Uber's app makes the taxi process at lot nicer than anything the taxi process has come up with. With a taxi you're still usually calling and talking to a real person. Then maybe they dispatch a cab, and if you're lucky they find you and not someone else. More likely you stand there unsure about whether to keep trying to hail cabs or keep waiting for the one you called. With Uber, you have a map of all the cards in your area and an estimated arrival time. When you reserve one, you have a car devoted to picking you up; they won't stop for anyone else. You can watch them via gps so you know what's going on. The payment goes through your credit cards so there's no fiddling with change. Uber also has nicer cars and UberX costs about the same as a cab, although how sustainable that is is up for debate, since they may be skimping on insurance. The laws here are still being worked out. Of course, this is the situation in SF, where taxis suck. As you'd think, Uber isn't catching on as well in places where the taxi service is better.

A much better name would be "Buttcoin"

If you're looking for a near-future cool technology book this is my recommendation. It's augmented reality, which is only now beginning to exists in any semi-useful form, taken to the limits. The author is a computer science professor, so most of his technology is written with an idea of what's possible the whole story is very cool. It's definitely a world I could envision coming to be in a few decades

LaTeX and Vim. Get good at the combo and you can type as fast as you can write. That's what I did through college

Think about the lock on your door. Do you know how it works? If you don't you can look it up on the internet somewhere. But even though you know how it works, if you don't have the key, you can't get past it.

This is a general principle of security in general: something is only truly secure if it remains secure even when you know exactly how it works. Anything else is "security by obscurity"

Closed source software is like a mysterious lock where you have no idea how it works. You can take the company's word that it's secure, but really you just don't know. One day someone may just show up able to waltz right into your house. If the design of the lock is public for everyone to see, you can examine it yourself if you're knowledgeable in such things, or else rest secure knowing that plenty of knowledgeable people have deemed the lock good enough for their homes

That's my favorite way of explaining open source to non-computer people

Those are the minimum supported versions

That's the clever part. they're not paying a million bucks, they're offering a million bucks to anyone who gets to 10%, which may never happen. And in the meantime they've gotten some better algorithms for free, as well as good publicity