hahaha.. Very interesting points, conveyed with humor but have a strong base in CS fundamentals. I guess my original question was not very well framed. I am writing a CS conference paper (on the ACM SIG template) and four pages in docx is 90 KB and the same saved as PDF came to 260 KB. I was so far using a much older version of Word and only recently upgraded to Word 2010. Hence, my older pdfs used to be converted via a free utility and for the first time used the Word 2010 pdf converter.

I loved your analogy in political speeches. I actually have a friend who tracks politician (on www.mumbaivotes.com) - I might actually share this idea of your of compressing political speeches to identify the uniqueness in what is said in the speech ;-)