I can have quite a few keys, too, especially when I have the good fortune to have a job. As I believe in carrying them all the time, for consistency, the question becomes how to manage them. What I have done is to get 3 medium-sized key rings and 3 small ones. The keys are organized into "things that move", "things that don't move", and "tools/etc", although whatever suits you will do here. Each set is put on the medium-sized key ring, along with a small ring. The 3 different sets are then clipped, using the small rings, onto a small carabiner or a brass hook (heavier) together. The basic idea is to get the keys split up enough to lie flat, so that they don't poke your pockets and the like. While I wear mine outside of my pants, on a belt loop, you can also clip them onto a belt loop and tuck the keys into your front or back pocket, where they will hang nice and flat and not poke anything. After a little practice, you get pretty good at getting the keys on and off of the belt loop. Ok, maybe it's the redneck way, but I haven't lost my keys in 32 years of carrying them this way, so it's been working for me this far.

Hawking should stick to math and leave the philosophy to the more scientific among us. People have a disturbing tendency to revere the ideas of celebrities, no matter how closed-minded they might be. And if you're going to point out the similarities between cosmology and philosophy, I would only counter that he has a most unscientific attitude toward the latter.

LBJ, what a shame on our state.

Carl Sagan, what a sorry excuse for a scientist. He made money by popularizing it (translation: dumbing it down) and being a skeptic. Can't we do better for role models in America?

I recall as each successive version of Windows came out, how we'd always have to figure out what changed and learn its little tricks. But we always did it, because there was money there.

Same with linux. But at least new versions are prompted more by substantive progress than by marketing considerations (can you say "Vista"?). But people who are plenty smart enough to learn and install linux often piss and moan about it for some reason, while they'll put up with Windows and its many inadequacies. It's funny how people often tenaciously stick to the OS they learned first, regardless of its merits.

Most users just want the browser to work. Firefox under linux will just plain keep working, for the most part, whereas under Windows any number of things seem to go wrong. And there's the obligatory "let's-reinstall-Windows-every-couple-of-years-because-it's-gotten-tolerably-slow" or the "I-guess-we-need-a-new-computer-since-this-one-is-now-intolerably-slow-because-it's-supposedly-too-old". Sheesh, what a drain on the American economy.

Ever used the package manager in Ubuntu? All that free software out there for the taking? I've shunned Windows for years, and have been rewarded by hardly ever having to spend time maintaining my various computers. If you are more interested in getting productivity out of your computer rather than continuously battling to keep the OS functioning, I'd suggest putting just a little time into learning linux.