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2014 is shaping up to be the year when renting an apartment became a more popular choice than owning a home. According to a June 20 CNBC article, the national apartment occupancy rate continued to soar throughout the month of May, reaching its highest level in six years. An amazing 95% of apartments across America are currently occupied -- and developers are rushing to construct more to meet demand. Americans' gravitation toward renting an apartment rather than buying a home marks an important shift away from the traditional "American dream," in which everyone was expected to own a home to be considered successful. “The American people believe that the country’s housing environment is changing,” a MacArthur Foundation report called “How Housing Matters: The Housing Crisis Continue...

Unicode is getting an update which will include 250 more "emoji" symbols, as well as other updates for languages around the world. Smartphone users around the world, rejoice. Among the many updates are a hammer, a spider, an arriving airplane, a hot pepper, and a satellite. The update release is Unicode Version 7. Unicode is a system that came into existence during the early 90s as a way to provide a uniform code for different character and letters. Years ago, many countries and languages used their own systems for text encoding. Before the internet, this worked out fine. After the introduction of the World Wide Web, however, a problem quickly became apparent. When a page was written on one standard but seen by a web browser as another standard, the page would appear on the screen as tota...