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.

Daron set out on the next leg of his journey today. We are each given chances in life to make extraordinary things happen. The once, daily, good-humor show in the midst of the office, the foil to joust ideas with, the joys and frustrations will now be shared in a different way. Congratulations, Daron, on taking this opportunity to follow your heart.

Discussions have been going on for some time about the status of blogs. Are they journalism? I believe that they can be in many ways. They can break stories. They can contain information that is factually correct. One of the biggest shortcomings, however, is the lack of the integrity of the publication. Not the kind of integrity shown to be recently lacking at the New York Times, but the kind of integrity that what I see today is what I will see tomorrow.

Scripting News was recently plagued by a robot that was rather annoying (to Scripting News). However, it brought to light one of my long-time frustrations - Blogs change. Not just by adding new postings but by removing or changing content. There is not the integrity of an issue of Time magazine - something that once held in my hands and read will remain the same. While it would be technically possible to print many common blogs this defeats the growth of knowledge created by the rapid recombination of data possible through blogging.

For example, some weeks ago, Dave Winer, publisher of Scripting News grew weary of the mud slinging and petty nature of personal attacks and turned off Scripting News. This is completely in his rights as a publisher. The problem is what happens when Scripting News does go away. For whatever reason. There is no comprehensive library that will preserve every issue ever published there (or here for that matter). How will scholars of the future tap the publications of today as they become increasingly temporary?