A Congressman Who Can Code Assembly 421
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."
thats great and all.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not any time soon (Score:5, Insightful)
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not impressed! (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Heretic! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Assembly language and VB? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Assembly language and VB? (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone Codes (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
oOoOo (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
It doesn't guarantee much (Score:5, Insightful)
Especially you assembly hackers!
Re:Assembly language and VB? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Assembly language and VB? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:thats great and all.. (Score:3, Insightful)
all politics is local (Score:4, Insightful)
You can expect the new congressman from the 14th District [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:Why would it? (Score:1, Insightful)
I know shit about congressmen, but I suppose that if they previously had no one with a technical background, then their probability of making a correct decision in a matter with technological aspects went up with his inclusion.
I'd be even less specific, but I'm not sure the tubes could handle it.
So can Bill Gates (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This guy is from my state (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Heretic! (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone who is willing to listen to me and like-minded people and also willing to ignore people I don't want him to listen to.
Or maybe you don't realize that PACs also represent people... which could be. There is a touch of the foolish and naive around here when it comes to politics.
Because Coders aren't Professionals. (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:...provided a tie-breaking vote to pass... (Score:4, Insightful)
I know no one will read the article. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Heretic! (Score:5, Insightful)
He's not just smart. He's smart with a fairly rich background in applied sciences. In other words, he's a lot less likely to create or support legislature based on the perception that the internet is a bunch of tubes.
Given the current lineup, at least nice to balance some of the technical ineptness on capitol hill right now... even if his area of experience is somewhat narrow.
=Smidge=
Re:Cook county uses sequoia voting systems (Score:-1, Insightful)
Re:Heretic! (Score:5, Insightful)
But as a first-order rough approximation, calling the internet a "bunch of tubes" sounds as accurate as it gets. Can you find a term as short and simple as that that describes the internet, even as partially as that?
Re:Because Coders aren't Professionals. (Score:3, Insightful)
2. surely there are some
Re:Assembly language and VB? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Not necessarily as good as it sounds (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:thats great and all.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Heretic! (Score:4, Insightful)
/usr/lolcat (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Woohoo? (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
No (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:thats great and all.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Let The Past Be Prolog (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
Re:Assembly language and VB? (Score:3, Insightful)
"computer network" (Score:5, Insightful)
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
a representative (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:"computer network" (Score:2, Insightful)
Except that the social/business meanings of network, as "group of connected individuals" is, and has been since before the 80s, a well-understood and recognized meaning of the word. Hence, "networking" as "meeting people to form connections."
This definition of "network" and "networking" is both more apt than the tubes metaphor and better targeted at the kind of person who works in politics. This version of "networking" is a staple of political and legal circles, and has been for 30+ years.