You may not be considering the right charities. Not every charity is a hand out; some are a hand up (tired old idiom not intneded). E.g. at my church we recently morphed the Benevolence Ministry beyond simply a food bank, since there are plenty of churches in the area that already do that. Now we're focusing on, as you would say, solutions. Job counseling, psychological counseling, finding temporary homes for those in need or victims of domestic abuse, and most importantly, spiritual counseling. The objective is "complete healing", not just fixing symptoms. It's because of that focus that I'm perfectly fine with donating four digits annually.

One of the main hindrances (the primary hindrance?) to adopting widespread flying cars or other airborne vehicles is safety, and helping to keep people from killing themselves in spectacularly Youtube-worthy ways. The development of an advanced "airbag" like this will really help accelerate the dawn of "highways in the sky", IMO. (Disclaimer: I work for NASA, albeit as an IT geek)

I don't know where they're getting their numbers, but based on data I've been collecting for the past 5 years, theirs are way off. A 14 TB drive for $40 in 2020? My data says by 2020, $40 will buy you 342 TB.

Wrong! It's yoo-RAIN-us. Think of the U as a separate syllable and you'll be fine.

If Apophis shows up in a System Lord mothership, and Richard Dean Anderson isn't around to stop him, then he has 1 in 1 chance of hitting the Earth.

It was probably posted by the dude's wife, who picked up enough geek jargon to compose a believable message, in order to mock his freewheeling college days (back when kids would swap 640x480x256 pix of Cindy Crawford on 3.5" floppies)

At the glacial pace we're going now, by the time we're ready to actually launch folks to Mars, we should have a workable ion drive or plasma drive or Russian Reversal drive. Heck, we've known ion drives work for over a decade.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt9MP70ODNw