Took a look at some sample questions, they are similar to those taught for 12~13 years old kids here (Vietnam).

Let me recounts recent events....
- They axed any services that compete with G+ (Google Reader for example, together with its community)
- Everything must be tied with G+, back then I can add my comment on Google Play, now I need a G+ account
- They 'upgraded' Google Talk to Hangout, removing XMPP Federation in the process which makes Hangout a walled garden (Gmail/Gtalk users constitute one of the biggest XMPP network).
- After your 'upgrade' to Google Hangout, you will lose your ability to disable chat logging from the gmail web interface, that can only be done with official Hangout client. And you can only disable per contact, not completely.
- They did not respect Do not track setting.
and many more....

I feel that Google now is no longer the one I loved, I shutdown most of my google services, took out all my data, blocking cookies from Google. Now the only Google service that I still is gmail, as I am looking for a good alternative, paid service like fastmail.fm is fine too.

It is not that simple, take flash memory for example, if the blocks are erased then the write will be very fast, but the write speed will slow to a crawl if they aren't. You can't predict the writeback latency at all, you can only (heuristically) adapt to it. As for the GNU/Linux's complexity, I don't think there is any problem with it, most IO operations are cached in memory, only when you need to flush it down to storage medium then the latency problem appears. I have read somewhere that Linux is optimized for throughput workload (for big server), so the desktop users have to suffer, for them responsiveness is more important than throughtput.

A bit offtopic, roughtly 10 years ago I came to /. and was amazed by the technological insight/information in the comments here. And now more than half of the comments are jokes about skynet without any insight of understanding what TFA is about. Of course, informative posts still can be found often, but slashdot has fallen quite low...

Think of it as solving a multiobjective optimization problem using heuristic algorithm/machine learning. You can't solve the congestion problem completely as it is computionally infeasible, now they just use machine learning to find the (supposedly) optimal solution. Read TFA, it is quite interesting, I wonder if we can apply that to Linux writeback algo to avoid the current latency problem (trying copying 8 Gb of data into a slow storage medium such as SD card or USB flash, prepare for 15+ seconds stalls!), the underlying is the same anyway.

I still use Unity, it is strangely good after you used it for a while, despite some minor bugs here and there. Unity actually included many useful features from other desktops, such as:
- Menu on top, titlebar on top (when full screen): Saving precious vertical space, esp. useful with my 1366x768 laptop screen. And to be honest, I only care about the menu of the program I am focused on anyway, so one menu at a time isn't a big problem.
- Taskbar on the left, with grouping: same as above, with 16:9 screen I can spare some horizontal space for it. Also you can quickly switch windows with Super + F[1234], something taken from Microsoft Windows 7, it is more useful and faster than Alt-tabbing because you don't have to wait for the list of windows to appear, you always know which keys to press.
- Windows grouping, subgroup switching with Alt+grave (`). Taken from GNOME Shell, help unclutter my windows list, and switching is faster too. I loved this feature of GNOME Shell, too bad it removed the windows list (taskbar) so I can't have an overall view of which windows are on the screen. Same goes for notification area, GNOME Shell removed that part and go for a touch-oriented notification system (tap bottom right for the notification list), which is extremely useless since the notification area (or systray, as in windows) is supposed to always stay on screen so you can have a quick glance.
- Topbar widget/notification is more refined than GNOME Shell, with the later on you have to write an extension in javascript with little to no documentation. With unity you can write one in python, easy.
- Last but not least, Compiz is still better than metacity/GNOME Shell in CPU/RAM usage. With GNOME Shell you are practically running an webkit browser with all the javascript jazz and stuff. So while Compiz/Unity only eats ~90 MB RAM, metacity/GNOME Shell eats about 250 MB. Sure, RAM is fairly cheap these days but that doesn't mean your desktop has to use as much RAM as the sum of the rest of your programs.

Linux Mint with MATE or Cinnamon is okay too. But MATE is just GNOME 2 renamed, it works, but no better than GNOME 2, and with a bunch of leftovers tech such as libbonobo. Cinnamon is, well, nothing special, nothing attractive for me to use, that is it. And I have heard that Cinnamon devs have many problem following upstream too.

Because the head is where they feces are.

I agree, while Canonical has paved the way for linux on desktop and they have some really good ideas (HUD for example), their solution is often quite bad, technical wise. When they introduced new notification system (ubuntu 9.04? can't really remember), I remember the notification applet for ibus (written in python) eats up to 1 GB of RAM after awhile. And Unity has its fair share of problems too.
But hey, it's open source, we are free to join and fix the code and let Canonical deal with the UX problem.

Ditto.
I removed all 'social' related stuff in my google account. While it is unlikely to be able to change the decision, at least Google won't get my information anymore. Now to find a good email service...

It seems that ChromeOS is based on hardened gentoo (clues can be found here https://sites.google.com/site/chromeoswikisite/home/what-s-new-in-dev-and-beta/shell-acess-with-verified-boot), and hardened gentoo is.... hard (grsec + pax + some kind of MAC mechanism). And while I agree that ChromeOS is very basic, just a browser on top of it. But all other browsers were successfully attacked, it means that the OS has protected the browser.

MD5 isn't that secure, and AFAIK SHA1 usage is not recommended due to near future threats too. The system you referred to is just the same one as my laptop, with the TPM chip as the 'highly protected host'.

I concur, now if only they improve the document for developing using JS with gnome-shell a bit more...

What about Comodo's Defender? You can set it up to automatically sandbox any suspicious programs (unsigned for example) and any suspicious behaviours will be denied and reported. Certainly it is not a silver bullet but I have had good experience with it after it detected a malware hidden in my input method program (which wasn't detected by MSE). The developer site was breached and a modified version was uploaded, comodo alerts me that the program was trying to access the internet.

Although I haven't read tor document in depth, I think blocking certain tor hidden services is doable. A tor node with hidden service will 'advertise' it services on randomly chosen nodes (introductions point), those who want to connect to the hidden service choose one random node (rendezvous point), ask those introductions point to relay the message to the hidden service node, which will initiate the connection by connecting to the chosen rendezvous point (extra step of redirection, I know). So if a node owner want to block a hidden services, he only need to blacklist that .onion domain, forbidding it from being advertised on his node.

Pretty good, it is even more stable than Fedora, rarely do things break, and even if they do there will be announcement on how to prevent/fix it. Still, setting up my own DE is a pain, for example I still can't do tethering with my Android phone without some magical configuration.