Even Microsoft has this feature. Outlook 2003 doesn't load any external images by default, and neither does the latest version of Outlook Express (in Win XP SP2).
A deadlocked government would be the best thing to happen to this country since the revolution.
Well, since the Reagan years anyway. Or the maybe the Clinton years. A sitting president with a hosilte congress can't do too much harm, and vice-versa. Which is why the economic Waring blender was set to "purée" [1] during both the Reagan and Clinton administrations.
And that is the most serious issue.... the configuration of Windows is often very insecure.
Actually, Microsoft got the "principle of least privilege" mostly correct for the corporate environment. The default permissions given to users on a workstation that is in a Windows NT/2000/2003 domain are very restrictive. Users cannot install software, modify the system portion of the registry, or modify any system or application files or directories.
However, as you point out, many lazy network admins have given their users local admin rights on their Windows workstations. This lets users install software (including printer drivers) on their own, and lets you run some poorly written apps designed for Windows 95 at the flip of a switch. But it horribly compromises security.
Even more unfortunately, home machines that do not participate in a Windows domain default to having the "installing user" be an administrator. A totaly security disaster. I expect, however, that Windows XP "reloaded" or Longhorn will go the Linux distro route and include a "create two accounts" set of steps by default for home users.
But you're wrong, they don't. IE and Media player run in user space in Windows. As do the vast majority of "buggy" programs in Windows.
It would be far more fair to compare XP with the Linux kernel + X + Gnome/KDE + browser + email app + xine + a bunch of other equivalent user-space utilities. But that would be a lot of work, and deciding where to draw the lines would be difficult. The two OS are architected very differently... shouldn't the horrendously buggy third-party video drivers that ship with most linux distros be included, since so many third-party drivers are included with Windows?
I'm not saying Linux would lose such a "fair" comparison, it would probably still be found less buggy than Windows. My point is this referenced article is stupid, useless propaganda generated by someone with an axe to grind.
This is merely more evidence supporting my theory that Microsoft are paying companies sizeable -- and very illegal -- cash bribes to actively not support other operating systems.
Riiight... AMD and Intel don't support Linux at all. I mean, just look at all the evidence! There's this and this, and this. All these developer tools and documents are just fakes! They secretly install Windows in the background!
I thought the PR implied "Although not as dense, SRAM is many times faster than dynamic random access memory (DRAM).", density is like a also-run
I remmber back in the days of the release of the original Macintosh II, a lot of articles (In Byte, MacUser, etc.) about the new 68020 architecture stated that main memory in the Mac would eventually be transitioned to SRAM because of SRAM's speed and power-consumption advantages. Cheap and dense SRAM was coming, "real soon", so that extra wait states or caches would not have to be implemented when the 68020 was scaled past 25 MHz.
Then the original Mac Portable came out, with 1 MB of zero-wait-state SRAM as main memory. It cost $7300 with a 40 MB hard disk, and pretty much sucked in every imaginable way.
I have a CS degree from a top-20 school that focuses very sharply on undergraduate education. And that degree really did open doors early in my career. Even though some of my friends that went to "top-tier" engineering schools, I had more opportunities starting out because people knew the institution on my degree produced (mostly) high-quality Bachelor's recipients. I won't name my school specifically, but here's a hint: we just fired our Football coach on Tuesday and hope to steal a new coach from Utah.
Anyway, my point is, a lot of the top-tier universities really don't give a rats ass about their undergraduates. They're there strictly to pay the bills for the grad schools, and they're given short shrift when it comes to resources and faculty time.
I chose my school over quite a few others because a neutral family friend, who is a professor, said it was the best undergraduate institution amongst those where I was accepted - even better than a few that were ranked higher that I could have attended. I only had one doctoral graduate student as a teacher during my four years, for a freshman English seminar. The rest were all full PhD professors, even the "lab profs" we had in chemistry and phsyics. That is very uncommon at most institutions, even others ranked in the top 25.
So if you feel your current school has a good overall undergraduate program, people doing hiring and acceptance for graduate schools probably know that. Even if your school is not known as an "engineering school." If the school you're at now focuses on its graduate schools, chasing grant money and all that, it might be better to move on. IMHO.
Even in Star Trek, Americans don't rule the world. The Vulcans rule the world...
From this tirade, we can all safely assume you have never had consensual sex with a woman.
It's a FREAKING TV SHOW, allright? Not real life. You should have listened to your mother when she told you to go play outside, join a team sport, and make new friends.
How about turning on the Internet Connection Firewall included in EVERY version of windows XP (RTM and SP1) before you connect the machine to the internet. Then go only to the Windows Update site, and get all your patches.
This is so simple and easy, you'd think it would be obvious, but that would mess with the Slashdot party line which is "windows sucks at all times and in all places."
A few "home-orenited" XP RTM and SP1 machines I've seen came with the ICF enabled on the internal NIC by the manufacturer. They were not from Dell/HP/Gateway; all were smaller "white box" or store brand machines.
Have you looked at your Gas bill lately? Natural gas production and distribution is under just as much strain as oil production.
Why? Natural gas deposits are typically right above oil fields.
Whatever the long-term replacement for gasoline is, natural gas is probably not it. Nor is ethanol, which uses more oil in production than it replaces.
Hydrogen is the only energy storage mechanism plentiful and cheap enough to give us a long-term replacement for oil & gasoline as portable enrgy. We can make fuel-ready hydrogen with a simple process that uses only electricity and water. We know how to generate electricity cheaply and (fairly) cleanly, with nuclear or wind/solar/thermal/hydro power. Water is fairly cheap and available in most of the world; the lemmings in Southern California will have to payu high prices or move to someplace with some freaking water. Construction of the hydrogen infrastructure will be expensive, but the technologies are well-known and in the field for a veriety of uses today.
This would make absolutely no difference, since they *already* do that to win House seats
Well, maybe some difference. People cross part lines far more readily in congressional and gubenatorial elections, for a variety of reasons. Maybe people think they don't "matter as much", so they go with the candidate they like. Or perhaps some hot-button local issue causes them to vote the other way.
For example, staunchly-Republican Indiana has had a number of Democratic governors and Senators in recent years, while liberal neighbor Illinois has had republican Governors and Senators.
But, I think, discrepancies in a vote for President would be rare. Using Congressional district winners to assign electoral votes would be the roughly the same as having Congress elect the President. We might as well skip the general election.
do it like Maine & Nebraska where it's by congressional district, so winner doesn't take all in a particular state
THis is an extraordinarily bad idea. Congressional districts are routinely the victim of politically-inspired redrawing, a process known as Gerrymandering. If the election were decided by congressional district, the party in power in each state legislature would simply draw the districts to favor their own party. Both parties engage in Gerrymandering after every U.S. census to swing congressional elections; many congressional seats changed hands this year in Texas and other states because of the redrawing done after the 2000 census.
In a windows NT, 2000, or 2003 domain, users do not have administrative rights on a workstation by default. It's been that way for nearly ten years.
The fact that most short-sighted windows administrators change this to ease their workload shouldn't be Microsoft's fault. Even a poorly written Windows application that "requires" administrative privileges can be made to work with standard user privileges, by giving narrow write permissions on select registry keys and directories on the disk. (Such applications do not even qualify for the Windows compatibility seal from Microsoft).
Similarly, no sane "web kiosk" administrator would give a user anything other than guest rights. When you log into windows 2000/XP as a guest account, everything is deleted when you log off - registry settings, temporary files, whatever. There are plenty of auto-logoff screen savers avaiable, too, even some from Microsoft IIRC.
...the reccomended fix is to patch everybody else's code.
No, the recommended, "party line" fix is most likely to wait for the patch to the ASP.NET execution environment from MS. You can work around the issue using the coding method suggested if you do not want to wait for the patch to be regression tested by MS. Also, I'm sure if you called MS Product Support Services you could probably get an engineer to send you a hotfix (without installer) that was marginally tested today. PSS does not charge for the call when it involves a reproducable bug in MS software. I have gotted such pre-release patches from PSS in the past, before they were released to the public after a lot of testing.
Don't be such an alarmist. Microsoft will post a public patch for this hole, and soon. Of that you can be sure.
So the Iraq war is a violation of international treaty, making it illegal, as Kofi Annan already stated.
The Iraq war was not a violation of any international treaty. In fact it was a direct result of Iraq repeatedly violating their 1991 cease-fire agreement with the coalition - and therefore "legal", as far as anything in international law can be.
For more than a decade, Iraq repeatedly violated most of the provisions of that 1991 cease-fire (no-fly zone, weapons inspectors, attacks against the Kurds, etc.). The fact that the Clinton administration did little about these violations - other than attacking Iraqi air defense positions - is beside the point.
W. had his justification for going into Iraq in hand in the form of repeated cease-fire violations. I think most of the world world have accepted that as a pretense for invasion - nobody thinks Saddam was a good guy. The direct evidence that he gave material support to terrorists in the form of payments to suicide bombers was indisputable icing on the cake.
The whole WMD thing was a tactical political blunder on the part of the Bush administration. Whether or not there ever was a credible WMD threat, it was not needed as a justification for knocking over Saddam's regime.
Which doesn't change the fact that the 2nd Iraq war was justified, albeit not in the way the U.S. administration chose to spin it. I guess they thought they needed a stronger reason than a cease-fire being broken by Saddam, which, IMHO, they didn't.
Unless you were a particularly mature, cynical 4th grader, you probably missed some of the humor.
Point taken. I certainly considered myself mature at age 10. But then again, the 4th grade was circa 20 years ago for me, and I don't remember much in the way of sex, intrigue, or even plot in the HHGTTG series. Just general zaniness. Maybe I did miss something. I know I missed a lot in Gulliver's Travels when I read it at that age, though I'm sure many a literature professor would kill me for putting Johnathan Swift and Doughlas Adams in the same league.
I also find it interesting that I was modded 50% funny and 50% troll for my post. Seems like I touched a nerve somewhere deep in the brain stem of a 24-year-old living in the basement of their parents' house... (now that's a troll!)
I read HHGTTG when I was in 4th grade or something. It was neato back then, but I can't see myself ever being interested in it now.
Rabid adult fans of HHTTG scare me a bit, much like adult fans of Harry Potter. With the movie(s) coming up, and now this, I think I'm in for a frightful couple of years.
Take a look at the number of jobs outsourced by the Heinz corporation, of which Kerry and his wife own 4% ($500M USD). Now, she doesn't sit on the Board, or hold a position at the company, but owning 4% of a huge company like Heinz buys a helluva lot of influence (as well as outsourcing-enhanced dividend checks).
Kerry is a hypocrite on this issue, pure and simple. As they say, "clean up your own back yard before you go knocking on your neighbor's door."
There's a lot more to quality CD playback than the number of bits in the D/A converter. The analog section of most sound cards is so cheap that you get quite a bit of hiss and distortion in a D/A/D conversion such as you describe.
Secondly, there is the matter of the quality of the A/D conversion. Again, you have some cheap-ass 30-cent analog parts in there upstream from the A/Ds. And I doubt the A/D converters themselves are all that great, even if they're labeled "24-bit".
There are reasons that professional studio time is so expensive. Mostly it is the recording engineers' time, but the equipment they use costs a helluva lot more than a Sound Blaster Audigy or whatever you got in your white-box PC.
Even lower-grade professional studios use things like this to make digital masters - stuff costs many thousands of dollars, and is built with several kg of high-purity copper in the "analog" parts of the box.
First off, I am an active participant in the MARID working group, and I know *exactly* what Sender ID and SPF do.
SMTP mail exchange occurs over a TCP connection, not a UDP connection. It is very hard (not impossible - but very hard these days) to forge the source IP address of a TCP connection.
So the TCP protocol "validates that the IP address of the immediate source of the message is what the message claims it is". SPF and Sender ID assume that the underlying OS and MTA provide the connecting IP address to the SPF/Sender ID resolver, and that it is correct. This is a very safe assumption, since 1) forging a source IP in a TCP connection is hard and 2) we must assume the underlying OS and MTA have not been compromised by a hacker.
Netiher SPF nor Sender ID rely on IP address derived from header fields in the message to determine the source IP address. Those would would be easily forged. So what exactly are you talking about?
The real answer is to fix SMTP so that forged headers don't work. That's all. Don't try to do too much or focus on a specific area of spam.
Uh, dude, read the freaking proposals. Preventing "header forgery" is exactly what Sender ID aims to accomplish. Many have pointed out flaws in the (patent-incumbered) PRA algorithm that the proposed SenderID standard uses to verify headers. These flaws may make SenderID less than effective at preventing phishing attacks and other forms of header forgery until a lot of mail clients are upgraded. In any case, though, Sender ID's primary design goal is to prevention of from-header forgery.
The "classic" SPF protocol, on the other hand, attempts only to prevent "envelope" forgery. Think of this as "return address forgery", which is subtly but definitely different that "from-header forgery". Users mostly never see the envelope sender, unless they go looking for a "return-path" header that was autmatically added by their receiving mail server. The envelope sender is where a message is returned when it is bounced.
MARID is (apparently) going to put out a revised standard that allows both RFC-2821 mail from (SPF) and RFC-2822 from-header (PRA) verification. Both of these scopes will be optional, to accomodate the IPR issues a lot of people have with Microsoft's PRA algorithm. Future scopes can be added to the protocol ot verify other parts of the email "conversation", but not until the first draft is out the door.
You seem to be missing some of the language nuances. A scientific theory can become a physical law though a large accumulation of evidence which is called a proof. So yes, scientist can "prove" things, insofar as as these terms are defined in the scientific method.
As for your thoery, "physics cannot prove things"... I think it is invalid. It seems to have a logical flaw in that does not appear to be falsifiable if you choose not to accept the large accumulation of evidence that defines a scientific proof.
Slashdot Mirror
Even Microsoft has this feature. Outlook 2003 doesn't load any external images by default, and neither does the latest version of Outlook Express (in Win XP SP2).
Well, since the Reagan years anyway. Or the maybe the Clinton years. A sitting president with a hosilte congress can't do too much harm, and vice-versa. Which is why the economic Waring blender was set to "purée" [1] during both the Reagan and Clinton administrations.
[1] Wording completely stolen from P.J. O'Rourke.And that is the most serious issue.... the configuration of Windows is often very insecure.
Actually, Microsoft got the "principle of least privilege" mostly correct for the corporate environment. The default permissions given to users on a workstation that is in a Windows NT/2000/2003 domain are very restrictive. Users cannot install software, modify the system portion of the registry, or modify any system or application files or directories.
However, as you point out, many lazy network admins have given their users local admin rights on their Windows workstations. This lets users install software (including printer drivers) on their own, and lets you run some poorly written apps designed for Windows 95 at the flip of a switch. But it horribly compromises security.
Even more unfortunately, home machines that do not participate in a Windows domain default to having the "installing user" be an administrator. A totaly security disaster. I expect, however, that Windows XP "reloaded" or Longhorn will go the Linux distro route and include a "create two accounts" set of steps by default for home users.
But you're wrong, they don't. IE and Media player run in user space in Windows. As do the vast majority of "buggy" programs in Windows.
It would be far more fair to compare XP with the Linux kernel + X + Gnome/KDE + browser + email app + xine + a bunch of other equivalent user-space utilities. But that would be a lot of work, and deciding where to draw the lines would be difficult. The two OS are architected very differently... shouldn't the horrendously buggy third-party video drivers that ship with most linux distros be included, since so many third-party drivers are included with Windows?
I'm not saying Linux would lose such a "fair" comparison, it would probably still be found less buggy than Windows. My point is this referenced article is stupid, useless propaganda generated by someone with an axe to grind.
Riiight... AMD and Intel don't support Linux at all. I mean, just look at all the evidence! There's this and this, and this. All these developer tools and documents are just fakes! They secretly install Windows in the background!
I remmber back in the days of the release of the original Macintosh II, a lot of articles (In Byte, MacUser, etc.) about the new 68020 architecture stated that main memory in the Mac would eventually be transitioned to SRAM because of SRAM's speed and power-consumption advantages. Cheap and dense SRAM was coming, "real soon", so that extra wait states or caches would not have to be implemented when the 68020 was scaled past 25 MHz.
Then the original Mac Portable came out, with 1 MB of zero-wait-state SRAM as main memory. It cost $7300 with a 40 MB hard disk, and pretty much sucked in every imaginable way.
I have a CS degree from a top-20 school that focuses very sharply on undergraduate education. And that degree really did open doors early in my career. Even though some of my friends that went to "top-tier" engineering schools, I had more opportunities starting out because people knew the institution on my degree produced (mostly) high-quality Bachelor's recipients. I won't name my school specifically, but here's a hint: we just fired our Football coach on Tuesday and hope to steal a new coach from Utah.
Anyway, my point is, a lot of the top-tier universities really don't give a rats ass about their undergraduates. They're there strictly to pay the bills for the grad schools, and they're given short shrift when it comes to resources and faculty time.
I chose my school over quite a few others because a neutral family friend, who is a professor, said it was the best undergraduate institution amongst those where I was accepted - even better than a few that were ranked higher that I could have attended. I only had one doctoral graduate student as a teacher during my four years, for a freshman English seminar. The rest were all full PhD professors, even the "lab profs" we had in chemistry and phsyics. That is very uncommon at most institutions, even others ranked in the top 25.
So if you feel your current school has a good overall undergraduate program, people doing hiring and acceptance for graduate schools probably know that. Even if your school is not known as an "engineering school." If the school you're at now focuses on its graduate schools, chasing grant money and all that, it might be better to move on. IMHO.
From this tirade, we can all safely assume you have never had consensual sex with a woman.
It's a FREAKING TV SHOW, allright? Not real life. You should have listened to your mother when she told you to go play outside, join a team sport, and make new friends.
How about turning on the Internet Connection Firewall included in EVERY version of windows XP (RTM and SP1) before you connect the machine to the internet. Then go only to the Windows Update site, and get all your patches.
This is so simple and easy, you'd think it would be obvious, but that would mess with the Slashdot party line which is "windows sucks at all times and in all places."
A few "home-orenited" XP RTM and SP1 machines I've seen came with the ICF enabled on the internal NIC by the manufacturer. They were not from Dell/HP/Gateway; all were smaller "white box" or store brand machines.
[1] Use a freaking debit card or credit card to pay at the pump. Or get a Marathon SpeedPass.
Have you looked at your Gas bill lately? Natural gas production and distribution is under just as much strain as oil production.
Why? Natural gas deposits are typically right above oil fields.
Whatever the long-term replacement for gasoline is, natural gas is probably not it. Nor is ethanol, which uses more oil in production than it replaces.
Hydrogen is the only energy storage mechanism plentiful and cheap enough to give us a long-term replacement for oil & gasoline as portable enrgy. We can make fuel-ready hydrogen with a simple process that uses only electricity and water. We know how to generate electricity cheaply and (fairly) cleanly, with nuclear or wind/solar/thermal/hydro power. Water is fairly cheap and available in most of the world; the lemmings in Southern California will have to payu high prices or move to someplace with some freaking water. Construction of the hydrogen infrastructure will be expensive, but the technologies are well-known and in the field for a veriety of uses today.
Well, maybe some difference. People cross part lines far more readily in congressional and gubenatorial elections, for a variety of reasons. Maybe people think they don't "matter as much", so they go with the candidate they like. Or perhaps some hot-button local issue causes them to vote the other way.
For example, staunchly-Republican Indiana has had a number of Democratic governors and Senators in recent years, while liberal neighbor Illinois has had republican Governors and Senators.
But, I think, discrepancies in a vote for President would be rare. Using Congressional district winners to assign electoral votes would be the roughly the same as having Congress elect the President. We might as well skip the general election.
THis is an extraordinarily bad idea. Congressional districts are routinely the victim of politically-inspired redrawing, a process known as Gerrymandering. If the election were decided by congressional district, the party in power in each state legislature would simply draw the districts to favor their own party. Both parties engage in Gerrymandering after every U.S. census to swing congressional elections; many congressional seats changed hands this year in Texas and other states because of the redrawing done after the 2000 census.
In a windows NT, 2000, or 2003 domain, users do not have administrative rights on a workstation by default. It's been that way for nearly ten years.
The fact that most short-sighted windows administrators change this to ease their workload shouldn't be Microsoft's fault. Even a poorly written Windows application that "requires" administrative privileges can be made to work with standard user privileges, by giving narrow write permissions on select registry keys and directories on the disk. (Such applications do not even qualify for the Windows compatibility seal from Microsoft).
Similarly, no sane "web kiosk" administrator would give a user anything other than guest rights. When you log into windows 2000/XP as a guest account, everything is deleted when you log off - registry settings, temporary files, whatever. There are plenty of auto-logoff screen savers avaiable, too, even some from Microsoft IIRC.
Have you looked at the amount of taxes taken out of your paycheck recently?
Gestures with the puck or stylus were part of the functionality of Autocad as far back as the late eighties, as I recall.
No, the recommended, "party line" fix is most likely to wait for the patch to the ASP.NET execution environment from MS. You can work around the issue using the coding method suggested if you do not want to wait for the patch to be regression tested by MS. Also, I'm sure if you called MS Product Support Services you could probably get an engineer to send you a hotfix (without installer) that was marginally tested today. PSS does not charge for the call when it involves a reproducable bug in MS software. I have gotted such pre-release patches from PSS in the past, before they were released to the public after a lot of testing.
Don't be such an alarmist. Microsoft will post a public patch for this hole, and soon. Of that you can be sure.
The Iraq war was not a violation of any international treaty. In fact it was a direct result of Iraq repeatedly violating their 1991 cease-fire agreement with the coalition - and therefore "legal", as far as anything in international law can be.
For more than a decade, Iraq repeatedly violated most of the provisions of that 1991 cease-fire (no-fly zone, weapons inspectors, attacks against the Kurds, etc.). The fact that the Clinton administration did little about these violations - other than attacking Iraqi air defense positions - is beside the point.
W. had his justification for going into Iraq in hand in the form of repeated cease-fire violations. I think most of the world world have accepted that as a pretense for invasion - nobody thinks Saddam was a good guy. The direct evidence that he gave material support to terrorists in the form of payments to suicide bombers was indisputable icing on the cake.
The whole WMD thing was a tactical political blunder on the part of the Bush administration. Whether or not there ever was a credible WMD threat, it was not needed as a justification for knocking over Saddam's regime.
Which doesn't change the fact that the 2nd Iraq war was justified, albeit not in the way the U.S. administration chose to spin it. I guess they thought they needed a stronger reason than a cease-fire being broken by Saddam, which, IMHO, they didn't.
Point taken. I certainly considered myself mature at age 10. But then again, the 4th grade was circa 20 years ago for me, and I don't remember much in the way of sex, intrigue, or even plot in the HHGTTG series. Just general zaniness. Maybe I did miss something. I know I missed a lot in Gulliver's Travels when I read it at that age, though I'm sure many a literature professor would kill me for putting Johnathan Swift and Doughlas Adams in the same league.
I also find it interesting that I was modded 50% funny and 50% troll for my post. Seems like I touched a nerve somewhere deep in the brain stem of a 24-year-old living in the basement of their parents' house... (now that's a troll!)
I read HHGTTG when I was in 4th grade or something. It was neato back then, but I can't see myself ever being interested in it now.
Rabid adult fans of HHTTG scare me a bit, much like adult fans of Harry Potter. With the movie(s) coming up, and now this, I think I'm in for a frightful couple of years.
Take a look at the number of jobs outsourced by the Heinz corporation, of which Kerry and his wife own 4% ($500M USD). Now, she doesn't sit on the Board, or hold a position at the company, but owning 4% of a huge company like Heinz buys a helluva lot of influence (as well as outsourcing-enhanced dividend checks).
Kerry is a hypocrite on this issue, pure and simple. As they say, "clean up your own back yard before you go knocking on your neighbor's door."
There's a lot more to quality CD playback than the number of bits in the D/A converter. The analog section of most sound cards is so cheap that you get quite a bit of hiss and distortion in a D/A/D conversion such as you describe.
Secondly, there is the matter of the quality of the A/D conversion. Again, you have some cheap-ass 30-cent analog parts in there upstream from the A/Ds. And I doubt the A/D converters themselves are all that great, even if they're labeled "24-bit".
There are reasons that professional studio time is so expensive. Mostly it is the recording engineers' time, but the equipment they use costs a helluva lot more than a Sound Blaster Audigy or whatever you got in your white-box PC.
Even lower-grade professional studios use things like this to make digital masters - stuff costs many thousands of dollars, and is built with several kg of high-purity copper in the "analog" parts of the box.
First off, I am an active participant in the MARID working group, and I know *exactly* what Sender ID and SPF do.
SMTP mail exchange occurs over a TCP connection, not a UDP connection. It is very hard (not impossible - but very hard these days) to forge the source IP address of a TCP connection.
So the TCP protocol "validates that the IP address of the immediate source of the message is what the message claims it is". SPF and Sender ID assume that the underlying OS and MTA provide the connecting IP address to the SPF/Sender ID resolver, and that it is correct. This is a very safe assumption, since 1) forging a source IP in a TCP connection is hard and 2) we must assume the underlying OS and MTA have not been compromised by a hacker.
Netiher SPF nor Sender ID rely on IP address derived from header fields in the message to determine the source IP address. Those would would be easily forged. So what exactly are you talking about?
Uh, dude, read the freaking proposals. Preventing "header forgery" is exactly what Sender ID aims to accomplish. Many have pointed out flaws in the (patent-incumbered) PRA algorithm that the proposed SenderID standard uses to verify headers. These flaws may make SenderID less than effective at preventing phishing attacks and other forms of header forgery until a lot of mail clients are upgraded. In any case, though, Sender ID's primary design goal is to prevention of from-header forgery.
The "classic" SPF protocol, on the other hand, attempts only to prevent "envelope" forgery. Think of this as "return address forgery", which is subtly but definitely different that "from-header forgery". Users mostly never see the envelope sender, unless they go looking for a "return-path" header that was autmatically added by their receiving mail server. The envelope sender is where a message is returned when it is bounced.
MARID is (apparently) going to put out a revised standard that allows both RFC-2821 mail from (SPF) and RFC-2822 from-header (PRA) verification. Both of these scopes will be optional, to accomodate the IPR issues a lot of people have with Microsoft's PRA algorithm. Future scopes can be added to the protocol ot verify other parts of the email "conversation", but not until the first draft is out the door.
You seem to be missing some of the language nuances. A scientific theory can become a physical law though a large accumulation of evidence which is called a proof. So yes, scientist can "prove" things, insofar as as these terms are defined in the scientific method.
As for your thoery, "physics cannot prove things"... I think it is invalid. It seems to have a logical flaw in that does not appear to be falsifiable if you choose not to accept the large accumulation of evidence that defines a scientific proof.