the stock market, for example, is in the worst possible category (i.e. it is stochastic, imperfect knowledge, non-zero sum, multiple agent, no static end goal, etc). Only a dishonest or ill informed computer scientist would claim the ability to accurately predict the stock market, which ultimately has a subjective basis (i.e. what people believe things are worth and how they behave according to that belief).
This makes any prediction of human behavior a statistical undertaking at best. Your success will be measured by how much better you compared to a random decision making process. At worst, the statistical anomaly completely wrecks your model - see the Black Swan Theory in Economics.
This is true. However, it is important to remember that the mathematicians and computer scientists who wrote formulas and programs for Wall Street didn't sell them as completely accurate predictors of the future (or at least the honest ones didn't). Very often it was the business types who became so enamored of the "scientific" basis for formulas (which they didn't really understand) that they began trusting them in situations where they shouldn't have (greed can blind the best of us after all). If loses are potentially unlimited and there are random variables which result in loses then there is always the possibility of epic failure or to phrase it another way: running in front of a steamroller to pick up pennies probably isn't worth risking your life, even if 99.99999 times out of a hundred you will be successful.
Who is going to climb up there and clean all the bird poop off of it?
How about Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame?