So? European health care has a median among countries, and it's still valid to compare that median to American health care.

I'm aware of that. But what should I do if I want the browser to write the page to flash memory, such as if I'm about to go offline for an hour?

Because the explicit command causes unintended side effects in drives manufactured prior to the command's introduction.

Any file system supporting "secure" deletion should be filling deleted files' sectors in the background anyway.

Either way, when you read that sector back, the drive would decompress it to a string of 0xFF. This is true whether it's an "empty sector" or a row of white pixels in a BMP file.

What happens when the kernel attempts to read back a sector that hasn't been written since it was last TRIMmed?

A lot of flash controllers already use compression of some sort to reduce write amplification. So a controller could just store which sectors compress to the smallest sizes. That wouldn't be much more effort than storing which sectors are TRIMmed, and it'd ensure a well-defined response when the kernel attempts to read a TRIMmed sector.

Unless, as Immerman pointed out, a particular drive chokes on it. Sending TRIM to a device that doesn't correctly support TRIM produces "undefined behavior", and even some drives that claim to support TRIM don't in fact. No drive chokes on constant fill.

Why couldn't an operating system just write a big block of 0xFF bytes to an unused sector, which the SSD's controller would compress into an efficient representation of a low-information-content sector, instead of needing a dedicated command?

I imagine that discussing the suggestions on Slashdot first is a way to avoid presenting half-baked suggestions to busy developers.

What happens when the kernel sends a TRIM command to a drive that does not recognize TRIM commands?

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are an alternative to hard disk drives using flash memory instead of spinning platters. This greatly improves read speeds but doesn't do quite as much for write speeds. One reason is that each sector on a solid-state drive can only be erased a finite number of times before it starts failing. For this reason, the microcontroller in an SSD perform wear leveling to spread writes across more physical sectors. TRIM is a feature that an operating system can use to notify a drive that a range of sectors has become unused, which helps wear leveling run more efficiently. A cron job is a program that runs periodically in the background, and Canonical (the publisher of Ubuntu, a distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system) wants to add a cron job that scans attached drives for unused sectors and sends TRIM commands for these sectors. It's possible for an operating system kernel to send a TRIM command for multiple ranges of sectors, but the current version of Linux doesn't know this and instead sends one range at a time. This slows down deleting files because the kernel has to notify the drive of each sector range as the file is deleted. To work around this missing feature of Linux, the cron job will TRIM when a drive isn't busy doing something else.

Microsoft didn't feel a need to issue such a "security" patch for desktop Windows 8, so why would it issue such a patch for desktop Windows 8.1?

I'd bet a lot of these writes are for caching received HTTP response bodies to disk. Otherwise, desktop browsers in low-memory environments would have to act like Firefox for Android and Chrome for Android. When I open multiple pages in tabs in these mobile browsers, they tend to discard entire pages as soon as I switch to another tab and reload them when I switch back. This interferes with my common use case of opening multiple pages in tabs and then reading them while offline and riding transit. Firefox for X11/Linux can keep pages open on a Dell Inspiron mini 1012 laptop with 1 GB of RAM, but Firefox for Android can't on a first-generation ASUS Nexus 7 tablet with the same amount of RAM. I guess the difference comes from two differences in the environment: swapping is more acceptable on X11/Linux than on Android, and desktop browsers are more likely to keep things in disk cache than mobile browsers.

That or use Classic Shell to give Windows 8 the important parts of Windows 7's interface.

Only some components of the notice of claimed infringement are under penalty of perjury. Others aren't. Please see parkinglot777's comment.

Sometimes the hard-to-understand part of the law is not the law itself as much as how it applies to the facts. One example is whether two works of authorship are "substantially similar" in areas beyond "idea, procedure, process," or other unprotectable elements. Another is whether factors in favor of fairness of a particular use of a work of authorship outweigh factors in favor of unfairness.

Because people change occupations over the course of their respective lifetimes, and some laws apply to areas that one might not think of. For example, some jurisdictions have considered odd things to be practicing medicine without a license, such as tattooing.