Germany's lower school system of deciding at age 10 whether you go to a school (Gymnasium) that allows you go to college later or not is definitely a big issue.
But when I went to college in Germany 10 years ago in my hometown, the cost was minimal (< 300 Euros per semester including unlimited public transport). Also there are regulated student loans (Bafoeg) that less affluent students can take advantage of.
The point is that if you come from a low income background, there is a very good chance you will never make it to university, because you will probably never quite make it to gymnasium (or through it) to begin with.
The fact is that the school is divided very early in way where you are going to college and others where you'll just learn a more simple job (mechanics, cook...). So at a young age, teachers decide where you are going to go. Studies show that this is very dependant on the social class of your parents. Teacher almost never send a surgeon's son to a no-college school. So social mobility is prevented that way, instead of letting the children decide when they are around 18 and more aware of their own capacities and wishes. Having your life determined at 10 is quite harsh.
Then, there is the fact that school is over at around 2PM, letting the afternoon to either slack off or learn piano and classical dance, and do homework. That works only well for families which are well educated, poor and immigrant families don't really know what to begin with.
It highly depends in which state (Bundesland) you live. The most states have don't have those fees anymore, only 3 of 16 states have them as far as I know. The height of those fees is about 500 € per half-year.
Independent to those fees (which are called Studiengebühr) there are other fees which have to be paid in all universities: It is called "Semesterbeitrag" and is about 150 € per half-year (average guessed on my experience ;-) ). It is used to pay public-transport and such stuff.
I use Parse on a couple of projects, I also work (separately, I hasten to add!) on apps for carriers with significant security issues.
I would say that you shouldn't really worry about 'sniffing' traffic, because whatever countermeasures you take chances are if someone cares enough they'll work around it.
Parse has an access-control model for objects: objects can have read/write permissions for users, groups, or everyone. For example, you might have an object in Parse representing a comment, which the owner could edit and everyone else read.
Obviously the Parse API itself is rather public, and it wouldn't take a huge amount of skill to extract your client keys from an Android / iOS app: but as long as you've designed your ACL (access control list) correctly, it won't matter as your user will have to be logged in and authenticated to access sensitive objects.
it wouldn't take a huge amount of skill to extract your client keys from an Android / iOS app: but as long as you've designed your ACL (access control list) correctly, it won't matter as your user will have to be logged in and authenticated to access sensitive objects.
But it's possible to edit the ACL from a client. Isn't that a potential weakness?
Editing the ACL is subject to the same access restrictions, similar to how Unix ACLs work. So, for most cases this is sufficient. If you have more complex security needs, we're glad to discuss how individual apps can be secured. Drop us a line at feedback at parse.com.
Thanks. And I will likely do that. Before I do and if I could borrow some more of your time: would using Parse qualify an app as containing encryption, in regards to the AppStore submission/guidelines?
Parse does use https:// connections for all data, so you should take whatever action you would normally take for an application that communicates over https. That is the only form of client-side encryption used.
There is per-user authentication. The PFUser class (in iOS, Android is ParseUser) handles this sort of authentication automatically for you, and there are also hooks to do it with a bit more effort through the REST API.
Also makes for a great interview question why a pseudo-random generator initialized with a 64 bit seed will not produce all possible shuffles of a card deck.
That depends on whether you use the first 52 values after the seed as the shuffle or are allowed to produce multiple shuffles from the same seed. In the latter case it also depends on the, unspecified, period of the PRNG.
If the generator memory size is equal to seed size (64 bits), then period can't be larger than 2^64, and that's probably what grand-parent meant.
But generator can have states that are not possible to be set directly by seeding (like when generator has for example 1024 bits of state, but can be seeded from 64 bit int). Then period is larger than 2^64, and grand-parent thesis don't hold.
It's interesting you're mentioning reddit. In my personal use, G+ actually started competing with with reddit.
G+'s what's hot section resembles pretty much the image subreddit at this point content-wise, but the browsing experience is better since most content is displayed inline and I can easily navigate it with j/k.
Now they just have to figure out how you can get hot content for certain categories. Of course it's missing the anonymity of the reddit community, so the content will probably never be on par.
https://radiolab.org/podcast/alpha-gal