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Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.

A shame that it wasn't respected.

Glendower. - I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur. - Why, so can I; or so can any man:
But will they come when you do call for them ?
                                                                (1 Henry IV, 3.1)

The grandparent might have us believe there are no witches. You would have us believe there are no terrorists, just panic and hysteria. And yet, when our enemies, men who once walked upon the earth, such as Bin Laden and Al-Awlaki, called them, terrorists came or formed among us. Now they are arrested and tried regularly. This isn't myth, this isn't panic. this is fact. We ignore it at our peril.

FBI’s Top Ten News Stories for the Week Ending January 27, 2012
Denver: Man Arrested for Providing Material Support to a Designated Foreign Terrorist Organization
Baltimore: Man Pleads Guilty to Attempted Use of a Weapon of Mass Destruction in Plot to Attack Armed Forces Recruiting Center
Washington Field: Man Pleads Guilty to Shootings at Pentagon, Other Military Buildings

FBI’s Top Ten News Stories for the Week Ending January 13, 2012
Tampa: Florida Resident Charged with Plotting to Bomb Locations in Tampa
Baltimore: Former Army Solider Charged with Attempting to Provide Material Support to al Shabaab

FBI’s Top Ten News Stories for the Week Ending December 9, 2011
Seattle: Man Pleads Guilty in Plot to Attack Military Processing Center

FBI’s Top Ten News Stories for the Week Ending December 2, 2011
San Diego: Woman Guilty of Conspiring to Provide Material Support to al Shabaab

More here.

http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/wordsinvented.html

"The English language owes a great debt to Shakespeare. He invented over 1700 of our common words by changing nouns into verbs, changing verbs into adjectives, connecting words never before used together, adding prefixes and suffixes, and devising words wholly original."

I'm pretty sure that verbing nouns and nouning verbs is against the "rules" of English (as they are determined by consensus). But now they're words, because someone started using it, and other people used it, too.

If the portrait is 500 years old, and it was painted 6 years before his death, I believe I'm being told that Shakespeare died in AD 2009 - 500 + 6 = 1515. This page says that Shakespeare was born 1564. How could Shakespeare have died before he was born?

You believe it's the year 2009, when in fact it's closer to 2109. I can't tell you exactly what year it is because we honestly don't know ...

(You think that's air you're breathing now?)

Right now the summary reads: "...NYTimes a few days back of what is believed to be a 500-year-old portrait of William Shakespeare, painted 6 years before his death."

If the portrait is 500 years old, and it was painted 6 years before his death, I believe I'm being told that Shakespeare died in AD 2009 - 500 + 6 = 1515. This page says that Shakespeare was born 1564. How could Shakespeare have died before he was born? Even if this is true though, and he lived his entire life and wrote all his works while in his mother's womb and died in there in 1515, how could his corpse remain in there for some 49 years when he was still-born? And besides this, how did he develop bodily and mentally in utero such that he was able to lead a life as he did? How did he compose and direct and act? And then how did the artist figure what Shakespeare looked like? Is that the news I'm missing here? Did they have some sort of ultra-sound technology in 1509 and we've just re-discovered this now?

Everything is a remake, some are just better disguised remakes. Even Shakespeare's plays were reworkings of older works.

I mean seriously, Shakespeare was great, but would we want to have saved every piece of parchment he scribbled on?

"with the possible exception of a few pages of Sir Thomas More, a play that Shakespeare may have helped write, no manuscripts of Shakespeare's survive. The only certain evidence we have of his handwriting is his signature."

Our knowledge of Shakespeare is so sparse that there's an entire genre of claims that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by someone else. Everyone from Ben Jonson to Francis Bacon to Sir Walter Raleigh has been put forward as the "real author". David Kahn's classic work on cryptography, The Codebreakers , devotes almost an entire chapter to debunking the "secret coded messages", supposedly hidden inside Shakespeare's plays, which reveal their true author.

All of this speculation could be disposed of, if only we had a few scribbled pages of Hamlet or The Tempest. But we don't.

Fortunately, Aardman Animations is far better documented than Shakespeare. But the destruction of their storyboards and sets is still a terrible loss.

Am I the only one who instantly thought of Marc Antony's "Honorable Men" speech from Shakespeare's Julius Caeser? I think this "apology" is a brilliant example of modern satire.

For those that haven't read the speech, go here and read it, starting on line 83. It begins with "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears." I think you'll find that it's very similar in style to the ZDNet "apology."

Guess that explains why Shakespeare and Chaucer are so easy for most people to read and comprehend today.

If you haven't read the Thursday Next books - you're missing a treat. Not just because the author is a genius (Think the love child of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett) but because the book can be UPGRADED and has SPECIAL FEATURES!
How cool is that!

I read loads of content on my (black and white) RIM Blackberry. It's fine for casual reading - but the screen needs to be a bit bigger.

Ebooks need to have all the convenience of "real" books - but address all their failings. Like VHS to DVD.

Real Book - fixed font (hey, you'll be old one day, too!). EBook fonts will go up or down depending on what you want.

Real Book - can't read 'em in the dark. Ebooks, lovely backlighting!

Real Book - can't carry 10 of them on the plane. Ebooks, you can fit all of Shakespeare in less than a MB.

It's not enough to give people the same old content in a fancy wrapper - people need a tangible reason for swapping formats. Especially if you're going to be taking away some of their original benefits (book sharing etc)

T

Somehow, a child porn site becomes hosted on Geocities. Geocities, with the thousands of other sites hosted there, doesn't notice it before someone is PA does.

Shocked, the user immediately informs their ISP to correct the issue. The ISP duely blocks off all Geocities pages, as required by law, and at the same time sends off an e-mail to Yahoo (Geocities's owner). By the time someone at Yahoo finally receives the e-mail, Geocities has been blocked for the entire weekend.

It seems to me that without knowing how exactly this law is supposed to work, it may not be giving hosting companies a fair chance to react.

Of course, what's child porn here may be perfectly legal elsewhere. After all, Romeo was only about 16 and Juliet was "not yet 14" when they met... Of course, Shakespeare reduced Juliet's age from the original source story. She was originally 16...

Which brings up another scenario - some foreign site which contains "barely legal teens" has pictures of naked 16 year-olds on it. PA deems this "child porn," and when contacted the host laughs at them and says "it's legal here!" The other sites hosted on the server suffer as a result...