A Computer Assistant

I've enjoyed watching the many ``Batman'' cartoon series and live-action movies which have been made
over the decades.  The cartoon titled ``Batman: The Animated Series'' is among the greatest cartoons
ever created.  He works without superpowers, instead relying on his many gadgets to defeat villians.
I've long believed one particular gadget of his would be particularly useful to myself and others, a
relatively simple device to describe: A machine which monitors data sources and reports changes once
some behavioural rule be triggered.  The RSS reader partially fits this description, but many of the
most interesting data sources explicitly resist any such analysis out of an evil desire for control.

I used a simple RSS reader for a long while, until it became overburdened by worthless information I
couldn't filter.  Even then, I was forced to repeatedly and explicitly check other data sources on a
regular schedule because there was no such support for RSS among them.  When only one data source be
worthwhile, as with many things, explicitly checking it be no greater burden than such an assistant;
the automatic computer is intended to allow man to conquer such things as they grow.  The WWW is the
best example known to me of a relatively trivial mechanism twisted into something unrecognizable so;
large entities have seen fit to resist automation in every respect through required use of those WWW
browsers, and so much as attempting to resist the one purpose of computers in this way is sickening.

Regardless, it shouldn't be difficult to build such a system some day; an individual data source can
be inspected, and some trivial rule unlikely to break in some unnoticeable way can be written; then,
the main system can poll the source and evaluate the rule, reporting upon its triggering.  Even this
alone would be better than manually polling such data sources.  The greatest effort for some will be
to install and maintain those systems designed to circumvent restrictions installed by the owners of
the more complex data sources, and this I dread; a ``fast'' Internet connection is ever more needed.

Unlike Bruce Wayne, I at least have some choice in what I deem worthy of attention, but increasingly
I find Internet data sources to fall into two extremes: trivially automated, or grotesquely hostile.
.