No, News Corp has been doing this for years. The reason is Murdoch thinks Google and Google News specifically is killing the news industry, and that the iPad will save it (or at least he thought that a few years ago). It's pure inter-corporate warfare being played out through manipulation of public opinion. The WSJ in particular are experts at it.

Software development can be a high skilled job but entry level skills can be obtained in months, which is not coincidentally, how much training time seems to be involved with learning to be a long haul truck driver in the USA (I see quotes of about two months of full time study for the formal exam around the internet so maybe call that three months when employer training time is included). Three months of full time study isn't going to make you a well paid programmer but that's plenty of time to learn basic web development skills, and another two or three after that with a good course will get someone writing basic CRUD business web apps if they want to. Of course, it's the start of the journey, but now think how many clueless developers you've encountered who are earning good money.

Can the software development world absorb millions of new developers? Sure, it has done in the past, think dotcom boom. Trucking won't disappear over night, nor will taxi drivers, if only because of limited capacity to upgrade vehicle fleets even assuming the technology becomes perfect (which it isn't), and not all drivers will become software developers.

Can you give some specific examples?

Well, Ataturk tried to forcibly reform Turkey into a western style country through a dictatorship. He was always in favour of democracy ... in the future, knowing full well that he hadn't built any real support amongst the people for his plan but betting that over time the culture would change. Seems like he lost that bet.

EU law was written by the EU. Article 50 is a mess, there was an interview with the guy who wrote it where he said he didn't bother doing it properly because he thought it'd never be used.

There is no diminished negotiating power, it's the opposite.

Java via OpenJDK has been GPL+linking exception for years. So I guess by 'more free' you mean a slightly different open source license.

The only comparable platform to Java is .NET and if your goal is to avoid money hungry patent/copyright-abusing companies, switching from Java (which has been open source for years) to .NET (partly open source for, what, one year?) is not really a great trade.

And no, dynamically typed languages are not replacements, nor are C/C++. To be a Java competitor you need to match its feature set, which is very hard given how large it is. And you need to be both garbage collected/statically typed. Only Go is even in the right general area, but Go is where Java was around 1998, so that's not really compelling.

The rather boring reality is that Java is safe unless you're an unusually rich corporation who is making something kinda-but-not-really Java. That does not describe most users.

Apple's outlandish profit margins were largely possible because the US carrier subsidisation model, which is now ending. A huge market wasn't really exposed to the true cost of the hardware. Android's market share over iOS has been massive in most markets around the world where phones were not heavily subsidised, and now the US is coming into line with international norms it seems like Apple will either bleed marketshare or have to lower its margins significantly.

Apple cannot buy Google or Facebook, and they have a poor track record of poaching staff from both companies. They have money but they don't exactly lavish it on their staff. So if they can't hire the AI expertise and they can't buy it....

You seem to be skipping over a fairly important detail in that heartwarming story - Apple nearly DID die, in the 1990s, and its turnaround was so incredible it's been studied in microscopic detail by business types the world over. Steve Jobs has movies made about him, this is such a rare and unlikely feat.

Blowing off any criticism or concern about Apple's direction on the grounds that "they didn't die last time" seems to overlook the fact that Jobs is dead and what he did is insanely hard to replicate.

I suspect you're overlooking a more likely possibility on the grounds that you wouldn't like it - maybe he decided to turn on Tor because he eventually realised he didn't agree with how it was being used or run. A guy with his skills could clearly get well paid work in other fields, after all.

PINs are absolutely required in the non-US deployments. It's like an ATM. Get it wrong too many times and it's locked.

The issue is that for mysterious reasons US banks believe Americans are too dumb to remember their PINs. So American chip cards are unlike the cards used everywhere else in the world, they're "Chip and Signature" rather than "Chip and PIN". Not surprisingly, this unique mode of operation causes interop issues because it's never been tested at scale before.

Apple Pay is much worse than the NFC payments the rest of the world uses.

1) You need an iPhone. Apple's marketshare outside of English speaking countries isn't that high.

2) You need batteries. NFC credit cards don't.

3) An iPhone is physically much larger than a card.

4) Apple Pay has to be initialised by putting in your card details, which makes it perfect for washing stolen CC#s. NFC cards are sent to you straight from the bank, so, there's no intermediate fraud-prone step.