They're just busy pushing everyone to do cannabis and proceed to abuse of prescription drugs.

Cigarettes are so 20th century, you have to soma harder, citizen!

I don't get your point. MFA can successfully defeat credential stuffing attacks like the one that reportedly caused security breaches here. It won't fix everything, but nothing does. I'm not sure how you go from "not a panacea" to "this is why I don't like MFA".

That being said, I think SMS MFA needs to die in a fire, although it's still probably better than nothing. I think TOTP or FIDO it's much better, and an open standard.

If you stick with a PIN, law enforcement would also be stuck under the proposed system. iPhones with PIN codes are actually hard to hack by guessing randomly.

I put in 32 GB of DDR4 3200 RAM for $100 in my desktop. There's really no reason not to do it if you can swing an extra fifty bucks over 16 GB even though, yeah, 32 GB is overkill.

The hidden issue with the MAX was the lack of adequate pilot training. Nothing I say is meant to vindicate or defend Boeing. But much of the growth are in foreign low-cost airlines that save money on maintenance and pilot training. (An improper activation of MCAS would mimic a runaway trim, which is a condition that all pilots are supposed to recognize right away, and the solution is the same: turn off the automatic stabilizer trim.)

The MAX crash on Lion Air was caused by a defective AOA sensor. The part was known to be bad, and supposedly replaced before the final flight. The flight before the doomed one saw the MCAS trigger but the crew knew how to deal with the problem. They turned off the trim system and continued to the destination. However, the crew of the doomed airplane kept on fighting MCAS instead of turning off the trim system.

The Ethiopian Air incident saw the crew react properly by turning off the electronic trim system when MCAS activated. However, the crew accidentally got their airplane flying too fast so they were unable to manually trim their plane up. The last thing they did was to turn on the electronic trim system again hoping to use it to trim up, but MCAS fired again and killed everyone.

Again, Boeing really fucked up. Using only one AOA sensor? Allowing the system to trigger an unlimited number of dives? Giving the system the power to almost fully deflect the horizontal stabilizer? Hiding MCAS from pilots? All of that was incorrect. But Lion Air wouldn't have happened if the defective AOA sensor was correctly replaced.

The airplane in question is a 737-800, not the MAX. The plane basically went straight down into the ground. MCAS would have caused a rollercoaster pattern because the system only activates for a few seconds at a time. I can't even imagine what would cause a plane in cruise to dive straight down like that.

FIDO2 might meet your requirement.
https://fidoalliance.org/how-f...

I had to be in the top percentile to get in, then worked 80-100 hours a week for 16 years to get the education and training after college to get my current job, most of that time at 1-2x minimum wage. I currently often work 80+ hours a week, often with night calls on top of that. At the same time, I get to hear that I'm making too much money all the time here on Slashdot. I got to spend the last 2 years neck-deep in COVID. Simultaneously, the programmers on Slashdot continue to write about the plight of working 5 days a week 9-5 (a schedule I have never seen, much rather felt), and push universal basic income etc. I am getting a distinct sense that there's a deep disconnect with reality occurring here.

I see this as little more than realization that they can institute censorship by proxy, rather than have the bad publicity of formally announcing it. Congratulations - your speech will be essentially regulated by Google, Facebook, etc...

Actually I think the better question is, how long until governments around the world seize this opportunity to declare Signal as a facilitator of illegal transactions (human trafficking is a good excuse) and shut it down. This was a terrible idea that opens the parent app and company to great legal peril. This is the wet dream of the nascent dictators around the world. While it was a facilitator of free speech it held a certain moral high ground. Now that it meddles in money, it's little more than a target.

The battle in universities over how to split a limited pie of money among departments has been going on for as long as there have been universities. And, each department jealously guards its budget and the number of professors in the department. Among other things, those are signs of the department's prestige, both in the university itself, and across universities. That's nothing new.

But, that desire runs into trouble when student interests in various majors don't remain constant. If there are 50% fewer majors in department X, should its budget or the number of X professorships remain constant? What about the budgets of the departments with increasing enrollments?

This is a common current problem at traditional liberal-arts universities. At the University of North Carolina, for example, the number of Computer Science majors has increased 10x in the last decade, but the number of CS professors has not kept up, leading to caps on enrollment. Undergraduate business at UNC has a similar problem. Meanwhile, enrollment in traditional "liberal arts" degrees has fallen dramatically. What do you do if you're the dean of, say, the History Department?

Part of the driving force behind that was a mess of grads coming out of college 7-15 years ago with massive student loan debts and an inability to pay them. So, students entering college started focusing on majors that they believed were high-paying. (Sometimes ignoring profitable majors, such as technical writing, in liberal arts departments.)

Flexibility is good. Having flex days to do chores is good. Working from home all the time is both cause and effect of a general deterioration in self discipline. Decreasing formality in dress, conversation, and now work location are all signs of a society that doesn't have the structure to keep itself stable. We need to go back to wearing business attire to business, polite conversation for discourse, and school uniforms. The alternative is the continued unwinding of our collective sanity, and the gradual destruction on productivity.

I think you misunderstand. Twitter created this deliberately flawed and obtuse policy to be weaponized by the left extremists (including their own staff), and now it was evidently weaponized by the right extremists. Now they are whining that it's unfair, even though anyone with a brain could have predicted that the policy would be abused by just reading the text of it.

That's how I read it. How about we just end Twitter and make life better for everyone.

Again, good question, but complicated answer. Adaptive immunity has two major components - the B-cell response (antibody production) and T-cell response (regulatory, cytokine production, and direct cytotoxic activity against infected cells). Both play an important role in response to SARS-CoV-2, and measurement of antibody levels doesn't address the T-cell immunity aspect. However, the data from 50k or so healthcare workers in Israel shows that after immunization with the Pfizer vaccine the antibody levels do decline precipitously after 6 months. This is definitely correlated with more breakthrough infections, including some associated with severe disease (but much lower percentage than in unvaccinated patients). Doing a 3rd shot raises the antibody levels something like 50-100 fold. There is no data about how that level behaves over time. What should happen is that each cycle of exposure should generate a more robust response lasting longer, but there's no data so far to confirm that. Decreased antibody level combined with clinical evidence for breakthroughs means that likely there isn't enough antibody to neutralize the incoming virus and block infection. That means the body will rely on mobilizing memory cells to induce response after infection in breakthrough cases. That is MUCH faster than generating a new response (such that occurs when you have no immunity, either natural or induced), so that difference likely accounts for lower severity, but is obviously less than ideal. I think that for someone who is contemplating a booster, I would say that timing should also play a role. If you're exactly 6 months out, you may choose to wait a few weeks to see what the data shows about protection against Omicron. If you're one of the first people to have been vaccinated and you're approaching a year, chances are you'll be served better with getting your booster now since your immunity likely waned even more, and then looking at a subsequent vaccine later.

P.S. Since you had a specific medical question, I have to disclaim since I am not your physician so consider all my answers educational and not medical advice.

Vaccines may or may not produce complete neutralization. This is extraordinarily variable, and depends on both the virus as well as the immune system of each vaccine recipient. Clearly vaccination against COVID-19 appears to offer imperfect protection against infection. However, that's actually the case for most vaccines, it just hasn't been as carefully studied previously since for many other diseases mild infections in vaccinated individuals were not significantly studied because they were clinically irrelevant.

To answer your second question there isn't a magic threshold unless you're going to start measuring single monoclonal antibody activity against specific virus in-vitro, since there is so much variability in host response. There is some literature on effective antibody concentrations against SARS-CoV-2 and you're welcome to peruse pubmed.gov for it, but that's highly specialized literature.

To answer your third question completely I would have to explain to you how you develop B-cell immunity. In short, you form a large panel of immature B-cell receptors through targeted mutation. When antigen presenting cells encounter B-cells in the lymph nodes, the ones that happen to have some binding activity (under specific circumstances) are activated. These then undergo affinity maturation where further mutations refine the sequence to maximize binding efficiency. These cells are then precursors to plasma cells that produce antibody and memory cells that remain quiescent till next infection. The spike protein has multiple antigenic sites, and there can be many linear or conformational epitopes that can be recognized differently by numerous B-cell receptors (out of a random pool). Thus EVERY induced immunity is by definition polyclonal (meaning comprised of antibody with a different binding site sequence that result from different B-cell receptor sequences). Monoclonal antibodies are made by inducing polyclonal immunity, then isolating the B-cells individually to produce a large number of monoclonal lines, and then these are tested against the original antigen and the best candidates are selected through sequential rounds of affinity testing. The best candidates then undergo transformation into immortal cell lines which can be scaled up indefinitely under laboratory conditions to produce what we know as antibody-mediated biological drugs.