Isaac Asimov has a book of essays and information on Shakespeare's writings. In it he makes the interesting claim that the reason English hasn't evolved much since Shakespeare's time is literally because we do not want to evolve such that we lose the ability to natively understand Shakespeare's works.

I like that idea.

Personally, I don't think English is going to evolve much. There will be neologisms and such, but it will never evolve to the point shown in this article. Formal English will still be recognized and understood such that we don't lose access to the immense body of literature that exists in English as we know it today.

#36, zuzu

Nope. This is real bandwidth measured from Speedtest.net and newsgroup downloads from Giganews. 25 megabit is well within DOCSIS 2.0 specs.

#37, Four Naught Four

It was just a tactic he used to get the installation and first month for free.

Unfortunately, Comcast is a monopoly. The only alternatives are to stay with the absolutely abysmal speed from AT&T/Bellsouth (come on, one megabit download, and for over forty bucks a month?), or go to dial-up. Honestly, even given how horrible Comcast is, would you take either of those two alternatives?

Here's my uncle's Comcast horror story from the last two weeks.

I was spending the weekend with my aunt and uncle and noticed that their DSL service through Bellsouth was a whopping one megabit downstream bandwidth. And they were paying $42.99 a month for it. I convinced them to switch to Comcast for a few dollars more a month, but with the current deal of $19.99 a month for the first six months since they already have digital cable.

So, my uncle calls Comcast and sets up an appointment for last Thursday afternoon. Comcast never shows. He calls Comcast and finds out that they rescheduled for last Monday, but didn't bother to inform him of the new date. Monday comes around, and Comcast doesn't show. My uncle calls back and expresses his displeasure to them. He finds out that they rescheduled for next Monday (11th). Again without bothering to inform him.

At this point, he's taken two days off from work for an installation that didn't happen.

He tells them that they can either come out and do the installation Tuesday, or they can just cancel the installation. They promise to do the installation on Tuesday. On Tuesday morning a tech arrives with a cable modem and a DVR (which they already had). Unfortunately, he didn't bring the equipment to install the new outlet my uncle requested. Nor did he bring the wireless router and wireless NIC he requested either. The tech is sent back without performing any work.

My uncle calls Comcast again and tells them that they have one more chance to get it right, and that the next guy had better come prepared with everything he requested for the installation.

Thursday afternoon another tech arrives. This time he has the equipment to put in the new outlet and the modem, but no router or wireless card. The tech goes back to the local office to get the requisite equipment, and comes back an hour later. It then takes him nearly four hours to get everything installed and setup. The funny part is that since I happened to be here, I ended up having to setup the wireless network because the tech couldn't get it to work.

On the plus side, the cable connection is running at 25 megabit downstream. Not bad.

Also, the people they have on the phones are fucking terrible.

@phillamb168, Umm, no. I said it's pretty hilarious. The above video is a PG-13 take on the joke. The one at Entensity is definitely an R.

Ok, that's pretty humorous. Unfortunately, he was beaten to the punch. There's a pretty humorous spoof of the original floating around right now. One source is on entensity.net. This spoof centers on a joke Max goes for early on in this one (drinking his own urine). Except, instead of urine, it's poo. He paints with it. It's hilarious.

Entensity is NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Well, unless you work in a brothel, or Guantanamo Bay. Entensity is also not safe for anyone who is NOT using Firefox, Adblock, and NoScript. Visit at your own peril.

That is quite possibly the worst video tutorial I have ever seen.

This is why I listen to Classical (misnomer, I prefer the Modern period, 20th century music). Composers like Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Bartok haven't even finished warming up by 2:42. In other words: pop sucks, and I consider anything post Jazz to be pop.

I came here to post about Bradbury's short story "The Silent Assassin." Unfortunately, I'm too late.

I can post this though: apparently someone made a new film version of the short story last year. It's listed here on IMDB:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1031278/

And, we'll probably rape this server, but there's a trailer here:

http://raybradburyboard.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/3791083901/m/2341040502

Enjoy.