Improving detection by 68% != Reducing fraud by 68%

Imagine that previous methods caught 10% of the fraudulent accounts. New tech improves that to 16.8%. It's a 68% improvement in the fraud detection rate, but only a 6.8% "slashing" of the fraudulent accounts.

(And 5% false positives is pretty horrific)

Except music, if you're an audiophile who prefers vinyl.

I don't care one way or the other about the audio, but I'm a true hipster videophile, and I insist on watching everything on VHS. It's hard to describe, but VHS gives a warmer, softer, smoother picture without all those annoying dots distracting you from the filmmaker's true vision.

And Nickelback?

A day without analogies would be like.... ummm...

Boy are they in for some disappointment...

Seriously? Most people won't even bother to fill out your surveys, and the few that do will probably "grade on the curve(s)" and give the hottest women the benefit of the doubt, at the expense of the those who are "plainly" more knowledgeable. You'd probably get lots of technical people voted out and even more bimbos voted in.

Analogies are like glass: if you push them too far, they break.

Worse yet, it's going to need a web site of its own: http://www.lunarcolony.gov/

Not if the volcano blows any time soon!

I've been meaning to start drinking heavily, and this is the perfect time: with any luck at all, I'll already be dead when the volcano blows! Take that, fate - I refuse to play by your rules!

Who cares? As long as the equations match what's happening (and what's going to happen), does it matter what's "really" going on? We've been doing quantum mechanics for almost a century now, and still no one actually knows what it all means - but we're perfectly happy to take advantage of QM in our technology.

No, the observer just needs to be situated so that both events are in his past light cone. That's completely independent of whether they're in each other's past or future light cones.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity

Sure, but that's not the point - relativity talks about "events" which are particular points in space and in time. You're treating "us" as a point in space but a line in time.

Nope - that's the whole point. Relativity is actually pretty simple (special relativity, anyway), but you have to get past a couple of things, and one of the biggies is that space and time don't work the way you think they do. Your "common sense" has jumped to unwarranted conclusions based on severely limited experience, and until you can let that go you'll struggle to fit relativity into a worldview that it doesn't fit in.

I mean the total universe, not just the observable universe.

The universe is 14b years old; let's assume it continues for another 14b years. Ignore expansion for now, and we can conclude that it must be at least 14b light-years across because we can see almost back to the big bang. In a 2D space-time diagram (1 space dim + 1 time) you'd see a square with an X in it - we're at the center, the absolute past is below us, the absolute future is above us, and the "neither past nor future" (let's call this the "elsewhen") is to the sides. Clearly half of this "universe" is in the elsewhen.

Now make it a 3D space-time diagram (2 space dims + 1 time): the diagram is a cylinder and the light-cones are normal geometric cones. But this means the volume of the absolute past + future is less than half of the cylinder, leaving more than half for the elsewhen. Add in the 3rd space dim, and there's an even smaller proportion inside the "hyper-cones" and thus even more outside.

Now if the universe if really more than 14b LY years across (which it almost certainly is - some estimates are hundreds of billions of LY, some much more), there's even more space-time in the elsewhen.

And because it's expanding, then the "hyper-cylinder" flares out as you move from past to future, resulting in yet still more space-time in the elsewhen.

So ultimately a very tiny fraction of all of space-time is in our absolute past, and a very time fraction is in our absolute future, meaning the vast majority is in the elsewhen.

If that's true, we can only hope that the exponential bloating of software stops as well. Software has been eating the free lunch Moore was providing before it got to the users; the sad reality is that the typical end-user hasn't seen much in the way of performance improvements - in some cases, common tasks are even slower now than 10 years ago.

Oh sure, we defend it by claiming that the software is "good enough" (or will be on tomorrow's computers, anyway), and we justify the bloat by claiming that the software is better in so many other areas like maintainability (it's not), re-usability (it's not), adherence to "design patterns" (regardless of whether they help or hurt), or just "newer software technologies" (I'm looking at you, XAML&WPF), as if the old ones were rusting away.