Somewhere recently I read an article talking about the fear that satellite and cable companies will start using provisions in their contracts to prevent people from hooking up devices that may diminish advertisers revenue.

Today while waiting for the car to be re-repaired I was reading an article in this month's 2600 about the provision stating that servers can't be connected to cable companies' broadband internet. This presents some real challenges to the future of the desktop computer. A very powerful view of the future would suggest that all computers are nodes, both client and server, to others. There are applications such as Userland's Radio, and Apple's iTunes that include servers.

There are some geeks that use many servers. For example e-mail is much easier for me to handle with qmail running on each laptop with the ability to connect to various networks. This doesn't even touch the file sharing servers (NFS, SAMBA etc.) that are used to share files between the machines. And then there are database, contact etc. servers....

To truly experience the benefits that will come from personal computing in the next years it's time to unplug the cable until the cable companies get the message and begin to work a more reasonable user-agreement for everyone involved.