links for 2009-04-12

"Experts agree that from a practical and financial point of view, vasectomies are an ideal form of birth control. The procedure — which cuts or seals the vas deferens, the tubes that carry sperm from the testicles — typically costs $500 to $1,000, but is usually covered by insurance." I once did a little bit of research into this, really easy and simple.

"Chinese government planners have long known that the urge of couples to have sons was skewing the gender balance of the population. But the study, by two Chinese university professors and a London researcher, provides some of the first hard data on the extent of the disparity and the factors contributing to it. They attributed the imbalance almost entirely to couples’ decisions to abort female fetuses." Bad things abound.

"Justice Ginsburg said the controversy was based on the misunderstanding that citing a foreign precedent means the court considers itself bound by foreign law as opposed to merely being influenced by such power as its reasoning holds" Justice Ginsburg explains why she wants the Supreme Court and other courts to look at foreign courts.

"If media companies want to compete with Google, they need to look at the source of its power — judging good content, which enables Google to be the most efficient and effective distributor of content. They also need to look at Google’s fundamental limitation — its judgment is dependent on OTHER people expressing their judgment of content in the form of links. Above all, they need to look at sources of content judgment that Google currently can’t access, because they are not yet expressed as links on the web." What can newspapers do?

"Google does not control the news, it exposes it." Another side.

"What Google doesn't mention is that the billions of clicks and the millions of ad dollars are so fragmented among so many thousands of sites that no one site earns enough to have a decent online business. Where the real money ends up is at the one point in the system where traffic is concentrated: the Google search engine." One side of the Google, media deabate.

Horizontally center a menu.

I want to see what Wil Wright does.

Everything gets a mention when you talk about terrorism, everything is a tool for terrorists the same as a business or you and I.

"In addition to 5, 10, 20 and 40GB caps, the company said this week that it would offer a 100GB tier for heavy users. Prices (so far) would range from $29.95 to $75.00 a month, and users would be charged an extra dollar for every additional gigabyte they download, up to a maximum of $75. An “unlimited” bandwidth plan, therefore, tops out at $150." That's not too bad at the moment, though in a couple of years.

ONe makes not just a good manager but a great manager.

"The drug contains a chemical which prevents the malaria parasite getting rid of a toxic by-product of feeding on red blood cells. It also disables a genetic defence that prevents the existing drugs chloroquine and quinine working, Nature reports. " That's some awesome research.

Free IP to location api, very useful.

Joomla templates galore.

"But the five-week trial of Mr. Stevens offered a different version of him, and only a discrete part of that was directly affected by the discovery of repeated instances of prosecutorial misconduct. The disclosures that prosecutors had withheld information from the defense did little to erase much of the evidence that Mr. Stevens, who had been a powerful and admired political figure in Alaska, regularly and willingly accepted valuable gifts from friends and favor-seekers that he did not report." What does the NYT think of the dismissal of the Stevens case?

"More than any nation I’ve ever visited, Costa Rica is insisting that economic growth and environmentalism work together. It has created a holistic strategy to think about growth, one that demands that everything gets counted." Interesting perspective from one Latin American country.

I would honestly hope the vast majority of Christians wouldn't agree with this kind of stuff.

This is just crazy.

“You’re not going to do this forever. There’s a finite amount of time you’re going to be doing this. Do this really, really well. And if you do this really, really well, everybody will see that, and they’ll move you onto the next thing. And you do that well, and then you’ll move.” That's my goal.

"While Digg reexamines the DiggBar, there are webmasters who will remain concerned. My original article on URL shorteners has code you can use to block framebars. Wikipedia has a page about this, too, and you can see John Gruber’s code here. By the way, we actually had that code on our site before the DiggBar came out, just as a general best practice of breaking frames."

Is anyone all that surprised?

Science makes dating fun.

What's the difference between Digg's bar and Facebook's and others?

"No what are you doing Apple, Skype, Flip, StubHub and Box.net?? These popular companies just couldn't resist paying off Twitter users to put advertisements into their Twitter streams using the new pay-per-tweet service Magpie." Advertising welcome to Twitter, we really thought you would kept clean of all the messy advertising.