Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 3834, Advancing America's NITRD Act of 2012. I would like to thank Chairman Hall and Ranking Member Johnson for their important work on this bipartisan legislation. It's been nearly 3 years since we last reauthorized and updated the NITRD Program. I was a cosponsor of that bill in 2009, and while the Senate never acted on it, I'm hopeful that this will be a first step in taking action this year. The NITRD Program evolved from the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, which funded the development of Mosaic, the first commercial Web browser, which made the Internet user friendly and facilitated the cyber-revolution in the 1990s. This innovation was created by a team of programmers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Marc Andreessen, one of the lead programmers on this project and founder of Netscape, summed up the importance of Federal investment in this research saying: ``If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn't have happened, at least, not until years later.'' Innovative breakthroughs like the Mosaic Web browser changed their everyday lives and established the United States as a world leader in networking and information technologies. But today we find ourselves in a world in which we can no longer take U.S. supremacy for granted.…”