Healthcare, and medical research is more developed and advanced than what most African countries have.

It might have been happening all this time in Africa, and went unnoticed all this time because nobody cared enough to study it.

Windows Phone 2nd largest market is Brazil,

And still, no Portuguese support on Cortana until next year. Compare this to the kind of language support you have on Google Now, and how they can mine all kinds of local content because their Bots can understand something other than English.

I guess Microsoft thinks it can compete with Google by leveraging their services with the Windows Desktop. Take Outlook.com for example, a functional but boring webmail... Want a "better" mail experience? Then buy an Office subscription to use Outlook... Meanwhile Google has Gmail, with tons of features, and Inbox that offers you an innovative take on managing email, no desktop client required, and I can use it both on a Mac and Linux.

The computer desktop is loosing relevance year after year, and it's dragging Microsoft along with it.

You don't know how right you are about this,

I can't use Cortana even if I wanted to, not even if I owned a Windows Phone device. See, I'm from Brazil, and Cortana doesn't understand Portuguese. It also refuses to work even it I switch my system language to English, because it's only enabled for US and UK. Compare that with Google Now language support.

It's kind of frightening actually how ahead Google is. That means that Google not only have a greater reach internationally, but means that they can extract information that Microsoft/BING doesn't have access to, since it's not limited to english. All this translates to better services, better local support, better AD targeting, and more dominance online.

It seems that young folk these days use YouTube, and other video sites, a lot to listen to music videos. So probably Microsoft just want another brand to use on its marketing war.

But I don't see how this will actually matter without support from other browsers. Who will waste CPU time and storage to create a stream that only one minor browser can take advantage of?

The JVM is written in Java. As it is the javac compiler and every other tool bundled within the JDK.

You can solve this by hosting your own maven repo and targeting specific versions for your dependencies instead of "anything newer than x".

Or you can move into the present and use Gradle instead. Or go back to ANT, or use GANT for a more pleasant experience... The list goes on forever.

Point is: Yes, Maven sucks. But we have better alternatives now. Find another reason to dislike Java.

Easy...

If he went to the voting place wearing a tie, chances are that he's voting for himself. :-)

Objective-C is not all that bad...

I'm a Java Web developer, without any real experience on desktop programming. But recently I was given the chance to do a small iPhone app for one of our clients, so I had to learn Objective-C from scratch to do it.

Objective-C might seem a little weird at first, but when you got used to the sintax the concepts used on the frameworks are not all that different from the Java counterparts. Appkit for example is much more pleasant to work with than Swing, for example.

It took around a week to learn the Objective-C basics, and another week to build a fairly complete prototype of the application.

So while might be a barrier for Java developers, it's not that high.