I would have assumed that techies would include technical people of all stripes, and if so, then I think you can see that people working on clean energy technologies and biological technologies are generally making the world a better place, at least for humans. The people making it cheaper to get into space, like SpaceX could also be defined this way. If you are defining techies as programmers, then people here have posted examples of programs that are not trivial, and of course that's a minority. It seems like an unfair standard though, why aren't you complaining that most authors write books you don't consider important, or most movies are trivial rewrites and extensions of nonsense franchises? Not everything has to be altruistic and highbrow. There is enough to choose from.

Sorting may be interesting to you, but it's dry and rather abstract. If you are working in Java or python, graphics is available, and graphical projects are far more interesting to the average high school student. Animation of any kind (processing is ideal) 3d animation (spinning globe, 14 lines in processing) 2d board games (checkers). Note you are creating a board that only allows legal moves, not playing. Earth-moon-sun system (for those captivated by the spinning globe. You can do more mathematics if students like it. For example primes. Tying it to graphics, the prime number spiral: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/P... http://adastraeducation.org/Pr...

New York Times just had an article on engineers who make apartments quiet. They also had pictures of a lot of different types of materials http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12...

Yes, yes, as we all know science is wrong, and the earth was made approximately 5000 years ago. And the earth is flat.

I for one would like to see a historic timeline of absolute numbers for CPUs, memory, and mass storage. But that is not so easy to do. I have found little snippets here and there on Wikipedia, but not even a single master list of CPUs, let alone more hardware. There are master lists of CPU benchmarks but not spanning generations and radically different CPU sizes obviously. Here's DDR3 RAM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... DDR4, not really there in Wikipedia, though there are some articles that talk around the subject: http://www.extremetech.com/ext... A discussion of the LINPACK benchmark: http://www.netlib.org/utk/peop... History of hard drives, plenty of data but not complete and not tabular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... If you know where to get tables of the raw data without an enormous amount of work, I'd like to see it.

Obviously all the middle east is not going to cool down any time soon, and needs a desalination solution, or the current wave of immigration will look like a trickle. Ignoring for the moment the population boom which will destroy everything if they don't control it, the technical solution is nuclear power. A nuclear plant does not contribute to global warming, and the waste heat, applied to water, desalinates a lot of water. It's a productive use of all the energy from the plant instead of just 45%. Unfortunately, no one wants Arab countries to have nuclear plants given the current political environment. The risk of terrorism, or proliferation is huge. I think the article neglects Iran, which should be higher on the list. They are using 90+% of their surface water and are imminently in danger of running out. The minister in charge was predicting that 70% of the country could have to evacuate in just a few years. http://www.danielpipes.org/158...

Israel currently or will shortly desalinate 100% of its water needs and is actually refilling its aquifers. So I'm not sure what the basis of the claim is. However, the desalination is using natural gas, not solar, so it is not long-term sustainable. Not all the damage has been undone yet. The dead sea has been falling by 1 meter per year for the last 30+ years because all the water coming into it was used for irrigation by Israel and Jordan. While I believe they have arrested or perhaps stopped the drop, they have not yet refilled it. There has been an interesting proposal to develop hydroelectric power with a canal from the meditteranean, and an interesting twist proposed by professor Dan Zaslavsky to generate all power needed by Israel AND Palestine with a single downdraft tower. Here is an article on this interesting concept in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Zaslavsky's claim was that such a tower would reduce the amount of water going into the dead sea by 90% due to evaporation, therefore they could increase the flow into the dead sea by a factor of 10, generating 20GWatts of power. The concept has never been tested at scale so no one knows if it would work.

His brother's B and N also get sick, but at difference rates.