I'm doing a back and forth with a guy on Twitter who says "government is never the answer." He asks me to name two things the government does well. That's the kind of thing his leaders ask themselves and they never come up with anything. But wait a minute, aren't these the same people who like the military? Who say we should always support the troops? Aren't soldiers government employees?

They're also tough on crime. Three strikes you're out. Lock the door, throw away the key. So how does that work without government? Does Rush Limbaugh decide who's guilty? That would make an interesting movie, but not a world I'd like to live in. I doubt if Limbaugh would like it very much. It wouldn't be long before there was some dittohead on the radio saying how he's a tool of some conspiracy or other.

I named a few things I thought he'd have a hard time saying weren't pretty good.

1. The Interstate Highway System.

2. The moon mission.

3. World War II.

4. Medicare.

Who wants to grow old and worry about getting their ailments treated?

None of us could afford to build all the highways we want to drive on, or might want to drive on somedays. That's why we pool our resources and all of us chip in and make it happen. When we pool our resources, in the U.S. that's called "government."

Wasn't it cool when Neil Armstrong said "One small step for man.."

We needed to pull together to win World War II.

A lot of people have accepted a lot of hooey as fact because it feels good to think they get something the rest of us don't. But wait till you get sick and find out how the health care system actually works. You don't have a whole lot of freedom when you're fighting for your life. It's confusing and you get all kinds of advice, and all of a sudden you don't feel so strong and independent. Especially when you find out you need help just to survive. And it's bad enough if you have the money to pay for the treatment, but a lot of people don't. What then? Do we just turn our back? And how isn't that one of the "death panels" that you all talk about all the time? Who actually says the word "No you have to die" in your ideal system?

No matter what the system is, someone has to say that sometimes. And sometimes people are ready to hear it (my father was, for example) and sometimes they're not. It's a gut-wrenching situation, and not one to make light of, and not one to feel superior to anyone because of. Maybe you're lucky and you've never been there. But it's pretty certain you will be there some day. Or someone you love will. Then you might find yourself wishing your neighbors cared about you a bit more than you care about them.

 10/14/2010; 2:28:01 PM.   .

Tomorrow is moving day, and I'm moving to an apartment with FIOS. 25 megabits up and 25 megabits down. Welcome Davey to the 21st Century. Finally. So all of a sudden I'm thinking about what kinds of services I can run out of my apartment with my symmetrical Internet connection.

That's all well and good, but this is a NYC apartment, so it's small. That led me to this question -- what's the smallest computer you can buy that can run an off-the-shelf OS like Windows, Mac or Linux? And wouldn't it be great if you could buy a small box that had slots, and in each slot you could put a complete computer? The box would take care of power and there would be no ports, except for Ethernet, which would basically be the internal bus protocol for the box. One jack for Internet, one for power, and say up to 15 additional CPUs (the box would come with one CPU on board). Then I could have a small server farm running from a corner of my desk in my crowded Manhattan apartment with great Internet access.

Think of it as a fractional horsepower server rack...

I know I'm dreaming. No such thing exists. But what if!

 10/14/2010; 9:55:22 AM.   .

The browser-based feedhose for the NYT was a hit.

Lots of people tried it out yesterday, and there were a lot of questions. Hopefully some of them will be answered by today's developments.

For an encore, we decided to add three big streams to the NYT stream:

1. AFP wire photos.

2. Tech news.

3. BBC World Edition.

4. NY Times. (As with yesterday's version.)

When you put the four sources together, it's hundreds of feeds, so the updates are pretty frequent, esp during the workday.

The tech sources weren't just thrown together either. I started with feeds Scoble follows on Twitter (but I went for their RSS feeds) and added some that I follow, and then watched TechMeme for a while to try to figure out who their big sources are. It's a pretty good mix, and it's really something to watch the stories roll through, like yesterday's notice of Apple's press conference next week. The result is something that flows much faster.

Leave the window open on your screen, esp if you have a second monitor as I do, to keep news flowing to your desktop 24 by 7.

Now it may be too much, quite possibly is -- that suggests other user interfaces -- maybe something like Checkbox News. The good news is that Eric has provided the source code, so you get to play too!

View the source on Eric's page. It's all right there. Can you make something that looks more beautiful? Neither Eric or I are good at fonts or colors, we're plumbing guys. Help us out by making something gorgeous out of this river. Post a link to your experiment in the comments below or send me a link via email. (Address is in the right sidebar on scripting.com.)

Amy Bellinger sees this becoming a widget.

And you can drop down a level, and access this mix through the feedhose, directly. Just add &name=mix to any of the commands I listed in the JSON post. For example:

http://hose.scripting.com/recent?count=5&name=mix

http://hose.scripting.com/recent?name=mix

http://hose.scripting.com/recent?format=json&name=mix

http://hose.scripting.com/?format=json&timeout=3&name=mix

One more thing, Eric's feedhose client now has a cool new url:

http://eric.feedho.se/

 10/14/2010; 8:01:36 AM.   .