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."

Any Chance of an Ask Slashdot?

[Irvu]

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?

He was the model for Lessig's run

[gambolt]

that never happened.

http://lessig.org/blog/2008/02/there_but_for_the_grace_of_god.html [lessig.org]

The fact that they are associates is definitely reassuring.

This guy is from my state

[gad_zuki!]

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!

[apsmith]

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...

Source code control

[taniwha]

time to get a good source management management system applied to laws - so we can look back in the history and see where the changes come from as they are developed ("ooh look this seems to have been changed by someone working for the oil/drug/gun/etc lobby")

Re:Everyone Codes

[gambolt]

If he can help stop bills that would make sysadmins criminals for doing their jobs, I'll be happy. Between the media content industry and the "think of the children" crowd, there's a lot of legislation floating around that mandates the equivalent of building concrete pontoon votes.

Re:Woohoo?

[Darfeld]

Assembly is still widely used in embedded systems. C is good, but sometimes it's just simpler in good old assembly.

Re:Why would it?

[Stormwatch]

Cut him some slack, will ya? The "tubes" analogy does make sense.
- http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1042 [freedom-to-tinker.com]

How did he end up in politics after Fermilab?

[damn_registrars]

I can't help but wonder if he chose to go into politics after the recent Fermilab budget cuts [google.com]. Considering the way that the current US congress has butchered science spending (at least relative to operating costs), it would be no surprise if he decided he had to fight the machine from within.

Re:Cook county uses sequoia voting systems

[ameyer17]

Except the 14th district is about 60 miles from Cook County. As someone who isn't in the district in question, but is close enough to have been bombarded with the BS from both sides, I'm not so sure Foster won this election so much as Jim Oberweis lost yet another political race (at last count he's 0 for 4).

Not the only one

[EriDay]

My former congressman Vern Ehlers [house.gov] (one of the less bad repulicants):

After three years of studying at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Ehlers transferred and received his undergraduate degree in physics and his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1960. After six years teaching and research at Berkeley, he moved back to Grand Rapids to Calvin College in 1966 where he taught physics for 16 years and later served as chairman of the Physics Department.

He serves on the Science and Technology Committee. One of his greater achievements is not related to science/technology: He's the guy who got FRENCH fries back on the menu.

Nerdiest president

[Chris Shannon]

In 1876, James A. Garfield discovered a novel proof of the Pythagorean Theorem using a trapezoid while serving as a member of the House of Representatives.

Re:This guy is from my state

[Actually, I do RTFA]

(no offense to any baby killing, tax and spend, socialized medicine advocating, way out on the left wing commie liberal democrats reading this).

Presumably it is the Democrats who do not kill babies or consider themselves both socialists and communists who will be offended. Although I suppose a good portion of Democrats would object to the idea that anything left of Fox News is "way out on the left". Some might take offense to the liberal/democrat equality.

Oh, and lastly, I suppose most Democrats would take offense to the idea that "tax-and-spend" is a worse idea than "borrow-and-spend".

Re:This guy is from my state

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too!

I also voted for him, not because I liked him. But because Oberweis is an Ass (see parent for the reasons). Also, Not only did they send out flyers every day in the mail trying to make Foster look like the anti-christ. They got ahold of my e-mail address and kept sending me spam. I unsubscribed to it. But it kept coming... so I had no choice. Not gonna vote for spammers.

For the general election, if I saw Foster running down the street with a dead baby in one arm and a bloody axe in the other. I would still vote for him over Oberweis.

Re:This guy is from my state

[Anonymous Coward]

>(no offense to any baby killing, tax and spend, socialized medicine advocating, way out on the left wing commie liberal democrats reading this

No offense taken. Im just curious what you mean by this. Do you mean all the babies your party has killed in Iraq? Or do you mean a bunch of cells that might have been a baby if allowed to prosper. Or in your warped mind these two things are the same thing? If so I dont see how you can vote for any party then.

Re:This guy is from my state

[wiggles]

I knew I wasn't going to get away with that rant without attracting some flames.

Republican voters are very turned off by the 'borrow-and-spend' policies of this administration -- note that Bush's approval rating is below the percentage of presumed Republican voters. I know I am. We should be cutting entitlement spending and balancing the budget, not borrowing from foreign governments so we can afford to bail out an unfriendly country with military aid.

Re:Heretic!

[Smidge204]

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=

Some self-promotion....

[FBodyJim]

As a blatant self-promotion post... I'm a computer science graduate of Rutger's University and I'm running for a seat in the House of Representatives in NJ's 6th Congressional District. I'm not a politician and have never run for a public office before. I'm a software engineer currently working in the shipping industry writing VB code (I also write in perl, php and used to do some C++ programming for Intel/Dialogic based computer telephony systems but it's been many years) for a desktop application that manages containers and shipping routes. I'm 27 years old so I hope that if I could win an election, I'll not only bring a younger perspective to the House, but a more tech savvy perspective as well, in addition to the perspective of a working Joe rather than the perspective of another career politician. My website isn't yet complete but there is some information available at: http://www.hoganforcongress.com/ [hoganforcongress.com] Be gentle, I don't have a ton of bandwidth or a very powerful server. Thanks.

Re:Heretic!

[SatanicPuppy]

No, actually, that's not what I meant. I've no illusions about my own rightness in all things; sometimes my view isn't going to be the best view. Someone who can listen to all sides and pick the best option is far better than someone who always chooses the same option, regardless of the situation.

And as for PACs...I don't think there is ever a case where I want my congress-critter to be swayed more by money than by the "rightness" of the idea, even if the money would have swayed them in the direction I personally believed in. Once you move in to financial politics, all you get is crap law, because law that benefits everyone is more "expensive" than law that benefits moneyed special interests who are willing to foot the bill.