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A Congressman Who Can Code Assembly

Posted by Zonk on from the at-least-its-not-haskell dept.

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."

3 of 421 comments (clear)

  1. Any Chance of an Ask Slashdot? by Irvu · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  2. This guy is from my state by gad_zuki! · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Heretic! by Smidge204 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Perhaps you should read the full Ted Stevens quote before you say it's accurate.

    I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

    Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially...

    They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

    It's a series of tubes.

    And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

    The truck analogy is actually much better, IMHO, because it represents the fact that large data sets need to be broken up into multiple packets and delivered separately. Each truck can take a different path, maybe even break down or get lost, and arrive at different times. A tube analogy makes it seem like all the data flows in a constant stream along a single, predetermined and rigid path. It's a horrible analogy, especially considering he compared it to a better one that he threw out.
    =Smidge=