Now they were facing something unprecedented and unpredictable: the prospect of a confrontation with the far right.
Publishing its 2008 financial results today, the troubled group said its current outlook continued to be "unpredictable without great prospect of rapid improvement" and that it needed to make further cost savings in the year ahead.
The new Council is expected to be more unpredictable, given the prospect of new, loosely fitting blocs like the Republicans and the candidates who opposed the rewriting of term limits and were powered by the Working Families Party.
But as students of a relatively young subject, many graduating sexologists find their career prospects unpredictable.
Harvinder Sian, an analyst at the Royal Bank of Scotland, wrote in a note to investors that the prospect of unpredictable E.C.B. intervention would raise the risk for speculators who might want to bet against European government bonds.
But all other companies in the program limit themselves to just a few athletes, given their unpredictable schedules and the prospect of paying them for hours they do not work.
Much of the perceived "rising and falling" is the predraft equivalent of Brownian Motion, the unpredictable, chaotic byproduct of prospects colliding with public expectations.
But the prospect that the unpredictable Mr. Paladino might loft more accusations about Mr. Cuomo's personal life or former marriage — live and in person — has worried Mr. Cuomo.
Although most of the drivers and teams remain from 2010, the number and kinds of rule changes, shifts in team ownership and engines, does raise the prospect of new, unpredictable results.
That, in turn, raised the prospect of an unpredictable handover of power in a country that is a pivotal American ally — a fear that administration officials say factored into President Obama's calculus not to push for Mr. Mubarak's resignation, at least for now.
