Good fortune
The Times today ran a delightful story on the front page about a sudden surge in successful lottery-number-picking that made the Power Ball authorities worry. It turned out, on investigation, that more than 100 people had played a number that they had read on a fortune cookie message. The cookie number turned out to be very very close to the winning number – close enough to entitle the cookie-readers to a cumulative payout of almost $19 million.
Investigators visited dozens of Chinese restaurants, takeouts and buffets. Then they called fortune cookie distributors and learned that many different brands of fortune cookies come from the same Long Island City factory, which is owned by Wonton Food and churns out four million a day.
“That's ours,” said Derrick Wong, of Wonton Food, when shown a picture of a winner's cookie slip. “That's very nice, 110 people won the lottery from the numbers.”
Last night I was the happy recipient of a remarkable fortune-cookie future-life prediction — undoubtedly from Wonton Food.
On the “A” side, it says: There is a prospect of a thrilling time ahead for you.
On the “B” side, it says: [try to] Speak Chinese: I am a lawyer.
See? Being a lawyer isn't so bad after all. It could even be thrilling.
[numbers to play: 40 41 13 2 22]
Access
Does anyone care that the customer agreements for Verizon's and Comcast's broadband services say You Can't Run a Server? (and We Reserve the Right To Change Any and Every Aspect of Your Online Access and This Agreement Without Notice?)
I know that internet users don't necessarily want freedom of action. Heck, the internet looks dark and dangerous to many people. But in light of the Markoff and Waldrop books I exclaimed over earlier this week, I'm feeling bolder. How can the provision of online access be so easily constrained? There isn't a whisper of a mainstream media murmur about this.
Maybe it doesn't matter — maybe running a server is something that only extremists would do. But don't we want to defend the (lawful) actions of extremists?
And if these limitations stem from bandwidth worries, why aren't there concerns about the absence of significant players who can both provide symmetric broadband access and support the freedom to run servers? Why not have cheap “no server” broadband available to most of us, and slightly more expensive “you can run a server” broadband available for other (ordinary, non-enterprise) people?
And how about those easily-amendable subscriber agreements? The argument must be that Verizon-SBC/Comcast-TW have no incentive to make their customers angry — so they'll be reasonable and we needn't worry.
But I'm worried anyway.
++++++
Verizon 3.6(E): If you subscribe to Broadband Service. . .You may not use the Broadband Service to host any type of server personal or commercial in nature.
Comcast 5(b): Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, the Service is for personal and non-commercial use only and you agree not to use the Service for operation as an Internet service provider, a server site for ftp, telnet, rlogin, e-mail hosting, “web hosting” or other similar applications, for any business enterprise, or as an end-point on a non-Comcast local area network or wide area network.
(by the way, how can Comcast ensure that no subscriber runs a “business enterprise”? I'll bet lots of people do business using Comcast broadband.)