Too bad our patriotic freedom soldiers of love 'accidentally' made the Afghanis 'leak' some material, clearly and presently endangering their health. Surely that must have been Saddam's fault, not those glorious administrators doing 'god's work' in the pentagram.. er pentagon!

24

When I first saw this story I said to myself: "But wait! I thought that the USA (whoo whoo) already does this! Jack Bauer used one to get the terrorists in NYC!" Then I remembered that 24 wasn't real life. *sigh*

That'd be an awesome formatting option when installing Windows 7.

Or we could make the other assumption that most people happily agree on: That the people representing us in the government don't mean what they say, nor do they know what they are doing!
Fa fa fa!

...Unless they're in with the Federal Reserve, who I welcomed as my new overlords long ago, as they seem to be the only ones who have actually gotten things done for good or evil in some time.

It seems that the fundamental problem with financial mathematics is that most models rely on the 'efficient markets hypothesis' which assumes our market is deterministic. Until we find (which we have not) that the human decision making process IS deterministic, the results of EMH backed formulae will never produce consistent results at predicting market behavior. Some of the most interesting research into trying to predict things that normally seem nondeterministic (like markets, human behavior, etc.) was being done by Orlin Grabbe (with fractal modeling techniques), but unfortunately, he seems to have died too early to finish that work.