Well, I got lucky. I hit the back button about twelve times, and my cache still had my origional message in it! I fixed the "less than" error, so this is what I was TRYING to say the first time:

> Don't think so. That's no quote at all -- a practice which is significantly different from putting a quote between your name.

This is probably carrying this particular tangent way too far but...this isn't what I meant.

Your quote was -5 letters, since it removed the "tephe" in sTEPHEn. My quote was -9 letters, since it removed ALL NINE letters in "anonymous". Since -9 is less than -5, my quote was obviously the shorter one. (Come to think of it, though, your quote was exactly the same length as Kevin's given this logic, since "Kevin" only has five letters in it.)

Of course, (and before anyone else says this, I'd better get it out of the way) we could pretend that the quote removes ASCII numbers instead of letters. This means that "tephe" is worth 534 ascii characters, and "Kevin" (with a capital "K") is only worth 509; meaning that your quote is shorter. (However, if "kevin" had been spelled with a lower case "k", then it would be worth 541 in ASCII and therefore would win.) "Anonymous", of course, is worth much more, at 969 (with a capital "A").

>If we're going by those rules, then Sam had it way back with the original post: no quote, no name at the end.

Based on my argument, since "Anonymous" is a significantly longer name than "Sam", mine is still shorter than that origional post (either judging by letters or ASCII values, it doesn't matter). But if anyone has a longer name than mine, then they could automatically have a shorter quote by not signing :-Þ!

>But obviously that's silly...

No kidding. But if I was in the mood to be serious, I'd be studying right now :-Þ.

-Anonxlous
[Quote of -2ASCII between the "y" and "m" in "Anonymous"]