perennate

The end of Chapter 1 is a rape scene, I wouldn't call it "mild". I imagine it can be difficult to read for many people.

capital gains tax rate is 50%

That makes it sound like you pay half of capital gains in taxes, but I think what you mean is that 50% of capital gains is taxable, and that this portion is taxed at the same rate as other personal income. Personally I think 100% of capital gains should be taxable at the marginal income tax rate.

I wouldn't trust a support page's definition of "opt-in"

The support page doesn't have any definition of "opt-in". It simply says that users need to click under "Turn your PC's idle time to cash" and then accept a "License and Services Agreement" before they can access the "Norton Crypto dashboard" and enable "mining during idle time". I would consider that opt-in given that the user has to perform multiple steps before they can even enable the miner, and given that there isn't any suggestion to enable this by default during the installation process. If you don't consider that "opt-in", then please explain.

There seems to be a mob here that has been misled to think that the cryptocurrency miner is enabled by default and runs on every Norton user's computer in the background, whereas in reality it IS installed by default (as in the binary takes up storage space on the user's hard drive), but can only be enabled with multiple steps including agreeing to a separate services agreement that is dedicated to the Norton Crypto product.

(I still think it's dumb to bundle a crypto miner with an anti-virus product. But all this talk about it running without the user's consent is nonsense.)

See also https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/v... seems clearly opt-in.

You can however "pause" the mining forever while keeping everything installed which is what support will suggest if you ask.

Just to clarify because this sentence sounds a bit misleading -- according to https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/v... the cryptocurrency miner is off by default, so if you haven't turned it on, then there's no need to pause it if you don't want it running.

It is installed but not activated without warning AFAIK. According to https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/v... the user must first agree to a Norton Crypto License and Services Agreement and then explicitly activate the miner before anything will happen.

oblivious customers

Users must explicitly agree to a Norton Crypto License and Services Agreement and activate mining before the software starts mining Ethereum. It is unlikely there would be any oblivious customers.

See https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/v...

(1) does not inform the user or ask for consent

(2) seemingly does not offer an option to disable it

Where do you see this? As far as I can tell, it is off by default, and the user must explicitly enable it (consent) to use the miner.

See e.g. https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/v... which mentions a License and Services Agreement that must be accepted before the miner can be used at all, and clearly says the mining status can be toggled between Active and Paused.

I agree that there needs to be a balance. I'd argue that US defamation law is close to the "right" balance, by making a stronger case needed to prosecute defamation against public figures (like public officials or celebrities), and by focusing not exactly on intention but on whether the defendant within reason could have believed the statement was true.

then the question is whether you actively participated in

There is another important question: intention. In the US, "for a public official (or other legitimate public figure) to win a libel case in the United States, the statement must have been published knowing it to be false or with reckless disregard to its truth" [1].

It seems to me that most of the problems come not from having the defamation law to begin with like you said, but from the law applying even to defendants who believed the information they were creating or disseminating was true.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation

I agree that they might be missing the point, but I also feel that adding a one or two extra CSS lines is really needed to turn something that is very unpleasant to read (the biggest problem being the unlimited width) into something that is really basically perfect. Like, this one is actually pretty much perfect, while the original makes me want to manually add a max-width from the inspector.

Unless you're using unsupervised learning or can find a good dataset, most of the cost will be in labeling the data. I'm not too familiar with background removal, there may be some self-supervised/contrastive learning approaches, but generally they don't work as well as supervised learning. Even for a week of training, the compute cost is only $200.

Edit: maybe you can get some decent results just with COCO segmentation labels: https://towardsdatascience.com/background-removal-with-deep-...

In the FAQ it says:

Is my instance guaranteed?

Yes, unless you run out of credit. To prevent that from happening be sure to setup automatic top ups.

I think Linode/Paperspace/AWS/GCP/etc. are closer to "direct competitors". I would be much more comfortable trusting a single entity that owns its servers than a GPU rental marketplace like vast.ai.

The website design put me off but the FAQ makes it clear that it is quite professional. They have information about physical security, GDPR compliance, and VLAN. Wish there was some information about storage, e.g. if it's local disk or distributed block storage, and how many replicas. Very nice that unused credit is refundable.

I mean, frivolous lawsuits are nothing new: https://www.thebalancesmb.com/most-ridiculous-lawsuits-of-al...

They usually get tossed out pretty quickly.

"In 2016, an Illinois man sued Starbucks for misrepresenting the amount of liquid contained in its cold drinks. ... The judge agreed with Starbucks' argument that a reasonable consumer who orders an iced drink expects the drink to contain both liquid and ice."

I would imagine he would appear under his real name. It would be weird to hear his username in Congress, especially when there are no longer concerns about anonymity now that his name is publicized.

His comments about the company's value were about the fundamentals and, to a very limited extent, about a possible short squeeze: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alntJzg0Um4

And at most it seems he was giving his opinion about the company. He never said something like "everyone should buy GameStop because it's guaranteed to rise in value".

I have mainly used Namecheap and NewEgg, not AT&T. Many of these companies may not process Bitcoin transactions themselves, but instead rely on a third party like Coinbase/Bitpay who handle the BTC-to-fiat conversion, so in that case the companies would not themselves host a wallet. My "directly" I mean that you don't need to convert your BTC to fiat to pay for these services. I suspect that most of the companies would stop accepting Bitcoin if it couldn't be converted to dollars, but that's not what I was replying to; I specifically said that "prices are pegged to fiat".

https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin/who-accepts/

Prices are pegged to fiat but the merchants accept BTC directly.

That is not at all my understanding of what the draft rehabilitation plan says. There are fiat assets and fiat claims and other complicated factors. The payout would depend on the BTC/BCH-to-yen conversion rate at the time that the distribution begins, and the total claims that make it through all the way to the end. Based on one creditor's read of the plan, along with the current exchange rates and such, the current expected payout is closer to 0.16 BTC per 1 BTC held, some of which is paid back in Japanese yen and some as BTC/BCH [https://old.reddit.com/r/mtgoxinsolvency/comments/l08ymh/mt_...].

It is much more complicated than that because part of the BTC will be paid from yen fund and part from BTC fund. And there are both fiat claims and cryptocurrency claims.

The draft document has been made available to creditors but it says not to share with the public. But it does say that BTC and BCH claims will be valued at the BTC/BCH-to-yen conversion rate as of the time of commencement of rehabilitation proceedings (749,318.83 yen/BTC). And the payout will be less than that because the remaining assets will be distributed to creditors in a prorated system (although certain small fiat claims and possibly other claims may have higher priority).

There is definitely not a specific amount of BTC currently that would be paid to creditors per BTC that they held, since it depends on the final total claims (which is mostly finalized but may still change a bit), and presumably on the value of the remaining BTC/BCH assets held by the trustee at the time of distribution.

One creditor made a calculator to compute the payout based on the current exchange rates and such: https://old.reddit.com/r/mtgoxinsolvency/comments/l08ymh/mt_...

Of course everyone would want the greater of the two. But the claims need to be balanced because some users held cryptocurrency assets while others held dollar assets, and there aren't sufficient assets to return either one. The rehabilitation trustee has already come up with a plan that balances the demands of the various stakeholders, and most people are happy with it. There are many reasons why the assets haven't been distributed yet, but one big reason is because CoinLab keeps parroting their ridiculous claims; obviously CoinLab's lawsuit will be thrown out eventually (because their claims are absurd), but it's part of the reason the distribution keeps getting delayed and likely won't happen until, say, 2022-2023.

Only in January 2021 did CoinLab finally say, okay, we will agree that the distribution of 90% of the assets can start while our lawsuit continues (they are ridiculously demanding that CoinLab get some big portion of the other 10%, so they want that money held up until their absurd lawsuit is finally thrown out). See https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-15/coinlab-r...

The absurd hypothetical that CoinLab could have been Coinbase in some strange parallel universe should not take priority in the bankruptcy/insolvency proceedings over the claims of Mt. Gox users who held actual dollar/cryptocurrency assets on the exchange.

CoinLab's lawsuit has delayed the distribution process and their absurd claims are part of the reason why creditors with actual legitimate claims (i.e. Mt. Gox users) are still waiting for the remaining assets to be distributed.

It is like the bank has robbery and 20% of the money is stolen, but instead of distributing the 80% among the customers, it is given to the bank's US partner that said "oh hey we could've been the next big bank in the US if the other bank didn't get robbed".

CoinLab's lawsuit is a big part of the reason why creditors with actual legitimate claims still haven't received their share of the remaining assets. Somehow CoinLab thinks their claim, which hinges on vague and unrealistic what-ifs, should have priority over Mt. Gox users who held dollar/cryptocurrency assets in their Mt. Gox accounts. Obviously CoinLab's ridiculous claims will eventually be thrown out, but it has severely delayed the insolvency proceedings and eventual distribution process.

Vessenes is not a "Bitcoin insider", he is a snake who seeks to steal billions from individual users who lost assets that they had held with Mt. Gox.

Here is what former Mt. Gox users who are still waiting for the distribution process think of this Bloomberg article: https://old.reddit.com/r/mtgoxinsolvency/comments/l9m3iz/coi...

From the affidavit: https://d279m997dpfwgl.cloudfront.net/wp/2021/01/Gang-Chen-D...

In one communication, CHEN instructed the colleague to remove any information identifying him (CHEN) as a PRC Talent Plan participant from documents concerning the proposed thermal energy project.

Most of the evidence is about activities he "failed to disclose", but this evidence supports the more serious allegation that he willfully acted to hide certain activities.

From the affidavit: https://d279m997dpfwgl.cloudfront.net/wp/2021/01/Gang-Chen-D...

In one communication, CHEN instructed the colleague to remove any information identifying him (CHEN) as a PRC Talent Plan participant from documents concerning the proposed thermal energy project.

Most of the evidence is about activities he "failed to disclose", but this evidence supports the more serious allegation that he willfully acted to hide certain activities.

The translated tweet matches the impression I got from the article. The article didn't make me think that it is specifically a "listening service".

"People rent him for various reasons. At times he will participate in a gaming session to make up numbers, turn up to send off people who are moving away, accompany those filing for divorce, or listen to health care workers who have become mentally unwell due to their exhausting work."

This is about cultural identity though. The link should be https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7805&id=6962 which shows 0.7+6.8 = 7.5% supporting eventual re-unification with 0.7% supporting immediate re-unification.

Hm you're right, I checked https://jamestown.org/program/taiwan-opinion-polling-on-unif... and https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3951560 and it seems the 30% supporting eventual unification claim is correct according to recent polling, with 11% supporting sooner unification (i.e. unify even if PRC still has a Nazi government).

Edit: according to https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7805&id=6962 (which has a finer breakdown) the number is 7.5%, but the jamestown.org article links to data also collected by NCCU (but maybe a different group), so I'm not sure what the distinction is.