Do you prefer short answers to your questions or lengthy answers?

Question

Personally I like large answers best! i don't know exactly why but I seem to have a thing for long texts.

Teehehe! Thanks all for your kind answers! I really appreciate that! As to the user who spun a yarn about the Ultimate Answer- As I set out to read what you apparently wrote I started to realise I had seen this very same text elsewhere. In other words, you're not the authentic author of this text. Better luck next time. And now onwards to the best answer:

Answer 1

I enjoy them both actually...Plus I read every single one of them,no matter how many there are...I respect the fact someone has written something,
whether its a Judasrabbi 3 word answer or a 3 paragraph Toona type of answer..=)Serious or funny I think its great..don't you?I see your nodding in agreement so cool..good question btw..thanks for askin' k? =)

Answer 2

short. Too impatient to get via the finished element if its lengthy. Plus typically at the same time as i'm answering its after a lengthy day at artwork, so i do not want to sit down and browse the finished element! I purely about clicked out of this question because it appeared too lengthy! =)

Answer 3

Some questions don't require long answers and can be rambling. I just like my answers to be sincere and as helpful as they can be, long or short doesn't matter to me. I could go on but I already answered your question and I'm trying to elaborate more just for you but don't know much else to say except I hope this day finds you healthy and happy.

Answer 4

Depends. If my question need some further explaination, then a lengthy answer will satisfy me. But if not, you can just answer me straight to the point.

Answer 5

It would totally depend on the question.

If I needed a yes or no answer, yes or no would suffice.
If I wanted to know, for ex., "Why are the Beatles still so popular?", that would require more.

Answer 6

Short and to the point

Answer 7

Depends on the question and in which category its placed. I like detailed answers in computers.

Answer 8

The search for the Ultimate Answer
According to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, researchers from a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings constructed the second greatest computer in all of time and space, Deep Thought, to calculate the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. After seven and a half million years of pondering the question, Deep Thought provides the answer: "forty-two." The reaction:

"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."

[edit] The search for the Ultimate Question

The Ultimate AnswerDeep Thought informs the researchers that it would design a second and greater computer, incorporating living beings as part of its computational matrix, to tell them what the question is. That computer was called Earth and was so big that it was often mistaken for a planet. The researchers themselves took the apparent form of mice to run the program. The question was lost, five minutes before it was to have been produced, due to the Vogons' demolition of the Earth, supposedly to build a hyperspace bypass. Later in the series, it is revealed that the Vogons had been hired to destroy the Earth by a consortium of philosophers and psychiatrists who feared for the loss of their jobs when the meaning of life became common knowledge.

Lacking a real question, the mice proposed to use "How many roads must a man walk down?" (the first line of Bob Dylan's famous protest song "Blowin' In The Wind") as the question for talk shows, after considering and rejecting various other questions such as, "What's yellow and dangerous?" (a commonplace joke, the answer to which is usually "shark-infested custard").

At the end of Mostly Harmless, which is the last of the series of novels, there is a final reference to the number 42. As Arthur and Ford are dropped off at club Beta (owned by Stavro Müller), Ford shouts at the cabby to stop "just there, number forty-two … Right here!" The entire Earth (in all dimensions, not just those in which it was demolished by the Vogons), is destroyed immediately after this final reference, which could lead to the Ultimate Question being, "Where does it all end?"


[edit] Arthur's Scrabble tiles

The Ultimate Question?At the end of the first radio series, the television series, and the book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the second of the five-book 'trilogy', Arthur Dent — as the last human to have left the Earth before its destruction, therefore the portion of the computer matrix most likely to hold the question — attempts to discover the Question by extracting it from his unconscious mind, through pulling Scrabble letters at random out of a sack. The result is the sentence "WHAT DO YOU GET IF YOU MULTIPLY SIX BY NINE."

The generation of this "question" is actually impossible with a single, standard set of Scrabble letters. Such a set only has two Ys; but the set shown in the TV series has clearly been handmade from memory, so the question buried within Arthur's brainwaves may have influenced him in creating it. In the original radio version of the story, however, it is made clear that Arthur has been travelling all along with a pocket Scrabble set from Earth.

"Six by nine. Forty-two."
"That's it. That's all there is."
The explanation is that the program (Earth) would have run correctly if not for the interference of events such as the crash landing of the Golgafrinchans causing them to replace the original inhabitants. These important modifications introduced error into the program and caused it to discover the wrong question; the question in Arthur's mind has been the wrong question all along.

It was later pointed out by readers that 6 × 9 = 42 if the calculations are performed in base 13, not base 10. Douglas Adams later averred that he was not aware of this at the time, and repeatedly dismissed this as an irrelevant concoction, saying that "nobody writes jokes in base 13 [...] I may be a pretty sad person, but I don't make jokes in base 13."


[edit] Marvin's Question
Another possibility as to the Ultimate Question is presented in the third book, Life, the Universe and Everything. Often complaining about having a "brain the size of a planet", (this would presumably be necessary to work out the Question, as the Earth was created for this purpose according to the series, and is also, approximately, the size of a planet) and once stating that he can see the Question on Arthur's brainwaves, it is possible the "paranoid android" Marvin may know the Question. If this is true, it is possible that it may be given in the following paragraph, taken from Life, the Universe and Everything where Marvin is speaking to the mattress, Zem:

"...I am at a rough estimate, thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number." [said Marvin]
"Er, five" said the mattress.
"Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?"
Given the situation, and other small clues, it is possible that the Ultimate Question is "Think of a number, any number." This would be ironic given that it is in fact not a question.

"Think of a number, any number" is repeated by the Heart of Gold computer near the end of Life, The Universe and Everything immediately after Arthur Dent suggests Prak may know the Ultimate Question and laments that "It's always bothered me that we never found out."


[edit] Impossibility of discovering the Ultimate Question
A joke about the impossibility of understanding the real meaning of the universe first appeared in Fit the Seventh of the radio series, in 1978. There it was stated:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something more bizarrely inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
The joke was reprinted in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and re-worked into both Life, the Universe and Everything and The Tertiary Phase, based on the third novel. In the latter novel, Arthur encounters a man named Prak, who through a significant overdose of a remarkably effective truth serum has gained the knowledge of all truth. Prak confirms that 42 is indeed the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, but reveals that it is impossible for both the Ultimate Answer and the Ultimate Question to be known about in the same universe (a sort of way to keep the key from the lock). He states that if such a thing should come to pass, the universe would disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable. He then speculates that this may have already happened.

The mutual exclusion of knowing both the Ultimate Question and the Ultimate Answer mimics counter-intuitive principles of quantum mechanics like the Pauli exclusion principle and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Douglas Adams's view
Douglas Adams was asked many times during his career why he chose the number forty-two. Many theories were proposed, but he rejected them all. On November 3, 1993, he gave an answer on alt.fan.douglas-adams:

The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story.
While it is certainly true that the answer was intended to be just a number with no hidden meaning, the fact that he arrived at 42 was explained in more detail in an interview with Ian Johnstone of BBC Radio 4 recorded in 1998 (though never broadcast) to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first radio broadcast of The Hitchhiker's Guide.

In the interview Adams said that, having decided it should be a number, he tried to think what an "ordinary number" should be. Adams ruled out non-integers, then he remembered having worked as a "prop-borrower" for John Cleese on his Video Arts training videos. Cleese needed a funny number that would serve as the punchline to a long sketch involving himself (as a bank teller) and Tim Brooke-Taylor (as a customer). Adams believed that number that Cleese came up with was 42 and he decided to use it.

Several attempts by fans to find this particular video have been unsuccessful and it is possible it may never have been published or has since been deleted from use.

Answer 9

Adequate answers; length is irrelevant.

Answer 10

don't care is it long or short,
the point is that answer could solve my problem