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This is actually my startpage for Firefox, where I collect RSS feeds I frequent.
This is all read by SimplePIE.org which is a great RSS reader for PHP.
Top News
The 21 Rules of Surviving a Super Bowl Party / Diggs:
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When deciding what Super Bowl party to attend, it is very rude to ask the host about "the TV situation." ... When you go to a dinner party, do you ask about "the oven situation?" ...
11. You have to decide right away if this is going to be a "shushing" or "nonshushing" Super Bowl Party. In a shushing party, it's acceptable to shush someone if you want to hear what the analysts are saying. In a nonshushing party, you get smacked in the jaw if you shush somebody.
Goodbye, Middle Class / Diggs:
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Read about three families who are falling out of the middle class and living on the lower end of the income scale.
Tim Tebow: Politics 'Could Be Something In My Future' / Diggs:
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Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow said he could one day explore politics "if it's something I care about." Tebow said he wouldn't rule out a potential future run for office during an interview with Dave Feherty -- host of the Golf Channel's "Feherty Live" -- that's set to air 10 p.m.
Mitt Romney wins overwhelming victory in Nevada caucuses / Diggs:
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Win provides added momentum heading to Tuesday’s caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota.
Before “it gets better,” gay youth still need help. Enter AnonyMouse. / Diggs:
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"In college, I wanted someone to talk to about being gay and found someone through Craigslist. Clearly a poor decision in retrospect, despite the fact that I did end up finding a mentor who helped ...
Lost Malcolm X Speech Heard Again 50 Years Later / Diggs:
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Brown University senior Malcolm Burnley was working on a class assignment in the library archives last fall when he made a startling discovery: a forgotten speech that Malcolm X, the Muslim minister and human rights activist, had made to the university in 1961.
Squirrel Twirls Like A Boss. / Diggs:
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Don't worry - he's alive and well! We call him "Hardiman" because of his longevity on the twirl-a-squirrel. This was his second lengthy ride that brought tea...
200 cruise passengers struck by norovirus / Diggs:
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More than 200 passengers on two cruise ships headed to south Florida have been stricken with a gastrointestinal illness.
Details of Investigation Into Discovery of "Contraband" at Guantanamo to Remain Secret / Diggs:
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The Pentagon won't release any details of an investigation initiated by the commander of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility revolving around the discovery of "contraband" at the prison, which included a magazine produced by an offshoot of al-Qaeda based in Yemen.
Science fiction futures ruled by the popular kids / Diggs:
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Some people's futures are determined by popular vote: American Idol contestants, class presidents, and people who want to get gay married in California. But what if every aspect of our lives was determined by our reputation and popularity? Would our futures be better, or would the tyranny of the popular spin us into dystopia?
9-year-old suspended after imitating Michael Jackson / Diggs:
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A 9-year-old boy at St. Stanislaus Elementary School was immediately and indefinitely suspended Thursday night at a school lip-sync fundraiser after mimicking Michael Jackson’s famous groin grab during a rendition of “Billie Jean.”
GOPilligan's Island / Diggs:
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Gamer found dead in internet cafe…nine hours later / Diggs:
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23-year-old Chen Jung-yu was found dead at an internet cafe in New Taipei, Taiwan on Tuesday night.
Jung-yu was rigid in his chair with hands on the keyboard and mouse, according to local police...
Video Game Characters In Real Life On Facebook [PICS] / Diggs:
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Ever wondered what the facebook pages of Video Game Characters would be like?
Luke could hit that. (Pic) / Diggs:
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9 Wholly Unnecessary Licensed Children’s Products / Diggs:
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Just because kids are idiots who’ll buy anything with their favorite character’s face slapped on the box doesn’t mean that toy companies should take advantage of them. Here’s some of the most odious licensed crap to have ever been hawked as “fun” or “worth buying.”
Australian SPCA designs iPad app for kittens so they can play games all day long! / Diggs:
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IF YOU thought you'd seen everything as far as iPad applications go, you haven't seen the RSPCA's cat app.
Official Google Blog: Unicode over 60 percent of the web / Diggs:
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Computers store every piece of text using a “character encoding,” which gives a number to each character. For example, the byte 61 stands for ‘a’ and 62 stands for ‘b’ in the ASCII encoding, which was launched in 1963. Before the web, computer systems were siloed, and there were hundreds of different encodings. Depending on the encoding, C1 could mean any of ¡, Ё, Ą, Ħ, ‘, ”, or parts of thousands of characters, from æ to 品. If you brought a file from one computer to another, it could come out as gobbledygook.
Unicode was invented to solve that problem: to encode all human languages, from Chinese (中文) to Russian (русский) to Arabic (العربية), and even emoji symbols like or
; it encodes nearly 75,000 Chinese ideographs alone. In the ASCII encoding, there wasn’t even enough room for all the English punctuation (like curly quotes), while Unicode has room for over a million characters. Unicode was first published in 1991, coincidentally the year the World Wide Web debuted—little did anyone realize at the time they would be so important for each other. Today, people can easily share documents on the web, no matter what their language.
Every January, we look at the percentage of the webpages in our index that are in different encodings. Here’s what our data looks like with the latest figures*:
*Your mileage may vary: these figures may vary somewhat from what other search engines find. The graph lumps together encodings by script. We detect the encoding for each webpage; the ASCII pages just contain ASCII characters, for example. Thanks again to Erik van der Poel for collecting the data.
As you can see, Unicode has experienced an 800 percent increase in “market share” since 2006. Note that we separate out ASCII (~16 percent) since it is a subset of most other encodings. When you include ASCII, nearly 80 percent of web documents are in Unicode (UTF-8). The more documents that are in Unicode, the less likely you will see mangled characters (what Japanese call mojibake ) when you’re surfing the web.
We’ve long used Unicode as the internal format for all the text Google searches and process: any other encoding is first converted to Unicode. Version 6.1 just released with over 110,000 characters; soon we’ll be updating to that version and to Unicode’s locale data from CLDR 21 (both via ICU ). The continued rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the processing for the many languages that we cover. Without it, our unified index it would be nearly impossible—it’d be a bit like not being able to convert between the hundreds of currencies in the world; commerce would be, well, difficult. Thanks to Unicode, Google is able to help people find information in almost any language.
Posted by Mark Davis , International Software Architect
Do the dead outnumber the living? / Diggs:
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The population of the planet reached seven billion in October last year, according to the United Nations. But what's the figure for all those who have lived before us?
58% vs. 27% - Sharp Divide Between Republicans and Democrats on Energy and the Environment / Diggs:
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No issue divides more along partisan lines than the importance of environmental protection  58% of Democrats say it is a top priority, compared with just 27% of Republicans.
