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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.
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.
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
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.
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
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
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