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A Congressman Who Can Code Assembly
christo writes "In what appears to be a first, the US House of Representatives now has a Congressman with coding skills.
Democratic Representative Bill Foster won a special election this past Saturday in the 14th Congressional District of Illinois. Foster is a physicist who worked at Fermilab for 22 years designing data analysis software for the lab's high energy particle collision detector. In an interview with CNET today, Foster's campaign manager confirmed that the Congressman can write assembly, Fortran and Visual Basic. Will having a tech-savvy congressman change the game at all? Can we expect more rational tech-policy? Already on his first day, Foster provided a tie-breaking vote to pass a major ethics reform bill."
But I'd rather see a Congressman who can write sensible legislature.
Now maybe he can hack into the C-Span system so that, when he gives a speech before the House, it shows him as "Bill Foster (D-1337)".
Similar to the upcoming US election results
8086? MIPS? ARM? Would be nice to know.
What kind of half breed freak is this guy?
We won't see sensible tech legislation until the people that have some sensible ideas are donating more money to politicians than the people who don't.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
We have had Presidents that could make a suit, run a nuclear reactor, fly off an aircraft carrier, and fly jet fighters. I am more interest in that he seems to have a good background in science than his coding skills.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I'm not sure that was linked to the new congressman's ability with coding skills, but I think I like him already.
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
... he's a Visual Basic guy.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
All your congress are belong to him.
Senator Bill Frist could do heart surgery, and look how well that turned out. The moron made a diagnosis based on edited videotape!
No, I'm afraid once a highly skilled individual gives himself or herself over to the dark side of politics, they promptly become yet another meat puppet to be toyed with by lobbyists and wealthy patrons.
Why would a tech-savvy human being be any more useful or valid as a politician than an education-savvy human being? Or a law-savvy human being? Or an entertainment-industry human being? Or a war-savvy human being? Or a bureaucracy-savvy human being? Or a classical literature-savvy human being? Or a propaganda-savvy human being? Or a violent revolution-savvy human being?
Is there something special about technology, that sets tech-savvy humans apart from all the other kinds of humans when it comes to politics?
Was his vote on this ethics-reform bill somehow informed by his tech-savvyness in some kind of game-changing way?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Just remember how great it was to have a Doctor in Congress.
This guy seems like a nice candidate for an Ask Slashdot. I would ask two:
(1) How do you feel about large-scale datamining projects such as the Total Information Awareness project? While the project itself is gone it is not the first of its type. Do such projects strike you as technically feasible or even usable?
(2) As someone who has written software how do you feel about software patents?
Surely someone who can code will make a superior congress-critter!
Meh. Smart is not the same as "Not evil." Lot smart people I wouldn't want to see in congress. The best situation is to have someone who is open-minded and willing to listen without being swayed by PACs.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
being able to write assembly protects you from corruption how? We're all self important techies if we think being technical means you naturally have a higher ethical standard. He has to prove his ethics outside of this one bill before it matters.
Not only can he code assembly, he has his own private store of antimatter.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
He also worked for Tony Stark's Baltimore factory.
that never happened.
http://lessig.org/blog/2008/02/there_but_for_the_grace_of_god.html
The fact that they are associates is definitely reassuring.
Coding skills doesn't really affect ones ethical/political views...
Spyware, Viruses, Addware, Internet Adds, ways around popup blockers, DRM, Military Software, and even Closed Source Software were all were done with people who can code. They are republicans who can code, there are democrats who can code, they even have moderates who can code. Religious People can code, as well as atheists, heck I knew someone who can code who is a Jehovah Witness. Some of the Terrorist can code, so do the good guys.
This is not really a big deal. Will it effect rational tech-policy probably not. Besides what you think it is less about not knowing the issues on a technical level it is about politics on who back you need to scratch. Yea we all laugh at the internet is made of tubes... But for most ISP if you get a huge amount of traffic you will slow down, like (a slimily word, not a direct comparison) having a lot of water going threw small amounts of pipes. It all boils down to do you want to support the new emerging internet technologies to make life easer for the old TelCos.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Though now I'd like to see a legislator who can design a web server chip in CMOS.
Life would be easier if I had the source code.
This guy is from my state and is realy a godsend for Illinois. He took the place of Dennis Hastert who is pretty much George Bush jr. Bill is a democrat which means that the more rural parts of illinois are also fed up with what passes for conservtism today. I hope we see more democrats from my state and continue to produce politicians like Abe Lincoln, Barak Obama and Bill Foster. I cant say how happy this makes me. After pretty much writing off this part of illinois to the republicans for decades its good to see some change. His campaign was a crazy longshot too.
A few scientists on our science committees will be nice. I think even blue-collar America is seeing the problem with theocratic elements. I dont think his geek cred is the big story here, the big story is that we're getting some more moderates in office as opposed to loud-mouth far-right idealogues. Thats a win-win for all, well, except the ultra-right.
I wonder if this will mean that he'll be able to get better funding for the sciences?
I mean, it's generally sad the way funding for science programs in the US is decided by congress, who generally know nothing about science, but perhaps an actual scientists in congress will be able to fix this.
what's that now?
My one experience "coding assembly" was 20 years ago as an undergrad visiting one of the experiments at Fermilab. They had electronic detectors triggered various ways sending data to an old Digital PHP system that was supposed to analyze each event as quickly as possible, decide whether it was interesting enough to save to magnetic tape, and then go on to the next event a few microseconds later. The data acquisition code was, naturally, in assembly - and boy they had that pared down to the absolute essentials, not a wasted instruction. My job was to try to, instead of recording to tape, to send the data over a wire to a new VAX machine that had just arrived.
Not sure I ever ran into Foster though - I wonder what experiments he was on? Actually, I have met him since then, but that's another story...
Energy: time to change the picture.
Almost all of you guys can code... and some of you have frightening opinions.
Especially you assembly hackers!
time to get a good source management management system applied to laws - so we can look back in the history and see where the changes come from as they are developed ("ooh look this seems to have been changed by someone working for the oil/drug/gun/etc lobby")
Couldn't it be said that EVERY person who voted for it provided the tie-breaking vote? I mean, was he the last person to cast a vote, and the vote was exactly 50-50 before he cast his? I believe that if you wanted to be literal, then the last person to cast a vote would be the only person who could be considered to have 'cast the tie-breaking vote'; which would require that a tie existed before he cast it. i.e. if the 'Yes'es were ahead 51-39 with 10 votes to cast, and the last ten were all 'no', there was no 'tie-breaking' vote.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Your copy of the US Constitution must be different than mine.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Cook county uses sequoia voting systems
Don't blame me, I voted for Clippy.
I know that not everyone is Einstein smart, but it does not take a rocket scientist to know that mixing assembler in the house will cause divide by zero errors.
He'll have to learn the difference between NOP and Abstain
Nowhere in the "xxx programming for dummies" books does it talk about kissing babies.
Impeaching a president is nothing like getting funding for your pet project, though the process might seem familiar.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Assembly is still widely used in embedded systems. C is good, but sometimes it's just simpler in good old assembly.
(\__/) This is Lapinator
(='.'=) copy it in your sig
(")_(") so it can take over the world
Which reminds me, could you tell me where a fellow with one or two niggling little DUI's and lots of cash could get himself a CDL?
we'll be seeing computed gotos written into laws. In other words, same-old, same-old.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Foster provided a tie-breaking vote to pass a major ethics reform bill.
Not to be a wet blanket, but didn't all of the people who voted for the ethics reform bill provide a tie-breaking vote?
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
vi or emacs?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
You can expect the new congressman from the 14th District to vote the interests of the 14th District.
The first term congressman does not make policy. He will be two years learning the job and lucky to get a committee assignment that is remotely relevant to anything more significant than the coastal defense of Wyoming.
I can't help but wonder if he chose to go into politics after the recent Fermilab budget cuts. Considering the way that the current US congress has butchered science spending (at least relative to operating costs), it would be no surprise if he decided he had to fight the machine from within.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Ask him if he knows what BALR does. What's an 80A abend? (a real coder!)
If he's a science guy of a certain age, he might be happier with MOV @(R5)+,R2 (PDP-11)
If he does i386 assembler, I'd also be impressed, but vanilla "assembler" doesn't cut it.
Fiat Lux.
But i certainly wouldn't want him in congess. shudder
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Congress likes to talk to professionals, lawyers, doctors, PhDs.
Congress rarely invites someone who writes code for a living to talk to them about technology. More often then not you wind up with a room full of lawyers talking to a panel of lawyers about how technology works. That is, when they don't just invite Billy G in to tell them what the H1-B Visa program should look like. (I know.. Billy used to be a coder, sort of, once, maybe.. but now he's repping as a buisiness man.)
Anyway -- if we did have a genunine coder in congress, than this community would have a real representative of those interests common to programs -- like say H1-B visas and net neutrality.
-GiH
your copypasta is delicious. nom nom nom.
In 1876, James A. Garfield discovered a novel proof of the Pythagorean Theorem using a trapezoid while serving as a member of the House of Representatives.
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
in a very red red red district. Please contribute to his campaign if you'd like to stick around. His opponent was a nasty, bigoted loser, Jim Oberweis.
_____
God is only experiencing itself -- Nisargadatta Maharaj
There is a touch of the foolish and naive when it comes to politics in general.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Foster_(comics)
If he knows assembly, then wouldn't that make him an assemblyman instead of a congressman?
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
eff.org guerrilla.net debian.org gentoo.org
"You can fix anything by throwing money at it." And thats a direct quote. Its that kind of mentality that has put us in the economic situation we are in. Chicago has it worst of all with a sales tax that is creeping tword 11%, Property taxes that have gone upwards of 50%, and a stale real estate market..
Before he's as corrupt as the rest.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume that being a physicist and knowing how to write code are no match for common sense.
The 'ethics bill' bill he voted on was pushed by Nancy Pelosi to create a outside panel to replace the House Ethics Committee, which many (rightly) consider nearly useless for its lack of aggressiveness, but the creation of this "Office of Congressional Ethics" will be little more than just additional bureaucracy and wasted money, besides its direct application as a bullet point on an election-year campaign flyer.
As a freshman congressman, he's going to vote the way he's told by the senior party membership like, say, Pelosi. And as far as getting into any science/tech committees, he might have to get in line; he's a *freshman*, so he has virtually no influence.
"We'll need 2000 crickets, 4 cans of Easy Cheese, and the fluid from 18 glowsticks for this plan to work...." - ph0n1c
... Would love to see these two in a battle of wits, chess match, or Thermodynamics trivia.
A Congressman nearby me was an electronics and computer researcher, implying he probably knows a little bit of some programming language (probably C given his background). I wouldn't be surprised if you research the other ~530 congress seats (house and senate) and uncover some other coders both present and former...
Note I'm not endorsing Darrell Issa in any way, just pointing out a fact...
...in bed
I knew a guy who did that. What you gotta do is find someone who will say they would hire you if only you had a CDL, you get a lawyer and go to court asking for permission to get the CDL (or they recommend you to the secretary of states office, something like that... you gotta deal with both) then youll probably need to pay some money (could be alot it sorta depends on the judge) for a bunch of random shit they basically make up amounts for and go to substance abuse counseling. Then you're good to go.
Let me explain:
Can code in assembly: +10 skillz
Has used Visual Basic: -10 skillz
It all balances out nicely
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Does he run Linux? Will he blend?
The article title reminds me of an exhange that occured in a meeting. We were co-developing a project with a customer and one of the customer's programmers was an old-time assembly programmer who never quite got the hang of high-level languages like C++. We were discussing some bug that was found in some of his unreadable code after a week or so of investigation.
My manager: It appears that this issue was found in some code that Bob wrote.
Their manager: But Bob's a great programmer. He can even knows how to code in assembly.
My manager: Great, can you have him stop coding like it's assembly?
Unknown host pong.
Maybe it's the perfect opportunity to get all legislation into CVS.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to make the obvious humor examples.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
My grandfather introduced me to programming. He worked with similar set of languages though not VB. He went with Delphi around that time period. It was awesome, he has tons of computers (mostly apple) and also HAM radio equipment. Very tech savvy, for 1992. That was 16 years ago. He doesn't know crap about modern technology, and barely recognizes the internet at this point.
There's nothing wrong with my gramps but the point is, just because someone has technical exposure during a time doesn't mean they maintain awareness and the important detailed knowledge necessary to fathom points about issues like net neutrality. No less criticism should be given to this person's influence than is given to any other random corrupt politician.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
I have to say that the parent is right on the mark.
Nobody wanted to see Oberweis elected, save a few gerrymandering conservative incumbents.
In all seriousness though, Foster is a heck of a nice guy. He's a scientist at heart and the kind of political outsider that is nice to see as my representative.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Visual Basic? He was cool when I saw Fortran (89 or 77?) and near god like when I saw Assembly. But VB? Meh. Just another man.
Assembly is unbeatable for writing fast code for number crunching. Fortran is extremely strong for mathematical modelling. Visual Basic lets you make GUIs quickly and easily in Windows.
All three are extremely useful to a physicist. Fortran especially is in wide use.
McCain is going to lose in November because he realizes that he has to pander to all these groups, and leave Americans behind in the process.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
but does he run linux? ah-HA! he writes his own OS!.. oh.. wait... never mind...
Well, beside the joke, IMHO, he's too bright for his own good or my constitutional right at least. This douchebag brought up national id card to congress, and i think, he's still endorsing it.
Again, he's a bright scientist and engineer (and very successful businessman). However I just need a representative who knows what constitution stands for and represent common man/woman's view. Ability to write code in assembly is cute and amusing thing I care less about when voting for a congress person.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Big Endians versus Little Endians.
I'm a Independent with a Democrat lean on most issues.
That being said, I would switch to Republican, if they went back to their '96 party platform (and, never reelected a "republican" who voiced agreement with their 2000 and 2004 platform)
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
To point out the inevitable mistakes in every single thing he does.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
"Just another man." Are you kidding me? If he tried VB and survived... he's more than just another man!
Well, here's the thinking goes like this:
if someone can understand logic, and see beauty in efficiency,
that person has the POTENTIAL to be logical. And logical means fair.
Of course if that sense of altruism isn't instilled it doesn't bear fruit. It's only a potential. But at least it's something?
At least it's possible.
Is it right to think that smart/`intelligent` people are more likely to be fair? Perhaps this thought is wrong.
Didn't we have something on Slashdot that shows higher IQ means different voting patterns?
A blog I run for the wealth
Assembler coding? About the only difference in Congress that would make over your average Congress critter is when the lobbyists click their fingers and tell him to jump, he'll ask "how far", not "how high."
I think lolcats might have reached escape velocity from being just a novelty/meme. They have a lot of extensibility, and cuteness is timeless too.
Medium cat is MEDIUM.
You know what else assembly can do? Self-modifying code.
After all, your program is just zeroes and ones in memory. They can be added, subtracted, multiplied, and mutilated, just like anything else digital can.
So, for speed purposes, you can write a bastard of a for loop that changes the address of the jump statement at the end rather. It's hard to find a real practical purpose, other than on the TI-83 graphing calculators that only let you have 8811 bytes of code running at a time.
So... What can a congresscritter do who knows assembly language?
He can write self-modifying legislature!
DATABASE WOW WOW
Of all the engineering fields I think programmers are the worst kind to be involved in politics. Since in programming or in digital design, its all about 1 or 0, and its very different compared to politics. I have an electronics background, and I really hate it when I'm dealing with Signal Amplifiers etc. Since in theory the design and in the bread board everything is fine. However, when you transfer it to the PCB a lot of stuff gets screwed up, the spacing between leads gives extra capacitance/inductance/resistance. That's why when the deadline is near, I usually attach a potentiometer in the design, so when the expected gain is not achieved, I just adjust my potentiometer to be tweak it on the fly. Just like politics, you keep on tweaking your potentiometer to achieve what you intend to do.
Of course not. He's one guy out of 432. And a freshman Representative at that. He'll have no more effect than any other freshman Congressman does, which is to say, none at all.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The real benefit of having tech-savvy people in office isn't that they could help program computers, it's that their knowledge of programming could help straighten out the poor programming of the many computational systems that are the world itself.
Politicians deal routinely with simple issues of reliably specified process (due process), proper abstraction (policies that are neutral as to whom they apply to), process control (time slicing, fairness, scheduling), data hiding (privacy), security matters (credentials, privilege), algorithmic complexity and resource management (budgets), forward and backward chaining (proactive investment vs reactive budgeting), side effect, storage management and garbage collection (literally), APIs and network services (government databases and services), automation (minimizing overhead and streamlining budgets), modularity (responsibility and accountability), etc. Modern politicians deal with these issues in a kind of haphazard way that is both scary and sad to watch.
I'm not saying a Congress of nerds is the way to go, though I'd say it was worth giving a shot for a while just to see what they could do by applying some actual schooling. For a programmer watching Congress tinker at some kinds of systematic processes is like an Astrophysicist watch an Astrologer explain the heavens.
So forget how a programmer can benefit the programming community while in office. That's small potatoes. If he really understands programming, the place to apply it is away from the keyboard, directly focusing on the real substance of what Congress does (and doesn't).
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
The FORTRAN would be for any kind of simulation or data analysis/processing software he might have had to write. Most number crunching for physics is done in Fortran - the most efficient parallelizing compilers for supercomputers are in FORTRAN and there's a lot of highly optimized toolsets like LINPAK.
The assembler he learned is probably for a microcontroller for controlling a custom apparatus (it could be anything but likely candidates are 8080, x86, or M68K). The VB is probably just for putting up quick and dirty GUIs to control parameters for repeated test runs or for controlling custom-made instrumentation and equipment for experiments.
I was thinking that probably involved more applied research than theoretical physics and then read the article. Sure enough: "One of his main projects involved the design of equipment and data analysis software for [Fermilab's] high energy particle collision detector."
The article also says, "What this actually means to tech policy remains unclear. Computer programming skills do not automatically lead to sound logic or wise positions on important issues."
True enough but, more importantly, a background in physics gives you a pretty darned good understanding of models and their appropriateness and limits in describing reality. I expect that Congressman Foster's reasoning and analytical abilities are way above average for both Congress and the population at large. What his background doesn't guarantee are the patience and political/networking skills necessary to stop bad legislation and get good legislation passed.
His impact will also depend on what committees he get himself assigned to as well. Even if he gets on committees where his background can be of most use - like Science & Technology, Education and Labour, or even Budget - since he's new blood, he won't have high ranking membership and his influence will be limited by the effectiveness his powers of persuasion.
Nevertheless, it's good news because someone in Congress will be able to recognize and call out bullshit when it's tabled by a lobbyist proxy. I hope he gets and opportunity to move to the Senate in a few years because it need those skills even more than the House does.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Any monkey can code in assembly on most architectures.
The question is, can he code assembly.... USING VI.
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
How about "pipes"?
To me, that's what made his statement sound so ignorant. It isn't that tubes is a bad analogy, it's that there is already a common term when using that analogy: pipes. If he'd called the internet a series of pipes, and left out the dumptruck stuff, it would've sounded at least somewhat informed. As it is, it sounds like he learned about it the night before, after a couple of drinks.
hmmm...yeah, how about "computer network"
It's an easy concept to understand, for virtually anyone...far clearer than the ridiculous "tube" analogy (i believe someone posted the full text of the original context of the 'tubes' analogy below)
In fact, the concept of the internet shouldn't be more dumbed-down than "computer network"...some older folks might have to learn what the terms mean, but if a person can't bend their mind around that concept, well, we don't need them influencing politics anyway
Thank you Dave Raggett
About twenty years I spent a couple of days wandering around the experimental halls at CERN: a friend of my parents was running the data acquisition on an experiment there, and my wife and I had dropped in to see them on our first holiday together. Mike's experiment was looking for quarks (naked bottoms, as I recall), and the events were arriving too frequently for the VAXen they were using. So they had all the sensors rigged to two cables. One short one went off to some custom hardware which made a rough `interesting / not interesting' judgement, and signalled that down another short cable to the VAX. The long one went straight to the VAX, and recorded the signals gated by the output from the hardware device. The difference in the length of the cables was tuned to the settle speed of the hardware devices, so that the gating signal arrived at the same time as the sensor outputs.
Yes, that sort of trick was used by things like Cambridge (slotted) rings. But using propagation delay in your favour always strikes me as really good science thinking.
ian
for(;;) {
tax();
spend();
}
let's keep in mind that this guy is a representative, and not a senator. There are 435 representatives, and freshman representative has about as much voice in national policy as the guy down at the DMV. Don't expect him to be authoring any bills.
The more significant news related to his election, if you follow the news, is that he replaced Dennis Hastert in a long time republican district. His election makes the democratic majority in the house that much more cemented, and generally is a signal of the upswing of the democratic party nationally.
My fellow Americans,
;Begin Speech
;End Speech
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HEXPRINT MOVEM.L
SUBQ.W D1/D4-D7/A0/A3,-(A7)
#1,D4
LOOP ROL.L
MOVE.B
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MOVEA.L
MOVE.B #4,D5
D5,D6
#MASK,D6
D6,A3
TABLE(PC,A3),D7
ACIARDY MOVE.B
AND.B
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RTS (A0),D1
#2,D1
ACIARDY
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(A7)+,D1/D4-D7/A0/A3
TABLE DC.B '0123456789ABCDEF'
Thank you, and may God bless America. Good Night.
Max Burns was the congresscritter from south georgia for a term or two. Before that he was a professor of information systems at Ga Southern University. He definitely was a coder too.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
It's not at all hard to find a real practical purpose. If you take one step into the emulation world, it's all around you. Self-modifying code is not just the norm but an absolute requirement.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
As a blatant self-promotion post... I'm a computer science graduate of Rutger's University and I'm running for a seat in the House of Representatives in NJ's 6th Congressional District. I'm not a politician and have never run for a public office before. I'm a software engineer currently working in the shipping industry writing VB code (I also write in perl, php and used to do some C++ programming for Intel/Dialogic based computer telephony systems but it's been many years) for a desktop application that manages containers and shipping routes. I'm 27 years old so I hope that if I could win an election, I'll not only bring a younger perspective to the House, but a more tech savvy perspective as well, in addition to the perspective of a working Joe rather than the perspective of another career politician. My website isn't yet complete but there is some information available at: http://www.hoganforcongress.com/ Be gentle, I don't have a ton of bandwidth or a very powerful server. Thanks.
Sorry, but I don't know any programming language (worth the definition) that can't, for example, open /dev/mem.
Or use closures. Or edit its own source file and recomplile itself.
A politician who can code? I'd hate to read through any of that. It would just be loaded up with //No Comment.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Bush didn't fly the plane. He isn't allowed to fly, was grounded after refusing to take a drug test.
I wonder what % of us really are programmers nowadays, though.
/. audience is a lot broader today.
That post the other day about the future of many-core processors that stirred up a lot of insightful and interesting debate about heterogeneous vs homogeneous cores or shades thereof and the relation of that hardware to the code made me realize that those types of discussions/comments have been somewhat rare.
I don't see this as such a bad thing. I'm just pointing out that the
Rush Holt, a congressman from NJ, also has a physics background.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_D._Holt,_Jr.
I always enjoyed the bumper stickers: "My congressman IS a rocket scientist."
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
A tax cut will solve all of our problems.
You'll get no argument from me. However, even though it's broader I would still bet there's equally geeky/nerdy (whatever 'title' is appropriate I always forget the difference) knowledge even if it's not programming. I think his comment in the article still applies. A lot of times (and I'm guilty of this to) is that people will 'shoot from the hip' without thinking things through.
That's what I took from his comment. That people who should be able to reason things through tend to just post the first thing that pops in their head. I don't think we have to tie the comment to just the programmers.
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
Anybody got Gov. Ryan's cell number handy?