I'm working through linter complaints, these are some fixes. Broad
categories:
1) Ignore errors where we can ignore errors: add "_ = ..." construct.
you can argue that this is annoying noise, but apart from silencing the
linter it *does* serve the purpose of highlighting that an error is
being ignored. I think this is OK, because the linter highlighted some
error cases I wasn't aware of (starting CPU profiles, for example).
2) Untyped constants where we though we had set the type.
3) A real bug where we ineffectually assigned to a shadowed err.
4) Some dead code removed.
There'll be more of these, because not all packages are fixed, but the
diff was already large enough.
