Actually, now that I see it in writing, adoption is ok for the cause. Sorta like Adopt-a-Highway or Adopt-a-Whale. It's support, now ownership.

Now, to be clear - it's "Name a Star" crap that they sell on the radio near Valentine's Day that I hate. And they'll even put it into an "International Registry!"

as well as through the non-profit Pale Blue Dot project.

Ugh. I simply cannot stand star "adoption."

GNOME 3 is the first desktop I've used in a long time that actually tries to do something fundamentally different and better, and, you know what? They've more or less succeeded. I'm glad to see the open source community actually try something different, interesting, and better.

Yes, GNOME 3 is wildly different from the traditional WIMP interface, but once I got used to it, I really think it's the best desktop experience I've had since my NeXTstation days.

The National Orphan Foundation (www.orphan.org) has a named scholarship program. If you donate to the program, 100% of your donation goes directly to the students. You can dictate the requirements for the recipients of the scholarship (four year school, public/private school, major, religion, whatever). Every student in the program aged out of the foster system, meaning that they did not have a family at the time of their eighteenth birthday and therefore don't have a support network.

I agree 100%. In the mid 90s, EGM was 100% of all gaming news and tips for me. It was so popular that, for a time, they even had EGM^2, a second magazine each month with yet more information.

I loved the reviews by Sushi X.

Somehow I trout that.

The original Amiga had a keyboard garage: the machine itself was raise a little off the desk, just enough for the keyboard to slide underneath it.

I loved every single thing about that computer. The Amiga 1200 was fine too. The Amiga 500 was great, but Commodore made their first big design snafu there - they put the Zorro expansion slot on the wrong side of the computer and upside down, so you couldn't use Amiga 1000 peripherals without also flipping them upside down.

(Still not as bad as the "PCMCIA" slot on the A600.)

Other things I miss: TUIs like Project Oberon and Symbolics Lisp. Hell, Lisp in general is now such a niche it's sad. "Real" Unix - lots of little programs that do one thing and do them well. cat -n considered harmful and all that.

Here in Israel it is law that all houses must have a solar hot water heater. It works great about 9 months of the year, the other 3 we have an electric boost.

It could be, but it would be weird if it were the case. Out of millions we are first? Ok someone has to be first but its still kind of improbable.

Of course our ability to spot the radio transmissions from other worlds is pretty thin still so we may well have missed some, infact it seems likely.