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I agree. Estimates aren't a problem for teams that understand what "estimate" means. It isn't exact. It can't be exact. As long as you respect it for what it is, then it is a powerful planning tool.

The next time a business person gripes about estimates not being accurate enough, ask him/her to estimate (to the minute) how long it will them to drive home during rush hour traffic. When they start complaining about how an unexpected accident would cause the estimate to be very inaccurate, then a light bulb will go off.

Obama promised (many times) that the "Affordable" Care Act was supposed to LOWER the premiums of the average household by $2500. If the goal was to force everyone to have more coverage and pay higher premiums, then that could have been done with a much much more simple law.

The smart cards coming by Oct 2015 will also contain a chip that will provide a unique token for each transaction.

"The biggest challenge however is one that both Apple and Google face: Only a small fraction of the 10 million or so retail outlets in the U.S.–220,000 at last count–have checkout readers that can accept payments from either system."

That's not the biggest challenge. The biggest challenge is that it is no more convenient or reliable to pay a bill with my smartphone than it is with a credit card. My credit card doesn't run out of power. And I don't have to worry about it not getting a good connection inside a store. And I don't have to worry about pulling out a $500 phone and juggling it around every time I want to pay for something.

By Oct 2015 most banks will be issuing smart credit cards that make it much harder to commit fraud. Some of them will come with NFC and support "tap to pay' just like a smartphone. But they will be much cheaper and much more reliable.

Paying by smartphone is a solution in search of a problem.

Walmart can't haul me out of my bed in the middle of the night for questioning. Amazon can't use a drone to kill me without due process. Microsoft would get shut down if they spied on people as much as the NSA.

The government has power over a person's freedom, privacy, and very life. Therefore, they MUST be drastically limited in power and completely transparent in all that they do. The people who founded this country understood that concept.

Obamacare REQUIRED insurance policies to cover conditions that were not previously required (ex: maternity care for a 60 year old woman). It also forced insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions that weren't covered before. It also forced insurance companies to cover young adults on their parents' policies. All of these policies HAVE gone into effect and have increased premiums.

Sorry, but to qualify for the "Too Big To Fail" corporate welfare program you must have contributed at least 1 million to various political campaigns in the past and show means to contribute at least that amount in the future. Politicians need to eat after all.

Luckily, he is James Risen from the New York Times and he only tipped off terrorists to how they were being tracked, so the Obama administration sees no need to press him further. If he were James Rosen from Fox News trying to keep watch on our own government, then he would be labeled a criminal co-conspirator and flight risk by Eric Holder so that they could trace his phone calls and emails.

The "something" that changed around 2000 is that people started expecting significantly more from software and programming became much exponentially more complex. I know plenty of Cobol programmers that can handle developing very basic green screens, but couldn't handle developing a 3-tier web application. At this point, software development changed from something that many people could do, to something that only very talented individuals could do.

"The followup question asks how Google believed one email product possibly target both casual (Gmail) and power (Inbox) users"

I must have a different definition of casual and power user.

If you did, it would be a pretty short war. I doubt you will find many Jedis on the side of the "New Testament".

According to Mark Zuckerberg, people like you don't exist. Which is why he absolutely needs the H1Bs to bring in all the offshore resources.

Isn't it interesting how Obama is using executive power to do all kinds of things and ignoring laws that he doesn't like (ex: immigration laws, Obamacare mandates, etc), but when something like this falls clearly within his power he does nothing?

According to the Obama administration, using waterboarding against known foreign terrorists to obtain critical information is wrong, but using a drone to kill Americans without due process is necessary.

I guess we know which side the Obama administration is on.

The IRS, like most big government agencies, are mostly filled with people who support big government agencies. On average, the leaders of these big government agencies are unlikely to be sympathetic to a party that claims to want to shrink the federal government (whether they actually do so is a topic for another thread). If the next president is a Republican, he/she is unlikely to get the IRS leadership to attack liberal groups like they have attacked conservative groups.