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Tim Tebow: Politics 'Could Be Something In My Future'- 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
- Win provides added momentum heading to Tuesday's caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota.
- Official Google Blog: Unicode over 60 percent of the web
- 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
- Science fiction futures ruled by the popular kids
- 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?
- Irish policeman receives pig's head by registered mail
- A police officer in West Clare is in shock after he received a pig's head in the mail at his family home.
- VIDEO: David Lynch Coffee Gets David Lynch Commercial
- Take this new coffee ad, probably better than anything you'll see on Super Bowl Sunday, but still an ad for a beverage branded by a master filmmaker turned hobbyist mythmaker.
- What I learned from teaming up with Google
- When Mobify CEO Igor Faletski participated in a Google event, he didn't realize that the tech giant could teach him so much about running his startup more effectively. Here are the four lessons he learned and advice on how to put them into action.
- Megaupload: Kim Dotcom describes his strange prison encounters in New Zealand court [VIDEO]
- Internet millionaire Kim Dotcom, also known as Kim Schmitz, has appeared in a New Zealand court, describing unwanted approaches from a forger, a fake prosecutor and various female inmates wanting to be pen pals. Watch the video here.
- 25 Best-Loved Video Game Commercials
- Sure, there are many video game commercials out there that have invaded our television sets in the past -- but which ones are the greatest?
- New EPA Rankings Dub Intel Greenest of the Green
- Intel landed itself on the top spot of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) new list of companies using the most renewable energy to power their business. According to the list, the Santa Clara chip maker uses more than 2.5 billion kilowatt hours of renewable energy sourced from solar, geothermal, low impact hydro, and biomass...
- Tim Cook Brings Philanthropic Attitude to Apple, Donates $100 Million to Charities
- All eyes are on Tim Cook since assuming the role of Apple's chief executive officer after Steve Jobs' health took a turn for the worse, and now that the co-founder is gone, the world is eager to find out how Cook intends to fill those shoes. Perhaps ironically, Cook has chosen to fill the mighty big shoes Jobs left behind by putting a bigger...
- Jerry Seinfeld's Acura Super Bowl Spot (Video)
- Jerry Seinfeld is at his, well, Seinfeld-est in this spot for the new Acura NSX. Watch as he pursues the number one contender for ownership of the new vehicle and pulls out all the stops.
- Busted By The FBI: The Life Of An Elite Teen BitTorrent Uploader
- Releasers and torrent racers are the select few counted on by millions to bring the latest movies, music and video games to the wider Internet in record time. One such person, a 15-year-old school kid, eventually gained access to elite piracy sites and went on to become the top uploader on one of the world's most famous BitTorrent trackers. But how did the buzz of the elite compare to being hunted down by a Patriot Act-empowered FBI?
- [STUDY] Jonesing For A Retweet: Twitter Harder To Resist Than Cigarettes And Booze
- Sleep, sex and...Twitter? A new study suggests that people are more likely to give into the urge to check email and their Twitter account than they are to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol. While the study headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School was limited in size, covering just 205 people between the ages of 18 and 85, it seems to confirm what many of us have suspected for years....
- Ex.ua Makes a Miraculous Comeback
- A few days ago we reported that the Ukrainian authorities shut down the popular file-hosting site Ex.ua. The police confiscated 200 servers which stored 6,000 terabytes of data, and the site's domain was taken over as well. Usually, such aggressive actions mean the end of a site, but not in this case. Out of nowhere [...]