Because the USPTO can only make policy and not make law, they cannot do away with software patents. Congress has said software patents are legal. It would take legislation to get rid of them. I personally would love to see software patents go away. But the goal of the effort mentioned in TFA is to "improve the quality" of software patents. Telling the USPTO that software patents need to go away would be a wasted effort. That energy needs to be directed at lawmakers.

Until recently there's been arguably no overlap between Bluetooth and NFC, but the Bluetooth 4.0 spec includes the Bluetooth low energy feature, which can be used over shorter ranges and use far less power, even less power than NFC when communicating with active RFID devices. Given that mobile devices are already expected to have Bluetooth, it makes some sense if Apple's goal is to push for a combined "NFC" payment and Bluetooth device solution. The question is whether payment processing equipment manufacturers will go along.

My immediate supervisor was a dude who was best friends with the department manager, which is why he had his job. I know this because they had the same working relationship at their previous bank, and bragged about it. Anyways, my supervisor fancied himself a programmer, which he was not. I was saddled with existing Perl code and it was my job to fix it and enhance it during the course of the day. I did my job well. Apparently, my supervisor would get bored late at night, and would wade through my code and reformat it and re-comment it to suit his own style tastes. No functional changes, just comment styles and formatting. And broke the code in the process. Every night. Every morning I came in and there were people waiting for me wanting to know why the software was broken. Nothing I said to my supervisor or the department manager made any difference. I fixed the same stuff over, and over, and over. And all my co-workers knew was that my software was always broken.