From the 1.7 release announcement:

- Default character set is now UTF-8, but other character sets are supported via an improved internationalization support.

Full of what's new / changed.

I haven't done enough research on Alzheimer's to support the link between the two, but the destruction of dopamine-producing cells in Parkinson's surely has an effect on long-term memory.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/325/5943/1017

A lack of dopamine affects other cognitive functions, so I can imagine seeing similar behavioural effects as one sees in Alzheimer's, but I'm not aware of Alzheimer's characteristic loss of neurons and synapses in Parkinson's disease. So the link between them seems a bit shady to me.

Artificial intelligence, simply put, is just applied computer science. The name is just intriguing enough that it gets (got?) decent funding.

I guess not all DVRs are created equally then, because when I was at my parents' house I was constantly frustrated by how difficult it is to fast forward through commercials on their Shaw-supplied DVR. The first level of fast-forward, which should double the speed the video playback, almost appears to slow it down, then jumping to the second level makes it skip fast enough that you're likely to have next week's Lost spoiled for you. A few years ago there was a button to skip exactly 15 seconds, which made it very easy to skip commercials, but they essentially disabled that button quite a while ago, and since then the fast-forward / rewind capabilities have gotten gradually worse. I'm not sure how many people use DVRs supplied by their cable company, but the ability for the company to push updates to essentially cripple your machine is something that needs to stop.

Me, I'll stick to downloading everything with the commercials already stripped out.

It's common practice for a journalist to strip those nonsense syllables from an audio interview transcribed to text. Just sayin'.

I saw District 9 last night and I have to say I was incredibly disappointed. After reading the good reviews, I was expecting to feel something during the movie, but instead it was just another action movie. Nice special effects, but the plot and characters were just awful. The main character has absolutely no personality; he changes his behaviour from scene to scene I guess to fit what the writers thought would be best for the action.

The phrase is "case in point".