Unfortunately, the new pope isn't the gatekeeper. I seem to remember something from Matthew about "Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it."

Glad I didn't just sell a car for bitcoins

Its all a conspiracy / major government lobbying effort by the plastic garbage trash can liner people and the cloth bag manufacturers to increase their sales.

I personally hate most of the plastic liner bags my wife buys. They tend to rip much more easily than the plastic shopping bags and they frequently don't have the handy handles to tie them up with. I try to reuse the plastic bags from grocery shopping whenever I can. Anytime you can do double duty with one product its a win in my book.

I hate to break it to you, but payments in stock really don't work either.

Most such payments are structured so that they get their stock options based on some performance measure. The problem is that the performance measure is continually tweaked so eventually they get their options. They either select different thresholds due to "economic" problems or adjust the mix of companies they compare themselves to so they look better. Unless you force the companies named officers to hold the stock they are paid in for a long time, there is a built in failure mode as they can just sell their stock. And, whether we like it or not, disallowing people to spend their paycheck as they see fit and when they want to - even if it is obscenely large - is just wrong.

I'd much prefer them to get paid only in dollars - no benefits of any sort that every employee in the company isn't also entitled to, no stock options, nothing except pure hard cash. Then apply the ratios. Let the employees see just how bad it is.

If you really want to change things, then start buying company stock directly and vote the proxies you get. Don't invest in mutual funds. Almost all of company proxies have approval options for the stock incentive plans and pay of named executives now. If there is a problem with how a particular company is run, vote against the plans, the pay, and any director who seems to be a problem. Until enough individual investors start picking their own stocks again, it is an uphill battle, but there are votes you can make as a stock investor that are sometimes enough to get noticed and get things changed at companies.

Yearly trip to the dentist - or so. Yearly trip to the eye doctor - or so. Even without being sick, 1 or 2 would seem reasonable. And of course, there's always the vet.

Thanks for this reply.

I'm sorry that you have had bad experiences with religions. For what it is worth, I have seen good pastors and less good pastors in my lifetime in mostly smaller towns but no bad pastors. Even the pastors I didn't feel were doing a very good job though were not getting rich in their job and I wouldn't trade places with them.

The ones I have known would an did go to the hospital at any hour of the day or night to meet with someone in their congregation (or for those who volunteered as a chaplain for the police or fire departments for anyone the officials called them about - car crashes, deaths, et cetera). They would help people move or clean up after problems (whether illness or flood or plumbing or whatever) for no additional compensation.

Their families frequently saw as little of them as those families of CEOs do today - leading to all the same stresses with nobody to turn to. For every "huckster" you have seen, there are a couple of orders of magnitude greater just serving and pressing on. You just rarely hear about them.

The thing is, I go to church for fellowship and to hear what God is speaking to His people about today. I wouldn't have to do that to hear what He is telling me today, but it is good to hear what He is speaking to the body today as well. I would miss that if I just tuned out all religion because of a few bad apples that are out there. There is a place He wants you to be - I am certain of this. Listen closely to your "conscience" tonight, peruse the yellow pages, and try again. If you go looking for a perfect man - be it pastor, priest, or other - you will always be disappointed because they are just as human as you or I. But most, I suspect, are actually better than politicians at least! If you go seeking to get closer to God and bring His presence with you, you will have a better experience.

The Bible is all the things you mentioned. The only change I would make to what you said is that the big sin rules between the New and Old Testaments were really only reduced by keeping the sabbath day holy because Jesus was disgusted with what the religious leaders were expecting of their people while rejecting Him (The problems you complain about today aren't new). All the other laws - if you read His sermon on the mount - now have teeth behind them in the New Testament -- You have heard it said ..., but I say unto you ... where what Jesus said was a higher standard than the Old Testament.

It is tough to carry on without a support system. It isn't impossible, but it is difficult. A good church can be a good support system. It isn't as good as the Holy Spirit, but it is good. Try to find one that works for you. Make sure it is based on the Bible. Good luck.

I'm pretty sure that if you read Revelation you will discover that the God of the Old Testament is exactly the same as the God of the New Testament. He is still just as holy and just as ready to judge those who do not accept Him, as He was in the Old Testament.

The Christian means to His grace has now been established, but that was prophesied from Adam's fall through the Old Testament. The entire Old Testament sacrificial system was a type of Christ's sacrifice on the cross. So I would counter that there was no change between the Testaments - just a completion and replacement of the covenant between God and man for the path to salvation.

What Christians believe, what the world says Christians believe, and what the Bible says are different things at times.

We have a fallen nature. This can be observed outside of Christianity. Ask any very little child which you know has done something wrong who did that thing and their nature is to try to avoid telling the truth or to lie or to blame others.

The Bible says in Rev. 3:5 He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white raiment; and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, but I will confess his name before my Father, and before his angels. Also see Ps. 69:27-28.

To me, this says that the names are all written there initially. This is consistent with the Christian view that until an age that a child knows right from wrong that child would go to heaven when it dies. At some point though, every child must make a conscious choice to do right or wrong - to commit sin or not.

God's Holy Spirit - the conscience in colloquial terms - tells the right path. If the child ignores the prompting of the Holy Spirit and sins, their name is blotted out. I'm not sure where God's grace draws that line for when that happens - where the failure to overcome is. I only know that the Bible says at some point God will blot out that name due to failure to overcome sin. If a person doesn't develop an ability to mentally process right/wrong due to disorders of the mind, I believe God's grace extends longer.

God's grace can be reacquired by accepting Christ as Savior. The sin is still there but the person has been justified by the sacrifice that Jesus made. He is made "just as if" he or she had never sinned in the first place. People can and do turn their backs on this salvation either before accepting it in the first place or at some point afterward. Again, at some point the name can again be blotted out if they forsake this great salvation.

Romans makes clear that God will judge those who have never heard of Christ according to how they have responded to the Holy Spirit's promptings in their hearts when presented with the choice to do right or wrong. Those who have heard of Christ and have rejected Him have no such out. Once you've heard of Christ and decided He isn't for you - you face God's judgment fully upon death with no second chances.

I don't know if that helps, but God is just about as fair and generous as He can be. And among all religions I know of, Christianity is the only one where a member of the Godhead Himself sacrificed first His heavenly station, and then His life for His creation. Due to God's own sacrifice on the cross, His standards and expectations are justifiably higher.

Gen. 18:20 And the LORD said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous; 21 I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know.

would make a pretty strong case against the omniscience of God. He's dealt with humanity for a very long time, and I'd lay odds that He could pretty much guess what any given individual is going to choose to do of his or her own free will and likewise would have a pretty high chance of getting what bodies of people will choose to do for any given set of circumstances correct. But all knowing is a concept that is hard to prove from the written text.

Satan doesn't go and accuse us before the Father for no reason.

Hold only works as long as a company is able to expand its business into new markets. After a point, every stock gets into a cyclical pattern where it oscillates by some percentage of its price each year.

The length of the oscillation in most cases matches whatever the tax favored length for long term versus short term is. So at some point, it doesn't pay to just hold. You can do much better by selling somewhere near the top of the currently yearly cycle and buying somewhere near the low. You don't have to hit the exact top or exact bottom. Let the experts fight over the top and bottom 15 or 20% of each year's swing in price. If you can get enough of the 60 to 70% swing in between, you can do very well.

Eventually, unless the company re-invents itself over time you get into a long term decline. There will be oscillation there as well, but the overall trend is down so it's harder to win.

Clearly, market melt downs or melt ups affect every stock without respect to where they are in the cycle, but if you graph most major stocks that you can hold with little risk, it is clear that just holding onto a stock that has passed its growth period isn't the best plan. Dividends are nice, but they'll never make up capturing the middle of the spread between a stock's typical low and high for the year.

If you ever tried to import a document from your kid's Mac into it, you'd understand completely.

To further the comment on the huge size of the "Everything" repository that is Fedora - I think F18 x86_64 is around 40+ Gb with updates, so, yes it is a huge distribution.

I think it would be great if they would get off this release everything every six months kick they're on and figure out something better. If rings helps them get this accomplished, that's fine. I hate to think of the number of packages that get recompiled just to change the name of the package from f17 to f18 to f19 with no substantive other changes.

If the rings let them alter their dependency tree from works with version x of lib x to works with at least version x of lib x on more outer ring fluff, I'm all for it. This is particularly true for all the font and game and other data packages where large blobs of data that probably didn't change from one release to another just get reissued with a new name.

The KDE group already releases their desktop for all non EOL versions of Fedora. I'm sure it costs them a bit of extra care to do that, but they manage. They're a great ring. It's the synchronization with some of the other same level rings like Gnome that give them fits.

The biggest issue is that some of the low level ring changes will force lots of next layer ring changes anyway that will propagate out, so in the long term I'm not sure if it will really fix the problem. But if it would slow down the massive changes in the outer application ring that in the old days wasn't even part of Core and allowed them to just update individual packages when needed to because of a library incompatibility in a lower level ring but otherwise didn't release a new version unless the software functionality was upgraded, that would be great.

The movement to unmanned planes isn't helping their case any either. There aren't as many fighter wars expected to be left - so why join up for a position that may be phased out in just a few years. The Navy might have better luck recruiting, but the Air Force is in a harder spot unless a major land war with a well equipped adversary materializes that lasts enough to bring the Air Force to bear.

The first computer that I bought was a Charles River Data Systems 68/35F with 512 kB RAM and a 1 MB add in board. The first ones I used were via punched cards taken by my CS teacher from my high school to the college - one run per day! I don't have any idea how much memory was available on that system. You learned how to program when you just got one run per day.

Current systems run roughly 5,000 to 10,000 times the CRDS but it served the basic functions I needed. All the fluff added later just makes it nicer to do those same basic functions.