This reminiscince of what it was like to work with old punch-card era mainframes gives me the willies.

KNOPPIX – Live Linux Filesystem On CD This is pretty cool, a linux distribution that can boot and run from CD on most hardware without any use of the hard disk. It can also netboot from a machine running the install, and it can easily be installed to disk.

States To Try Taxation Of The Net Again

Online retailers *are* taxed like everyone else.

If I walk into NineNine’s porn store in (say) Kalamazoo, and ask you you to ship the dildo I’m purchasing to my girlfriend in Texas*, you do not have to charge me sales tax unless you have a business presence in Texas.

* unless she’s in Austin and already has 6, in which case that would be illegal

The Truth About Charlie: What the HELL was THAT!?!?!
Does Johnathan Demme have a drug problem? Did he have a big chunk of his brain sliced away? This thing was appaulingly awful, even ignoring the fact that this movie is a remake of a movie I’m not sure I liked in the first place. Never mind that Mark Wallberg is no Carry Grant, he isn’t even a Luke Perry. Perhaps if he wasn’t so horribly bad the rest of the movie would have come into focus.

As it was though, it is hard to find anything good about the film. I can think of worse films, but not by a director that I generally respected.

Thandie Newton was quite nice to look at, but the most I can say about her acting is that she seemed to put everything she had into her lines, even though they rarely made much sense. I suspect she was wasted, as was Tim Robbins, on a sinking ship of a film dragged down by the boat anchor of a leading man.