@pallendo: I thought it was octothorpe, and had something to do with some Bell Labs guy lecturing at the Mayo Clinic trying to come up with a new fancy name for it.

@gogarty: Yes, when I went to the US the first time, I was confused as to why they called # "pound", but since it's stuck, and doesn't cause too many problems other than for travellers to the US being asked to "press pound" by automated phone systems, then I'd say it's more useful to use whatever terminology best…

@theplatform: Don't be so American-English-is-not-real-English. In the US, # is called pound. Since this article is most likely targeted at the US, then it would make more sense to refer to the # key as the "pound key". (Can't speak for other English-speaking countries, but I haven't received any political messages…

@JustinPM: yes, and those charity ads with the tag line "every minute, a child dies of ..." too. The fact is, I would probably donate to their cause had they not completely put me off by featuring a particularly googly-eyed child who REALLY FREAKS ME OUT.

@Z_Naught: did you not hear me? What I said was: running at a higher resolution, to me, looks better than running at a lower resolution with AA.

@JBu92: heh, this is the third time this joke has been told in the comments,

@Alicemagic: you could say: without light, there is no shadow. without shadow, there is no light. And without money, there is no evil.

This falls into the same category as: "guns aren't evil, people are", or if you like, "shoes are evil because they can be used to kick puppies".

Is it so evil? Great speakers will appeal to your emotions as much as using logic, and are likely to be a master of their own emotions.

@silvermoonstar3: I don't know...Windows 7 was great, I joined the beta program, and it was damn stable and snappy even then. On the other hand, Vista and XP weren't so great when they were released - buggy, prone to crashes, bad driver support until they got around to patching them up.

@davidr521: The people who make/design road signs have to do a lot of testing on font readability. So the fact that the official road-sign fonts are sans-serif ties in with sans-serif being more legible than serifs.

@samaursa: AA in most graphics engines are smarter than that - they perform adaptive AA, where only regions of high contrast (edges) are sampled at a higher resolution and averaged, avoiding performing unnecessary calculations on plain surfaces where AA would do little.

This looks like a case of using manufactured disfluency to force you to slow down your reading.

@Who's Soap?: yes! but depending on your eyesight, size of monitor and various things, these jaggies might not be noticeable at higher resolutions compared to if you used a lower resolution with AA (for which you may get the same graphical performance).

I find playing at higher resolutions is better than using AA at lower ones (in terms of performance), since at 1680*1050, the pixels are small enough that the aliasing doesn't cause too much problems.

@Thracky: ok, I realise I've come across quite flamey, and argumentative.

@Thracky: yes, I'm not arguing against that, I know that we are influenced by those around us, that is very obvious.

@brianary: I wouldn't call it rudderless: we might be on autopilot most of the time, and have less free will than we think, but this doesn't mean that our subconsciousness is useless.

The quote assumes that you are a mindless sponge - sucking in influence from those around you (oddly this must be exactly 5 people, no less, no more).

I'm fairly sure not every single person in the world is the average of the 5 people they spend most time with (since the smartest/richest/funniest/tallest/etc in the world can't be the average in those respects).