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O’Reilly Radar republishes a blog post imagining what Steve Jobs would do if he were President of the United States and needless to say, the writer supposes that Steve Jobs would do lots of cool stuff. What the article really shows is that the writer has no clue how the government actually works. Our government is structured in such a way that it’s incredibly difficult to get a lot done, regardless of who you are, and the sort of silly thinking that this article espouses only makes the problem worse. What the country needs is structural change that makes it possible for our leaders to be more effective, not magical thinking about the persuasive powers of great leaders. ...

Paul Baran, one of the original inventors of the Internet, passed away this weekend at age 84. He’s credited with inventing the packet-switched network. Here’s how he described his contribution to the creation of the Internet: The process of technological developments is like building a cathedral. Over the course of several hundred years, new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, ‘I built a cathedral.’ Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, ‘Well, who built the cathedral?’ Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else. ...

Chris Dixon has this to say about whether we’re in the midst of another tech bubble: I think it’s a good thing that the speculation on large private tech companies is happening in secondary markets where the risks are being taken by institutions or wealthy individuals. This is in stark contrast to the dot-com bubble of the 90s where many of the people holding the bag when bubble popped were non-rich people who bought stocks through public markets. Obviously this could change if we have a bunch of tech IPOs. ...

The perfect job description serves two purposes. It attracts the kind of people you would hope to hire, and almost as importantly, it discourages the sorts of people you don’t want to hire. Going through big piles of resumes is not fun. Job ads that extoll the virtues of your workplace without laying out any of the potential drawbacks may attract lots of resumes, but it’s almost certain that 90% of them will be from people you don’t want to screen, much less hire. ...

A lot of people have said that they wished that the New York Times’ new pricing system was more about offering more value for people who do pay rather than putting barriers in the way of people who don’t pay. Those remarks immediately made me think of Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime subscribers pay $80 a year in exchange for “free” two day shipping on every Prime-eligible item they purchase from Amazon.com. It is, essentially, a loyalty program that you have to pay to join. I’m certain it exerts a powerful influence on the buying habits of subscribers. If a subscriber buys something from a site other than Amazon.com, they’re likely to pay more for shipping, receive the item later, or both. Plus, they’ve already got the sunk cost of the Prime membership on their mind. When they go to other sites, they probably think, “Shouldn’t I look for this on Amazon.com first to see if I can use my Prime membership?” ...

Brent Simmons wants to see people move back to Web logs that render posts to static files so that they don’t go down in flames every time they get an unexpected traffic spike. I just wanted to point out that it is possible to build a resilient Web site using WordPress, as I explained in my post How to Speed Up WordPress In an Emergency. I’ve never put a lot of faith in content management systems that “bake” pages if those pages will be updated dynamically. Obviously the worst case for any site is cratering under load, but the second worst is not showing people the most up to date content that’s available. If you allow comments on your site or provide other dynamic features, caching can be pretty tricky, and simply baking pages is almost completely impossible. ...

The New York Times is about to embark on its latest experiment in getting online readers to pay up. They posted the details today. If you visit the Web site, you’ll be placed under the following constraint: On NYTimes.com, you can view 20 articles each month at no charge (including slide shows, videos and other features). After 20 articles, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber, with full access to our site. ...

Needless to say, the situation with the nuclear plants in Japan seems to be degrading by the day. I was one of the many people who linked to the letter by Dr. Josef Oehmen explaining how the containment systems for the nuclear plants in Japan work and that we needn’t worry about radiation releases from those plants. What we know now is that there is cause to worry. This has prompted Justin Elliott at Salon to publish a piece “debunking” Oehmen’s letter. ...

Today, everyone is linking to a provocative article from The Register with the headline Apple handcuffs ‘open’ web apps on iPhone home screen. There are three separate issues, all of which cause Web applications that are launched from the home screen to work more poorly than they do if you run them in Safari. The biggest issue is that Applications run from the home screen are not making use of the new JavaScript interpreter in iOS 4.3. ...

Felix Salmon makes a logical argument that you shouldn’t donate to Japan. He argues that earmarking funds for specific disasters prevents them from being used most efficiently, and that Japan is better equipped to deal with this disaster than most countries that suffer a major disaster. Tyler Cowen disagrees, arguing that donating to Japan affirms our friendship with that country, and that you probably won’t make a donation to someone else instead, anyway, and that donating to Japan is better than the non-donation you’ll probably make. I’d argue that the best compromise is to donate to a charity that provides disaster relief, like the Red Cross, Red Cross, but not restrict the donation to disaster relief for Japan. (That’s what Felix Salmon recommends as well.) So if you are moved to donate by this disaster, please do so, but donate wisely. ...