Nice troll there. Sorry to the community that I'm feeding you, but I can't just sit there seeing your comment at +2 without pointing a few things out.

I'm an atheist, but I think I wouldn't be if I were born in a Muslim country. There are places in the world where if you're not a Muslim (or a Catholic, etc.) you're a social pariah. Many people have to at least pay lip service to a creed, and even if they would rather become atheist given the freedom of choice, they're not going to alienate themselves from their family and social support structure by "outing" themselves in a declaration of a radically different/nonexistent faith.

Comments like yours therefore discriminate against people not only by choices, but by where they were born. That's pretty narrow.

Secondly, I'd like to point out that the way a faith is interpreted is way more important than what the letter of the sacred texts might say. The Bible praises people for killing a man found gathering firewood on a Sabbath. Obviously, most sane Christians don't choose to follow that part of the Bible. Sane Muslims don't want to kill us. People who are currently insane Muslims would probably be insane atheists if Islam were to disappear overnight.

Similarly, every Muslim I've met is sane, friendly and understanding. If I had to make generalizations, I'd even say that Persian culture (at least the fragment that's escaped from Iran's bizarre regime) encourages contemplative meekness, not the crazy Jihad-spewing vitriol that the US South's pundits would have us believe is mandatory for every follower of Allah.

As an individual, you want to be judged by your actions as an individual. Please extend the same courtesy to Muslims individually, which means refraining from labeling them collectively as aggressive nut cases bent on world destruction.

How about no ACs, no super-new accounts (newest 2%?) and no non-excellent-karma accounts in the first 5 replies to a story? Then newbies wouldn't be forced into top-posting, but trolls still couldn't get in the first word.

Kalman filters assume a linear relationship between predictor and response, while nonlinear least squares allow there to be a parametric known nonlinear relationship.

It's not so much the binding energy as the number of gluons in the proton that give it its mass. Binding energy would *decrease* the mass of the proton.

PS I can't believe "gluons" isn't in the Firefox spelling dictionary.

As has been said elsewhere, the advantage of keeping at least some technical identifier is that URLs are obvious. Compare:

Visit the mcdonalds website

vs.

Visit mcdonalds.com

Incidentally, with the way the Chrome address bar works, you *can already* just type mcdonalds into the bar and go to its website.

In the long run, what's best for the Internet might just be what nets them more money. No true geek would prefer a much larger percentage of the Internet economy now over a fixed percentage where the total size of the Internet grows exponentially at a slightly faster rate.

Agreed. It's not like many of those Instagram users had never heard of Facebook. If they didn't want to use the revenue-generating aspects of Facebook before the merger, they likely won't after either.

You say that like it's a bad thing.