Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cordless power tools typically have the battery management system in the device , not in the battery. The battery tends to contain protection circuitry, but no logic that determines charge rate etc. That means every device manufacturer will claim, even if the law requires that devices must all have the same plug, that a competitors device drew too much current, or charged their battery too fast/too slow/at too a…
I'm not sure that I agree with this statement. Many of the packs that I've seen the inside of has balancing circuitry included. Also worth considering these packs are charged separate from the tool. So this means the tool cannot control the charge rate etc. Lastly, based on my luddite eyes, the difference between makita, milwaukee, bosch, dewalt and ryobi batteries seem to me to only be a different keying in the plas…
Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B
121–130 of 458 posts
Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B
#122Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B
#123It is commendable that EU does not allow miscreants to tie up fines in an endless legal maze.
Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B
#124That’s 1.45% of their annual revenue or 5.2% of their annual net profit.
Which is essentially nothing. Imagine an individual, caught committing an illegal act of this magnitude for the third time , being fined 1.45% of their annual pre-tax salary, with no other consequences. Speeding tickets are costlier than this in many jurisdictions.
Holy shit.
Is it some sign of being on HN too much?
Sure, 1.45% is small, because % is shitty at representing the real value at this point
at the end of the day it's fucking $4 000 000 000
It's year salary of 2200 well paid engineers
That's industry-changing level of possibilities
Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B
#125Can they use that to finance grants or RFPs for other projects ?
Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
The budget of the EU parliament? What do you mean? The budget of the parliament was about 740k€ in 2022. Did you mean the budget of the EU itself? It's about what you said (180B€ in 2022). Of course, that doesn't account for individual member States' budgets. The EU's budget is dwarfed by the aggregate of all members' budgets, and it is lower than most of the big EU countries' budgets.
Did you mean 740k EUR per person? I can't find the whole budget right now, but it costs EU parliament over 100 million just to move it back and forth between Brussels and Strasbourg (which is totally pointless and is only done so that France can feel important). They also apparently spend 1 billion per year on translators. EDIT: I guess I offended some French people, hence the downvotes :)
Yes.
But I have to recognise, they could - at least - hand out "free" train tickets to most of the Parliament staff. Not just between Brussels and Strasbourg, but everywhere in the EU.
Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> pretty good track record when it comes to consumer rights Are you sure EU has "pretty good track record" with these fines of Google, FB, et al.? If anything, I'd say the EU puts a mild theatre every now and then, and gives the US giants a free pass otherwise.
What really matters is how many dollars did they take from european citizens and businesses, and how many tax and fine dollars did they return. Europe needs to make sure these tech giants get to keep just enough money that they don't pull out of europe entirely, but not much more. Big fines are a start, but a better approach is taxation, since that takes away the regulatory risk for the companies.
Companies should obey the laws first and foremost. I'm not sure there's a lot of regulatory risk either; Google certainly has enough lawyers to know that what they did was illegal.
Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What? Did GPT3 write the parent comment? No. Why do you think that is? > This is a multi-billion dollar fine, a $4.1B fine. As it should be the standard and nothing less than that. Even so, this one is a 'generous' multi-billion dollar fine that won't scare them. I am saying it needs to be much higher than that. GPT-3 cannot explain itself or its own comments, can it?
Losing 5% of Google's annual profits will absolutely scare the shit out of them. Consider how much this harms their ability to keep reinvesting the profits into growing the business. A 5% loss is likely sufficient to get them to stop for a moment and rethink their strategy so the punishment won't recur. > No. Why do you think that is? Because you lament the lack of a multi-billion dollar fine when the title states th…
No it won't. We all know that this won't be the last of such violations from these big tech companies like Google which the EU is disputing and especially when Facebook paid a similar fine to the FTC years ago and is once again still violating the privacy of its users. So it is clear that they still wouldn't change even if the fine is as high as that.
The fact is, they are not scared of these fines. Setting them in the multi-billion dollars should be the standard and the minimum and continuous violations warrant a much higher significant fine than this generous discounted fine which Google knows it can easily afford to do it again.
For them, the violations is worth it and pays more than these so-called generous 'fines'.
> Because you lament the lack of a multi-billion dollar fine when the title states that it's a $4B fine. This comes off as nonsensical and disconnected from reality, in a way that triggered "¯\_(ツ)_/¯, maybe it's GPT3".
Except I already said that 'this' fine "needs to be much larger" and disagreed with the EU's 'generous' fine. I'm talking fines of over $10B dollars, which that still qualifies as 'multi-billions of dollars' and 'much larger' than the EU's small fine. I made myself perfectly clear on my whole point.
So my comment is hardly 'GPT-3 bot' generated.
Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steve Jobs pointed this out along time ago. No one cares about the hardware. Nice hardware is nice but what we care about is the software. Previously, we would switch from Nokia to Sony we would lose our ringtones, our games, our apps, our photos, etc. When each phone operator had their own operating system, it was honestly terrible. And honestly, shoehorning privacy into a conversation about choices in phones is a p…
Privacy is the top concern I have with phones. The fact that 80% of them globally are compromised by default is a huge deal. Nobody informed should be rolling with Android, anywhere, and yet here we are. Also, I care about hardware... when it matters. Sell me a keyboard slider, the DROID 4 was the last compelling reason to care about hardware and we've all been bored senseless since.
Re: Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B
#130So... What's the end result? Google has to charge for Android? Ask users their search preference?
I think this is about Google's Android certification, that allows manufacturers to ship Android with any google app. Some like the Play Store are basically required by users, but Google makes it a "get all or none" deal with a lot of other demands, which includes a google search widget.