This is now implemented by inserting a Read more... tag (the button is located below the editor area) a dotted line appears in the edited text showing the split location for the Read more.... A new Plugin takes care of the rest.

It is worth mentioning that this does not have a negative effect on migrated data from older sites. The new implementation is fully backward compatible.

Yes it can! This is a significant security improvement.

The safe mode limits PHP to be able to perfom actions only on files/folders who's owner is the same as PHP is currently using (this is usually 'apache'). As files normally are created either by the Joomla! application or by FTP access, the combination of PHP file actions and the FTP Layer allows Joomla! to operate in PHP Safe Mode.

This is now defined in the Language [lang].xml file in the Language metadata settings. If you are having locale problems such as dates do not appear in your language for example, you might want to check/edit the entries in the locale tag. Note that multiple locale strings can be set and the host will usually accept the first one recognised.

Well... how about never needing to mess with encoding settings again?

Ever needed to display several languages on one page or site and something always came up in Giberish?

With utf-8 (a variant of Unicode) glyphs (character forms) of basically all languages can be displayed with one single encoding setting.