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.

If you look at about 2:15 in the first video of the first link, you'll see IBM is claiming an energy density of about 1.5 kWh/kg to 2 kWh/kg. They don't claim 12 kWh/kg; that's a "theorized" limit that extremetech quotes without substantiation from IBM.

One kWh is 3.6 MJ. That means 12 kWh/kg is 43.2 MJ/kg. The IBM air-breathing Li battery claims ~5x the energy density as the reference Li-air battery used in Wikipedia.

The mucous membranes can notice the difference between a pint of beer and a shot of whiskey IFF the whiskey is consumed so fast that the alcohol concentration in your stomach climbs above what the beer would cause. Hard liquor is fine if you drink it slowly enough.

Disclaimer: my New Year's resolution this year was to drink more hard liquor, and it's been one of the best decisions of my life so far. Long live moderation!

And if they had a symmetric cypher which looked as good as AES to testers but had a secret back door only they could find, they'd do all they could to promote it as the standard. This *probably* isn't what happened; AES is still probably safe even from the NSA. Still, folks shouldn't trust that AES is absolutely airtight.

Is it really a new algorithm, or is it just that they hand-tuned the code to run iterative reconstruction quickly? There's a world of difference. There are some great algorithms out there to speed up calculation of large images where you expect them to be compressible in some basis, but from this article it looks like they didn't invent a new fancy algorithm, they just heavily optimized an existing one. Anybody have a link to a technical paper so we can find out for sure?

OK, but how about distributing the LaTeX *source*, and having each device compile it for the screen size? As a bonus, cross-referencing would would work: "see page 35" could become "see page 65" on small screens without further magic.

Of course authors would have to agree on standard LaTeX libraries, otherwise you'd get errors about using your package incorrectly - could be embarrassing.

For anyone else who's curious, from http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=nice&searchmode=none:

nice:

late 13c., "foolish, stupid, senseless," from O.Fr. nice "silly, foolish," from L. nescius "ignorant," lit. "not-knowing," from ne- "not" (see un-) + stem of scire "to know." "The sense development has been extraordinary, even for an adj." [Weekley] -- from "timid" (pre-1300); to "fussy, fastidious" (late 14c.); to "dainty, delicate" (c.1400); to "precise, careful" (1500s, preserved in such terms as a nice distinction and nice and early); to "agreeable, delightful" (1769); to "kind, thoughtful" (1830). In 16c.-17c. it is often difficult to determine exactly what is meant when a writer uses this word. By 1926, it was pronounced "too great a favorite with the ladies, who have charmed out of it all its individuality and converted it into a mere diffuser of vague and mild agreeableness." [Fowler]

        "I am sure," cried Catherine, "I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should I not call it so?" "Very true," said Henry, "and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk; and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything." [Jane Austen, "Northanger Abbey"]