If they want to remain a fab behemoth than having a wide application open processor could help amortize a lot of aging foundry equipment and support investment in new generations. We're used to Intel having a leading edge advantage in chip making, losing that has been hurting them badly. We're used to focusing on their long battle with AMD but it is TSMC et al that are really hurting them (and letting AMD compete)

Japan has universal health care with heavily regulated markets so the price to tax payers will probably be as advertised there. Hopefully since this is diagnostic stuff it might be reasonably priced elsewhere as well when exported, since diagnostic stuff doesn't have the life and death extortion factor that alows charging unlimited amounts in countries where corporate lobbyists control health care.

I'm a nuclear power proponent but I wouldn't claim Chernobyl parity with airplane crashes unless those crashes also resulted in mass evacuations from giant exclusion zones that are rendered uninhabitable for generations.

chip implants will be superfluous and too easy to fool with minor surgery the panopticon will not require them

might be a viable business regardless of quality.

One cloud advantage is when the client demand is occasional but intense. Rather than each client needing their own server resources to handle a peak capacity that is only required occasionally and transiently a pool of shared resources can handle things like voice processing.

It isn't just magic pixie cloud dust, there are use cases where a shared pool of resources is vastly more efficient and less expensive than having every client need expensive resources that sit idle 99+% of the time.

Fashion is about change for changes sake. It's not about finding an optimal solution, it's about showing you have the latest thing. It's less about functionality and more about novelty.

we'll just keep "upgrading" your software until you do - and we won't stop then either

transaction processing is slow, limited in scope, unpredictable, and energy intensive. this limits the value of 'digital cash' as a transaction medium, leaving it to be used primarily as a speculative store of value.

Free Silver!

It seems reasonable that any attempt to decrease twitter's liability as an attack vector for russia's campaign against american democracy would disproportionately effect those who amplified and benefited from that campaign.

the bigger idiot theory vs. the buy and hold theory

Maybe they are planning to train an AI to write code or at least assist in writing code. That's the only business case I can come up with where spending 7.5 billion on github turns a profit.

how do they make 7.5 billion back from github? unless this is about extinguishing competition then why bother?

My surface pro 4 lasts a few hours at most just doing light browsing. if I turn off all networking/blue tooth and turn down the screen brightness I can get a little more reading .cbr comic archives. (primary purpose of tablet purchase). I wish it had a good battery life, I could use it at work for meeting notes and diagramming but it doesn't and I don't.