You keep posting that crap for every other article.
You're being sarcastic, right? You know tea party people think government is basically incompetent, incapable of say, launching a shopping web site, right? Conspiracy theorists, on the other hand, believe the government is secretly controlling everything, that they run everything. So pretty much opposite ideas of what government is. Here's a cheat sheet for you:

Believes government is incapable of setting up an insurance shopping web site: tea party
Believes government can hack your phone to spy on you with the battery removed: conspiracy theorist

Funny how rather than the realistic idea that the organizers of an event might have use for internet access, TFA assumes some ultra-rich lady would bring her own internet. At say, the Super Bowl, do you think maybe the broadcast crews, the security team, the merchandising companies etc. might want reliable internet access? Nah, I'm sure just some random guy in seat 44K would be the customer.

This author sure had to work hard at playing stupid to come up with this attack against Google, didn't they.

I said "for some workloads" twice. Specifically those "localized" workloads would include a web server with a MySQL database, a mail store, or other frequently accessed files - a very, very common workload. The database and other frequently accessed files end up on SSD while the large, sequentially accessed files such as videos stream from spindles.

I also said "up to" - in some cases it might not be 100 times as fast, but "only" ten times as fast.

  For some common types of workload, bcache (or dmcache) makes a big difference.

Bcache, merged in 3.11, improves IO up to 100X. Not 100%, 100X, or 10,000%. It may well be worth an upgrade if you're running a distro 2.3x and have random IO on multi TB storage.

If your default browser is IE, every time you click a link to an html page Chrome should launch IE, ignoring the fact that you've explicitly decided to use Chrome at the moment?

No? How about a jpeg, as Dahan said? Should Chrome display the image, or open Photoshop?

What's the difference between opening Adobe's software for jpegs and opening Adobe's software for pdfs?

The point is, whatever operation you want the hardware to perform, it could do it to the whole system extremely quickly. Some examples:

At boot, it can load the entire system into RAM in under a second and never wait for a read from the flash drive again.

Next, it could download an update which replaces every file in the entire OS in less than 5 seconds.

A virus scan of the OS takes less than a second.

A complete backup takes less than a second.

Opening the web browser takes less than a millisecond (it was duly loaded into RAM during the 2 second boot .)

Searching the whole system for any files named "foo.lib" takes less than a second.

For transporting documents intended for print, or intended to look like standard size printed paper, off does a good job, and there's a reason for that.

For those unfamiliar with the history, Postscript is a popular language for computers to talk to printers. Windows, Mac and other computers could all speak Postscript. "Print preview" functions could also read the postscript commands to display a print-like view on screen. So if you wanted a platform independent document, you could just use those Postscript printer commands, zipped for smaller size. That's essentially what PDF is - a dump from a printer cable, zipped. There's no need for "select top tray" and similar printer commands that don't show on screen, so those aren't valid in pdf.

So yeah, pdf is good for printing because that's what the language was originally designed for.

* The above is of course a summary. Pedants can of course point out various changes from postscript to pdf.

My natural instincts tell me that bacon slathered in gravy and topped with cheese is delicious. My natural instinct says "I'd hit it" about eight times a day. My natural instinct is to punch that asshole square in the mouth.

I have a brain capable of rational thought, though, so I eat vegetables, sleep with my wife, and refrain from hitting people.

I hope you're not so cruel as indulge all of your cat's natural instincts.

For that matter QNX, a complete graphical OS including essential programs like a web browser and even a web server is a couple MB - smaller than many odd DOCUMENTS.

I wonder how blazingly fast a 4MB OS is on 4GHz machine with GBs of RAM. The CPU could process the entire OS in less than a millisecond.

There was a contest for the smallest program that produces as output its own source code. Count the characters in the winning entry, which follows:

AC's comment.
Slashdot's we site.
It's thing? No, its thing.

Damn it, I've been doing it wrong all this time. Damn English. Maybe "Ive" been doing it wrong; I don't know any more! Maybe I dont know. Crap.

Indeed. It'll be spun, they are trying to frame the narrative, but it's awesome that they are being forced to try that. Info will come out. Some truth will come out accidentally. For example, when a leading democrat senator was asked about restoring funding for children's cancer treatment during the government shutdown he said "why would I want to do that?" - accidentally revealing that getting one over on the republicans is far more important to him than saving kids suffering from cancer. I'm sure NSA will have a few things like that.

However, as crioca points out, some of what NSA releases will be disinformation. We need to guard against not just the spin they put on it, but probably complete fabrications as well.

PS, if by chance you ARE a commercial pilot, I would defer to your expertise. My comments are based on primarily on performing a few landings myself and some knowledge of accident rates, reinforced by experience in realistic simulators and flying models.

Autoland is useful when there's little flying to be done because there's little to no wind, little traffic, an uncomplicated approach, but the pilot can't see. That's when radar based systems have the advantage, when visibility is poor.

I've landed a plane a few times, with help from my instructor. You read Wikipedia. You go land a few and then come back and tell us about it.

Obviously people can only invest by having assets invest. You don't build up a "war chest" by throwing away your money on a losing proposition. As you said:

  "when they see an opening, they can throw a bunch of money at it that was otherwise not working effectively."

In other words, stop doing things that aren't effective at generating a decent return. We saw this today on Slashdot. Auto maintenance wasn't generating a return near 9.8%, so Sears is closing it's auto centers and putting those resources towards datacenters, which do generate a healthy return.

You say "would only be true". Pick ANY industry and look at the average return US companies in that industry made over any 20 year period. You'll see it IS true. Pick various lines of business at various times. You'll see they all have an average return close to 9.8%. It simply IS true. The return is somewhat risk-adjusted; people will tolerate a slightly lower return if it's consistent, and require a higher return if it has wild swings. It's always close to 9.8% over any extended period of time, though.