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."

In other news

...workers at the Illinois Voter's Department are investigating the results of the election. "We didn't know that a Diebold machine could register 68% for one candidate and 100% for another," said their spokesman.

Re:In other news

...and somehow the results were counted very fast!

thats great and all..

But I'd rather see a Congressman who can write sensible legislature.

Re:thats great and all..

But I'd rather see a Congressman who can write sensible legislature.

Well, maybe he can start drafting all the legislation he proposes using IF-THEN-ELSE statements. If anyone complains, he can declare the House to be full of n00bs.

Re:thats great and all..

If he drafts it in assembly it'll probably be more readable than normal legislation.

Re:thats great and all..

If he drafts it in assembly it'll probably be more readable than normal legislation.

Thank goodness he doesn't know Perl.

Heretic!

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.

Now maybe...

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)".

Re:Now maybe...

Everybody who recognizes it would read it as 'Delete'

What Assambly?

8086? MIPS? ARM? Would be nice to know.

Re:What Assambly?

That's so nerdy. A congressman can code assembly, and all you ask is "what kind?". I like. :-D

Re:What Assambly?

It was my thought too. Well, my second thought. My first was 'he can code in assembly and FORTRAN and admits to knowing VB?'

Assembly language and VB?

What kind of half breed freak is this guy?

Re:Assembly language and VB?

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.

Not any time soon

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.

So?

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.

Don't get your hopes up

... he's a Visual Basic guy.

I'm not impressed!

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 it?

Will having a tech-savvy congressman change the game at all?

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?

But will it do us any good

Just remember how great it was to have a Doctor [wikipedia.org] in Congress.

Any Chance of an Ask Slashdot?

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?

As a scientist from fermilab...

Not only can he code assembly, he has his own private store of antimatter.

This guy is from my state

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.

Hey, I did that!

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...

It doesn't guarantee much

Almost all of you guys can code... and some of you have frightening opinions.

Especially you assembly hackers!