Month: January 2010
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Change Congress
Lawrence Lessig is pushing for a constitutional amendment to change the campaign financing system. You can sign his petition over at http://action.change-congress.org/amendment. I think Lessig is right that campaign financing is broken. Elections for national office are very expensive. Politicians spend a lot of their time fund-raising. Jesse Unruh was probably reasonably accurate when he…
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Go Linkage Names
All Go code lives in a package. Every Go source file starts with a package declaration which names the package that it lives in. A package name is a simple identifier; besides appearing in a package clause, package names are also used when referring to names imported from another package. That poses the problem of…
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Protected Symbols
Now for something really controversial: what’s wrong with protected symbols? In an ELF shared library, an ordinary global symbol may be overridden if a symbol of the same name is defined in the executable or in a shared library which appears earlier in the runtime search path. This is called symbol interposition. It is often…
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Transition
I’ll read anything which Iain Banks writes, but, frankly, his recent novel Transition was rather weak. I think he was a bit low on the idea bank for this one. This is one of the novels where he sets up surprises, but unfortunately they were not surprising. The ideas which were meant to be challenging…
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The Argent Age
The dramatic growth of income inequality in the U.S. over the last 30 to 40 years may mark the end of a long experiment in U.S. society, starting with Teddy Roosevelt and ending with Richard Nixon (things were already changing under Jimmy Carter). Teddy Roosevelt was the first of the progressive presidents, and was a…