The idea is that you would apply a high voltage to just the cable, with nothing else attached. If it's just a cable, no harm no foul. On the other hand, if you start seeing smoke from the embedded electronics, you may want to use a different cable.
You also see this in chip design EDA tools, at least the good ones. Not only will they record the equivalent CLI command that affects the "data", but some will also record the commands that solely affect the GUI! (e.g. resize window)
I'm not necessarily pro-big banks, but JP Morgan and GS were two of the banks LEAST in need of a bailout. GS was short MBS at the time, so your description is .
You are correct. Total # of masks for a modern IC can be 30-50 or possibly more. And with double and even quad patterning on the critical layers, that's 2 or 4 masks for a single layer.
Probably because the cost of the mask writers is so huge. As the article says, only 10 - 12 mask writers sales are expected in 2017. My guess is these machines will run 24/7, practically. The more masks it can make, the more units over which you can amortize the capital costs.
And increasing the voltage reduces the propagation delay, letting you shorten the clock period (increase frequency). This only works so far, however, before you run into other problems.