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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.
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.
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.
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.
Probably the kind that learned coding as a tool to use to pursue other ends, and learned the languages he needed to to get his job done. I'm inclined to think that's a good sign -- he's demonstrated a willingness to learn about the things he needs to learn about to get his job done. I think that bodes well for his career as a congressman, and a potential willingness to learn about more modern technologies as relevant to his job.
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.
A physicist. We normally end up coding in a new language with each new collobaration as you're brought into a culture where some language has already been established. On top of that, other groups will put out librarys and programs written in some other language, and you'll have to start using that to make use of their work.
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.
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?
Almost all of you guys can code... and some of you have frightening opinions.
Especially you assembly hackers!
Interesting. Most scientists I know learn one language and stick with it exclusively, even to the point of making the language do things that others might do in a fraction of the time.
I'm currently having to build an entire experimentation framework in a language which doesn't even slightly suit the task, simply because the primary researcher has no interest in using anything but the language they know. And yes, I did try to change their mind.
All the same VB? At my university that language was barred from use in assignments, because it was considered to be without merit.
I can also do assembly and VB (among others...), and I learned them purely as a programmer. Guess I grew up too interested in programming to get hung up on what language (or level of language) was "cooler".
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
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.
But i certainly wouldn't want him in congess. shudder
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
No, this part of the state is heavily republican. I ought to know -- I voted for Foster in this election. He was the first Democrat I've ever voted for, and I still feel a bit dirty about it. As heavily as Chicago goes for Democrats, the suburbs go for Republicans.
The real reason Foster won this election is not because the district is jumping on the magic bus with the rest of the leftist hippies, it's because his opponent, Jim Oberweis, is an ass who has been trying to buy himself into office for years. He's lost three consecutive primaries -- the party faithful can see right through him -- but since he's a big contributor to the party (he's made millions off his dairy business, which turns out an excellent product, by the way), he convinced the bosses to let him run for a fourth time in a rigged primary for a 'safe' Republican district. They rigged the primary by not allowing any serious competition for the seat -- the only two opponents Oberweis had was an idiot who just wanted to be on the ballot and didn't even live in the district, and a state legislator who pissed off just about everyone in the state legislature. Then, when it came to campaign time for the special election, I was recieving two to three pieces of hate filled negative campaign fliers in the mail each day, which just turned me off. Foster, however, barely sent anything out. The DNC ran some TV ads, but not nearly as many as the RNC. In the end, though Oberweis won the primary (barely), he lost the election because there were enough Republicans in the district, like me, who hated him enough to vote in a baby killing, tax and spend, socialized medicine advocating, way out on the left wing commie liberal democrat (no offense to any baby killing, tax and spend, socialized medicine advocating, way out on the left wing commie liberal democrats reading this).
I hope the Republicans in this state realize their mistakes with this race and throw Oberweis under a bus before the November election. He won the primary for that election, too, so we'll have a repeat of Oberweis vs. Foster in November unless they fix this.
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
The point being, had it been a republican, especially the person he replaced, it would not have passed.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
At my university that language was barred from use in assignments, because it was considered to be without merit.
I use it because it's what gets the job done inline with what I use at work. It would be silly for me to export data to a third party piece of code written in another language and then import it back into Microsoft Office just because it is considered w/o merit. If anything, I think that's fucking stupid.
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 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 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
Fortran 2003 is more 'modern' than c++ (most of which is based on a 1998 standard) :-). Seriously, though, Fortran really shines for scientific computing. I am routinely blown away by the thoughtful design of the matrix operations which are a part of the language and can be crudely approximated by c++ libraries that make your code almost impossible to debug due to extensive template use.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
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
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.