The motives of MS are fairly clear, they want it to be ordered with no options before they give up. But in the same vein of "it does not matter who said it, as long as it rings true", I see this as a good and true test of the long arm of federal data interrogation.
Does it really matter why? Their are not that many companies that can do this in a meaningful way. The fact that its Microsoft should not change the result that its being done. I have no particular love for them, but I do applaud them for making this public and tang the stand - even though it probably took thousands of man hours running hundreds of scenarios to come to this conclusion. An entity should be judged by their actions. They seem to be doing this.
At the same time, I would take this as evidence that MS is starting to see themselves as an underdog in the tech industry. They might not be wrong.

GNU/Linux is still pretty irrelevant outside of cheap servers...

I am curious, what do the expensive servers run?

Seconded on the grounds that there are 'worse' languages. Though usually I see Java as the example.

This is an odd way to look at who is paying for an ad-full internet. We are already paying for the ads, saying that in some way it would cost us that much to get rid of them is gibberish. The study would have been great if it weren't for the twisted logic applied to it.

Yes. Drivers should be calm when driving a car that can go off for like, no reason.

Depends, how long did you spend on the assembly language?

The fact that a theory is racist does not make it untrue. The part where the author had to resort to purposefully misrepresenting the research to prop up his racist conjecture makes it untrue. I would think that's the majority of the researchers issues. Or do you suspect the researchers would have been OK with misrepresenting their research if it was used to support something like alternative fuels? Basically an ends justifies the means bit...

In terms of their mission, they do a lot of things to "promote a healthy internet". Suggesting that two equal websites and the one that uses SSL gets higher ranking would fall under "healthy".

In my experience, one should always read the tea leaves or die. The more someone has to lose the better the intelligence gathering should be. As big as Microsofts interests are in China, Microsoft should have had fair warning that this was to happen. Hardly anything is really a secret. To me, the lose proposition is that they did not seem fit to do anything about it before it happened.

And yes, I am aware of all the complications of doing the job. Thats what makes it special. And inexcusable for Microsoft. Keep doing more of that, keep losing.

Trained to click on shit by bad interface design. It might have been a different story if UI designers didn't think every simple little thing demanded the users exclusive attention and acknowledgment right now.

They did it to hit the price point. No one asked for windows on ARM. Wait, was one of you guys trolling Microsoft again?

He huffed, but he didn't inhale.

I think you meant Perl. Python is for something else.

"Have to" is pretty strong wording considering you must do nothing of the sort.

If they really knew what they were trying to build it would be a multiply redundant liver with wireless charging pad.