Month: August 2007

  • Broken Programs

    I’m a programmer by profession, so I sometimes wonder: why are most programs so bad? All sizeable programs are full of bugs. Mostly these bugs don’t matter so much, but why are they there? If computer hardware had as many glitches as computer software, computers would never manage to boot up at all. My current…

  • Escaping Malthus

    How have we escaped the Malthusian trap, and is our escape only temporary? Malthus argued that human population was naturally at the limit of what resources could support. To put it another way, the very poor were always on the edge of starvation. Any increase in resources would only bring temporary respite: the population would…

  • Immigration

    Why do we have immigration restrictions in the U.S.? Does it make sense to advocate for free trade and free flow of capital without also permitting free flow of labor? It’s interesting to ponder how much immigration would increase if there were no restrictions. Many people enter the country one way or another despite the…

  • Medical Expenses

    So why is health care so expensive in this country? This is a subject I don’t really know anything about, which gives me even more opportunity than usual to speculate freely and leap to broad conclusions. Obviously a big chunk of it is profits taken by pharmaceutical companies, profits which would have much more justification…

  • W. Richard Stevens

    I was thinking about W. Richard Stevens the other day, when a colleague bought one of his books. I think the books he wrote are still unquestionably the best books on Unix programming and on TCP/IP. I first got in touch with him when I sent him a long list of errata for Advanced Unix…