Actually, the App Store allows infinite redownloading of apps you've purchased. The iTunes store does not for the simple fact that when Apple negotiated the original music studio contracts, they didn't want it to work that way. I've read that this is one of the things that Apple's trying to update in the contracts, but good luck with that...
It's MBR, default Windows 7 install arrangement was augmented by the 10.10 installer. The first 11.04 install I did was a dist-upgrade. This time I was doing an "erase and reinstall" to replace 10.10 with 11.04 and eliminate any factors of my existing system that might've aggravated graphics issues.
Grub falls into rescue prompt and the LiveCD can't even recognize that the drive contains any volumes. I'm presently kicking myself for not dd'ing my MBR to a backup before running the install. Though to be fair I don't really understand why Ubuntu had to repartition anything if it was just replacing the existing system.
Actually, they are telling Foxconn to clean up their act - reference
For what it's worth, from what I've read a big motivation in these suicides is accident compensation for families or somesuch. That's more a product of society in general. Both theirs and ours.
Manythings aremade by Foxconn. Also from what I've read, their suicide rate is quite a bit lower than the average suicide rates in Chinese/Taiwanese manufacturing plants. We only hear/care about this one because they make i-devices. I mean come on, the very title of this summary should be a glaring indicator why anyone cares. Foxconn is not a "chinese iPad factory," its a massive global technology company manufacturing pipeline.
Well the Ubuntu installer crashed or somesuch while I was installing on the Thinkpad. After entering user details and clicking next, I got an undismissable dialog stating that the username entered is invalid (the one I provided is just "jeremy"). Moving that dialog aside I see another one stating that ubi-partman crashed. I've never ever had a Mac OS X or even Windows installer crash mid-install and the fact that the Ubuntu one crashed during the disk repartitioning (here's to hoping my MBR isn't hosed) is just ridiculous. For the record, I instructed the installer to replace the Ubuntu 10.10 (that I reinstalled after removing 11.04 the last time) that was dual-booting with Win7.
I'm going to burn an i386 copy in addition to the amd64 I had already tried. I'll do installs onto bootable USB external drives because most of my machines don't have any more free drive bays. The first system I have is an Apple MacBook Pro 3,1 with nVidia 8600m GT. This particular model was susceptible to the nVidia manufacturing problems and the motherboard was replaced under warranty early in it's life. The second system I had difficulty with is a Lenovo ThinkPad T410 with nVidia NVS 3100m graphics. I've had immense issues with this graphics unit and Windows in addition. The third system is a custom-built desktop with EVGA GTX 470 graphics card. I've had some Windows driver issues with this one too.
Yeah I did do VESA boot, but even after the nVidia proper drivers were installed the 8600 and NVS3100 machines were still freaking out. At that point I decided it'd be better overall to just install the CLI-only version and sort out what I wanted myself - fewer preloaded packages that I don't want. Also my point was that if this is someone's first foray into linux, they're not going to want to have to take extra steps to get a functional deskop. The default setting of fancy, flashy graphics is not worth the hostility that it makes the OS present to new adopters. In my experience, the typical windows convert is happiest when one of the windows look-alike WM skins is being used. I'm not saying everything should regress to Win98 UI, just a simpler more functional default WM would make sense. FWIW, I'd love to see something similar to how the resolution switch typically happens on a computer be implemented for activating graphics acceleration for compiz or somesuch. Right after you turn on fancy mode, a dialog pops up asking you if everything looks ok and will revert back to a non-OpenGL desktop if you don't click OK in 30 seconds. I've seen some desktop graphics glitches that made the whole damn thing unusable, my least favorite thing with ANY system is when there's some graphical problem that makes it difficult/impossible to navigate the UI.
Yeah, it's a Mac... Presumably if your buying this type of machine you don't intend to upgrade it or possibly even do anything in its lifespan that requires an upgrade.
This! Particularly the OpenGL bit. I've got three machines I use regularly at the moment and none of them have had functional graphics acceleration with Ubuntu out of the box (NVS3100m, 8600m GT, GTX 470). I've had to install the server version of Ubuntu and then apt-get my window manager because the standard editions have been such a headache. Furthermore, the fact that Unity itself is so unstable (you really can't deny that it is not ready for release) is the reason that it should NOT be the default WM in Ubuntu. Ubuntu is one of the few distros that is ideal for inexperienced users, with it's robust ability to autoconfig. The last thing you want as someone introducing people to linux is an out-of-the-box setup that is prone to instability and crashes. If your test driving a car from the dealership and the brakes don't work half the time, you're not going to buy that car. The first linux experience should be relatively simple and familiar, and most of all reliable. To all us tech savvy people, the flashy laser beams and 3D effects dancing around the screen will look cool and make the UI seem more attractive, but people that are just trying to accomplish their daily computer tasks that stuff is completely meaningless.
For what it's worth, the other person who responded to your post and spoke about credit card info and https is incorrect. The reason this kit is considered similar to the Zeus model is that Zeus is designed to turn machines into an email spam-generating botnet. Other malware that hooks into a web browser could potentially intercept HTTPS communication, but that's not what they are doing according to TFA. That would require a different type of exploit.
Re:Can someone tell me how "form stealing" works?
on
OS X Crimeware Kit Emerges
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Assuming that this software is actually intended to be running on the "compromised" system (which I find no indication of in either TFA, the article it links to, or google results), then what it does is exploit FireFox to "hijack" cgi webscripts on websites and use them to send spam email. Pretty much it would send data through a web request to a page that's intended to send email (like forum registration perhaps) that would essentially make the email handler crash or open a backdoor and then inject spam email into the form that would get sent by the website's server. It's a clever way of getting around spam filters blocking known spam email carriers - if your spam is being sent from multitudes of legitimate websites that just have poor software security it's much harder to identify and block.
My big question is how this is supposed to get on the target system. To date, the only Mac OS X malware discovered in the wild has been virtually harmless, since it all comes in the form of a trojan. Some not very nice person disguises their malware in a piece of pirated software and upload it to torrent sites or whatnot. Some people download it and get infected because they don't realize the danger of such an occurrence. From what I've read, the security firms typically classify these trojans as extremely low-risk, with something like fewer than 50 confirmed infections. The point is, there are as yet no "drive by" or otherwise spontaneous infections you can get on a Mac. Any bad things that could happen rely on some form of social engineering or deception. The way OSes work, if you can convince an Administrator (of any system) to run something then you generally can do whatever you want. The Mac OS X security model is in many ways stronger than the Windows security model, but it's certainly not infallible. Macs are immune to the type of autorun viruses that are spread by removable media because they don't support automatic execution of programs on removable media (I can't for the life of me understand why the hell anyone would want autorun enabled on their system). On the other hand, the default OS X user/first one created is an Administrator. They aren't a superuser but things like global-scope installers have the permission to use the equivalent of 'sudo' if an Administrator enters their password. It's like UAC on Vista/7 - a large majority of people don't think twice about clicking "Yes" to whatever comes up on their screen (the other day my fiancé unwitting installed a browser toolbar and changed her home page on her PC because she didn't uncheck a few boxes in the installer for some freeware). I'd like to think that by being asked to enter a password a user is more likely to consider what they're authorizing but in most cases, the user is the weakest link.
$13 million
According to TFA, nVidia allocated $509 million of their "reserve cash" to cover the judgement. The judge was informed that there were "millions of potential members of the class, since "millions" of notifications about the lawsuit had been sent out. (FWIW I actually have a defective machine that was covered and I received a notice. I exempted myself because the issue had already been taken care of under my Apple warranty.) Approximately 28,000 people actually responded and participated in the lawsuit. According to TFA again, the settlement ended up to be for $10 million, plus the $13 million in legal fees that the judge approved before he got the actual number of individuals that were taking part in the class. $279 * 28,355 = ~$8 million so I presume the other 2 are going towards distribution or somesuch. In any case, yeah... the customers that have likely each been screwed in excess of $2000, discounting any compensation for the hassle they had to deal with, collectively receive $10 million in the form of extremely low-end replacement devices. The lawyers get $13 million. The lawyers got more money out of this case then the collective customers.
I noticed some other people saying things along the lines of the replacement being fair because after three years, the value of the defective computers would have depreciated considerably. That's not how this works. nVidia acknowledged there was an issue back in July 2008. The point of the lawsuit was that they screwed over people who had bought laptops with the faulty chips. Those people (myself included) had to deal with their system breaking down, struggles with service and support, and I'm sure in many cases lost work time or the expense of purchasing a temporary replacement. I look at this as I paid approximately $2200 for a high-end laptop. For a number of months I could not make use of the laptop I paid for because of a mistake that nVidia made. Furthermore, nVidia claimed for quite a while that my type of computer wasn't affected before coming clean about the scope of the issue. I could have been much less fortunate and not have been able to get mine repaired before the Apple warranty expired, or somesuch. If that were the case then I would have essentially thrown $2200 down the drain because of a mistake that nVidia made and I have a right to be compensated according to the original intent of purchase. It makes no difference that my laptop would be three years old by now, when I bought it I paid $X and if only now I was being given a functioning product according to my original intent of purchase, then I expect that replacement be worth at least $X.
And this is why I haven't found Starcraft 2 multiplayer all that fun, and thus why I will no be purchasing it myself. I mean come on, this is pretty much Blizzard saying that they don't care at all about the casual player, which is exactly what my friends and I are. When we dicked around with SC:BW at lan parties and such we weren't trying to train for some big competition. We were having fun playing BGH or Fastest and seeing whoever could get 2 dozen carriers first.
Agreed. I've got a 3-year-old nokia clamshell crap phone that works much better than my girlfriend's Droid X. Seriously, when we're out and want to reach someone it's always mine that is used because her battery is perpetually dead. She keeps bugging me to "upgrade" and get an iPhone or some other similar device. My response is that I already carry around an iPod Touch and iPad, not to mention laptop sometimes. The purpose of a phone is to make phone calls and my week-long-lasting nokia is more of a phone than any android of ios device in existence.
So the police should stop trying to catch robbers because people should have locks on their doors so the robbers can't get in? Seriously, why should the onus be on you to have to sidestep annoying, resource hogging, sometimes malicious advertising and other crap? When such a problematic tool has such widespread use as a great annoyance to people you might consider reevaluating its use at all. I use the "Click to Flash" plugin in Safari on my Mac. It's nice, it shows you where the flash content would be, it will look for MP4 playback alternatives on video sites. Even so, it's annoying when I visit some web site and have to play guess-which-flash-box-is-the-thing-you-want or puzzle on why something is working before I think to go to the menu and tell it to enable all the "invisible" flash on the page. Advertisements will probably never go away, but I'm sick of either having my CPU fan rev up because of some stupid flashy rectangles or having to bang my head against gmail wondering why it's file attacher isn't working and then on a hunch tell Safari to load all invisible flash and have it magically work.
Mmm. Some years ago my family and I were eating in our favorite local Chinese restaurant. It was a nice place (gone now), and we were friends with the manager. That particular evening as drinks were being selected the manager told us that a friend of his had just sold him a bunch of very good imported Chinese beer called Yuengling. My father and I immediately recognized the name as that of this beer, our favorite brew from "America's Oldest Brewery" (despite the name, it's actually of German origin). He brought out a bottle and sure enough, it was the Black & Tan we knew so well, with the label altered. The manager was quite embarrassed and said he would have to talk to this "friend" of his. Actually at this time we weren't aware that the brewery had expanded, you used to only be able to get it right from the brewery in Pennsylvania.
Pure faith and belief are healthy. They allow people to theorize and strive to prove their theories. Enforcing religion through an institution really doesn't have anything to do with belief, it's an entire political and self-important undertaking. We need to grow up in the sense that we don't oppress our beliefs on others.
Exactly! Yet a large number of people here have posted bashing religious belief. The concept of religious belief is to go beyond observable phenomena and speculate as to what the root of those phenomena are.
For many, many of the faithful, the basic laws of physics, biology, geology, and yes, mathematics, exist only at the mercy of their favorite omnipotent invisible buddy. Ask an "educated" bible believer how the impossibilities of a seven day creation, halting the sun in the sky, or changing water into wine are possible, and they don't say that gravity (momentum, conservation of energy, etc.) don't exist, just that they were temporarily suspended for the particular instance, and then put right back in place if necessary.
That's not saying those laws don't exist. In fact, the only difference with regard to science seems to be their origin. Presently you can't prove that there isn't an omnipotent intelligence behind the creation and functioning of the universe. Unless the human race transcends to a higher level of existence, I don't believe it will ever be possible to conceive the true origin of the universe.
Yes, by all means, discover those rules! But also keep an open mind about what's behind those rules. For the record, I'm not inclined toward any particular religion or religious belief. I just don't like to discount possibilities. There really is absolutely no way we can say that there is an omnipotent intelligence beyond our comprehension that created the universe and all it's laws.
I didn't say a single thing about religious institution. Lying to protect a religion is not a fault of the religion, it's the fault of the people who believe in it and thus institutionalize it. And there are most certainly people lying to protect their view of scientific fact. Remember the fiasco with fabricated climate change data?
When somebody at FermiLab tells you that gravity accelerates objects at 9.8 m/s^2 and uses this to calculate the trajectory of a ball very accurately, you believe them, because you can see this, and they can do it over and over and over. You can do the calculation on your own, and measure the dropping ball too. It works, and you can do it.
What's your (or their) proof that the acceleration due to gravity isn't a construct of my god(s)? For arguments sake, how could you ever disprove that the universe is a construct of an omnipotent being that has made it impossible to ever prove his existence?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the App Store allows infinite redownloading of apps you've purchased. The iTunes store does not for the simple fact that when Apple negotiated the original music studio contracts, they didn't want it to work that way. I've read that this is one of the things that Apple's trying to update in the contracts, but good luck with that...
It's MBR, default Windows 7 install arrangement was augmented by the 10.10 installer. The first 11.04 install I did was a dist-upgrade. This time I was doing an "erase and reinstall" to replace 10.10 with 11.04 and eliminate any factors of my existing system that might've aggravated graphics issues.
Grub falls into rescue prompt and the LiveCD can't even recognize that the drive contains any volumes. I'm presently kicking myself for not dd'ing my MBR to a backup before running the install. Though to be fair I don't really understand why Ubuntu had to repartition anything if it was just replacing the existing system.
Actually, they are telling Foxconn to clean up their act - reference
For what it's worth, from what I've read a big motivation in these suicides is accident compensation for families or somesuch. That's more a product of society in general. Both theirs and ours.
Many things are made by Foxconn. Also from what I've read, their suicide rate is quite a bit lower than the average suicide rates in Chinese/Taiwanese manufacturing plants. We only hear/care about this one because they make i-devices. I mean come on, the very title of this summary should be a glaring indicator why anyone cares. Foxconn is not a "chinese iPad factory," its a massive global technology company manufacturing pipeline.
Well the Ubuntu installer crashed or somesuch while I was installing on the Thinkpad. After entering user details and clicking next, I got an undismissable dialog stating that the username entered is invalid (the one I provided is just "jeremy"). Moving that dialog aside I see another one stating that ubi-partman crashed. I've never ever had a Mac OS X or even Windows installer crash mid-install and the fact that the Ubuntu one crashed during the disk repartitioning (here's to hoping my MBR isn't hosed) is just ridiculous. For the record, I instructed the installer to replace the Ubuntu 10.10 (that I reinstalled after removing 11.04 the last time) that was dual-booting with Win7.
I'm going to burn an i386 copy in addition to the amd64 I had already tried. I'll do installs onto bootable USB external drives because most of my machines don't have any more free drive bays. The first system I have is an Apple MacBook Pro 3,1 with nVidia 8600m GT. This particular model was susceptible to the nVidia manufacturing problems and the motherboard was replaced under warranty early in it's life. The second system I had difficulty with is a Lenovo ThinkPad T410 with nVidia NVS 3100m graphics. I've had immense issues with this graphics unit and Windows in addition. The third system is a custom-built desktop with EVGA GTX 470 graphics card. I've had some Windows driver issues with this one too.
Yeah I did do VESA boot, but even after the nVidia proper drivers were installed the 8600 and NVS3100 machines were still freaking out. At that point I decided it'd be better overall to just install the CLI-only version and sort out what I wanted myself - fewer preloaded packages that I don't want. Also my point was that if this is someone's first foray into linux, they're not going to want to have to take extra steps to get a functional deskop. The default setting of fancy, flashy graphics is not worth the hostility that it makes the OS present to new adopters. In my experience, the typical windows convert is happiest when one of the windows look-alike WM skins is being used. I'm not saying everything should regress to Win98 UI, just a simpler more functional default WM would make sense. FWIW, I'd love to see something similar to how the resolution switch typically happens on a computer be implemented for activating graphics acceleration for compiz or somesuch. Right after you turn on fancy mode, a dialog pops up asking you if everything looks ok and will revert back to a non-OpenGL desktop if you don't click OK in 30 seconds. I've seen some desktop graphics glitches that made the whole damn thing unusable, my least favorite thing with ANY system is when there's some graphical problem that makes it difficult/impossible to navigate the UI.
Yeah, it's a Mac... Presumably if your buying this type of machine you don't intend to upgrade it or possibly even do anything in its lifespan that requires an upgrade.
They go from HD 6750 to HD 6970 w/ 2GB VRAM depending on how you configure it. How is that not a supported GPU?
This! Particularly the OpenGL bit. I've got three machines I use regularly at the moment and none of them have had functional graphics acceleration with Ubuntu out of the box (NVS3100m, 8600m GT, GTX 470). I've had to install the server version of Ubuntu and then apt-get my window manager because the standard editions have been such a headache. Furthermore, the fact that Unity itself is so unstable (you really can't deny that it is not ready for release) is the reason that it should NOT be the default WM in Ubuntu. Ubuntu is one of the few distros that is ideal for inexperienced users, with it's robust ability to autoconfig. The last thing you want as someone introducing people to linux is an out-of-the-box setup that is prone to instability and crashes. If your test driving a car from the dealership and the brakes don't work half the time, you're not going to buy that car. The first linux experience should be relatively simple and familiar, and most of all reliable. To all us tech savvy people, the flashy laser beams and 3D effects dancing around the screen will look cool and make the UI seem more attractive, but people that are just trying to accomplish their daily computer tasks that stuff is completely meaningless.
Form hijacking
That's a concise description of form hijacking. To be clear, emails contain a very large header that specifies all sorts of things. Complimentary humorous reference.
For what it's worth, the other person who responded to your post and spoke about credit card info and https is incorrect. The reason this kit is considered similar to the Zeus model is that Zeus is designed to turn machines into an email spam-generating botnet. Other malware that hooks into a web browser could potentially intercept HTTPS communication, but that's not what they are doing according to TFA. That would require a different type of exploit.
Assuming that this software is actually intended to be running on the "compromised" system (which I find no indication of in either TFA, the article it links to, or google results), then what it does is exploit FireFox to "hijack" cgi webscripts on websites and use them to send spam email. Pretty much it would send data through a web request to a page that's intended to send email (like forum registration perhaps) that would essentially make the email handler crash or open a backdoor and then inject spam email into the form that would get sent by the website's server. It's a clever way of getting around spam filters blocking known spam email carriers - if your spam is being sent from multitudes of legitimate websites that just have poor software security it's much harder to identify and block.
My big question is how this is supposed to get on the target system. To date, the only Mac OS X malware discovered in the wild has been virtually harmless, since it all comes in the form of a trojan. Some not very nice person disguises their malware in a piece of pirated software and upload it to torrent sites or whatnot. Some people download it and get infected because they don't realize the danger of such an occurrence. From what I've read, the security firms typically classify these trojans as extremely low-risk, with something like fewer than 50 confirmed infections. The point is, there are as yet no "drive by" or otherwise spontaneous infections you can get on a Mac. Any bad things that could happen rely on some form of social engineering or deception. The way OSes work, if you can convince an Administrator (of any system) to run something then you generally can do whatever you want. The Mac OS X security model is in many ways stronger than the Windows security model, but it's certainly not infallible. Macs are immune to the type of autorun viruses that are spread by removable media because they don't support automatic execution of programs on removable media (I can't for the life of me understand why the hell anyone would want autorun enabled on their system). On the other hand, the default OS X user/first one created is an Administrator. They aren't a superuser but things like global-scope installers have the permission to use the equivalent of 'sudo' if an Administrator enters their password. It's like UAC on Vista/7 - a large majority of people don't think twice about clicking "Yes" to whatever comes up on their screen (the other day my fiancé unwitting installed a browser toolbar and changed her home page on her PC because she didn't uncheck a few boxes in the installer for some freeware). I'd like to think that by being asked to enter a password a user is more likely to consider what they're authorizing but in most cases, the user is the weakest link.
$13 million
According to TFA, nVidia allocated $509 million of their "reserve cash" to cover the judgement. The judge was informed that there were "millions of potential members of the class, since "millions" of notifications about the lawsuit had been sent out. (FWIW I actually have a defective machine that was covered and I received a notice. I exempted myself because the issue had already been taken care of under my Apple warranty.) Approximately 28,000 people actually responded and participated in the lawsuit. According to TFA again, the settlement ended up to be for $10 million, plus the $13 million in legal fees that the judge approved before he got the actual number of individuals that were taking part in the class. $279 * 28,355 = ~$8 million so I presume the other 2 are going towards distribution or somesuch. In any case, yeah... the customers that have likely each been screwed in excess of $2000, discounting any compensation for the hassle they had to deal with, collectively receive $10 million in the form of extremely low-end replacement devices. The lawyers get $13 million. The lawyers got more money out of this case then the collective customers.
I noticed some other people saying things along the lines of the replacement being fair because after three years, the value of the defective computers would have depreciated considerably. That's not how this works. nVidia acknowledged there was an issue back in July 2008. The point of the lawsuit was that they screwed over people who had bought laptops with the faulty chips. Those people (myself included) had to deal with their system breaking down, struggles with service and support, and I'm sure in many cases lost work time or the expense of purchasing a temporary replacement. I look at this as I paid approximately $2200 for a high-end laptop. For a number of months I could not make use of the laptop I paid for because of a mistake that nVidia made. Furthermore, nVidia claimed for quite a while that my type of computer wasn't affected before coming clean about the scope of the issue. I could have been much less fortunate and not have been able to get mine repaired before the Apple warranty expired, or somesuch. If that were the case then I would have essentially thrown $2200 down the drain because of a mistake that nVidia made and I have a right to be compensated according to the original intent of purchase. It makes no difference that my laptop would be three years old by now, when I bought it I paid $X and if only now I was being given a functioning product according to my original intent of purchase, then I expect that replacement be worth at least $X.
And this is why I haven't found Starcraft 2 multiplayer all that fun, and thus why I will no be purchasing it myself. I mean come on, this is pretty much Blizzard saying that they don't care at all about the casual player, which is exactly what my friends and I are. When we dicked around with SC:BW at lan parties and such we weren't trying to train for some big competition. We were having fun playing BGH or Fastest and seeing whoever could get 2 dozen carriers first.
Agreed. I've got a 3-year-old nokia clamshell crap phone that works much better than my girlfriend's Droid X. Seriously, when we're out and want to reach someone it's always mine that is used because her battery is perpetually dead. She keeps bugging me to "upgrade" and get an iPhone or some other similar device. My response is that I already carry around an iPod Touch and iPad, not to mention laptop sometimes. The purpose of a phone is to make phone calls and my week-long-lasting nokia is more of a phone than any android of ios device in existence.
So the police should stop trying to catch robbers because people should have locks on their doors so the robbers can't get in? Seriously, why should the onus be on you to have to sidestep annoying, resource hogging, sometimes malicious advertising and other crap? When such a problematic tool has such widespread use as a great annoyance to people you might consider reevaluating its use at all. I use the "Click to Flash" plugin in Safari on my Mac. It's nice, it shows you where the flash content would be, it will look for MP4 playback alternatives on video sites. Even so, it's annoying when I visit some web site and have to play guess-which-flash-box-is-the-thing-you-want or puzzle on why something is working before I think to go to the menu and tell it to enable all the "invisible" flash on the page. Advertisements will probably never go away, but I'm sick of either having my CPU fan rev up because of some stupid flashy rectangles or having to bang my head against gmail wondering why it's file attacher isn't working and then on a hunch tell Safari to load all invisible flash and have it magically work.
Yeah. As I said, it's of German origin.
Mmm. Some years ago my family and I were eating in our favorite local Chinese restaurant. It was a nice place (gone now), and we were friends with the manager. That particular evening as drinks were being selected the manager told us that a friend of his had just sold him a bunch of very good imported Chinese beer called Yuengling. My father and I immediately recognized the name as that of this beer, our favorite brew from "America's Oldest Brewery" (despite the name, it's actually of German origin). He brought out a bottle and sure enough, it was the Black & Tan we knew so well, with the label altered. The manager was quite embarrassed and said he would have to talk to this "friend" of his. Actually at this time we weren't aware that the brewery had expanded, you used to only be able to get it right from the brewery in Pennsylvania.
Pure faith and belief are healthy. They allow people to theorize and strive to prove their theories. Enforcing religion through an institution really doesn't have anything to do with belief, it's an entire political and self-important undertaking. We need to grow up in the sense that we don't oppress our beliefs on others.
Exactly! Yet a large number of people here have posted bashing religious belief. The concept of religious belief is to go beyond observable phenomena and speculate as to what the root of those phenomena are.
For many, many of the faithful, the basic laws of physics, biology, geology, and yes, mathematics, exist only at the mercy of their favorite omnipotent invisible buddy. Ask an "educated" bible believer how the impossibilities of a seven day creation, halting the sun in the sky, or changing water into wine are possible, and they don't say that gravity (momentum, conservation of energy, etc.) don't exist, just that they were temporarily suspended for the particular instance, and then put right back in place if necessary.
That's not saying those laws don't exist. In fact, the only difference with regard to science seems to be their origin. Presently you can't prove that there isn't an omnipotent intelligence behind the creation and functioning of the universe. Unless the human race transcends to a higher level of existence, I don't believe it will ever be possible to conceive the true origin of the universe.
Woops, should've proofread. I meant to say there's no way we can say there is NOT an omnipotent intelligence
Yes, by all means, discover those rules! But also keep an open mind about what's behind those rules. For the record, I'm not inclined toward any particular religion or religious belief. I just don't like to discount possibilities. There really is absolutely no way we can say that there is an omnipotent intelligence beyond our comprehension that created the universe and all it's laws.
I didn't say a single thing about religious institution. Lying to protect a religion is not a fault of the religion, it's the fault of the people who believe in it and thus institutionalize it. And there are most certainly people lying to protect their view of scientific fact. Remember the fiasco with fabricated climate change data?
When somebody at FermiLab tells you that gravity accelerates objects at 9.8 m/s^2 and uses this to calculate the trajectory of a ball very accurately, you believe them, because you can see this, and they can do it over and over and over. You can do the calculation on your own, and measure the dropping ball too. It works, and you can do it.
What's your (or their) proof that the acceleration due to gravity isn't a construct of my god(s)? For arguments sake, how could you ever disprove that the universe is a construct of an omnipotent being that has made it impossible to ever prove his existence?