We don’t know how much she pays, but yeah. It’s quite likely she does pay that much (and it may or may not pay off - if she gets one extra long term customer paying $100 per session, every week, for a year, that easily pays for a couple hundred clicks that go nowhere. OTOH the 99% of people who don’t need a LSCW but click the pin just to figure out what it is, why it shows up on the map, or what the acronym stands for aren’t going to provide any benefit…).

Ads/Marketing/customer acquisition are unbelievably expensive (and thus also a huge business).

White screen, no video.

That sounds like something Jackass would do.

Those are indeed ads.

I believe the business pays per click. I’ve seen (edit) only one estimate for the cost, claiming $2 to $6 per click. (https://www.shopify.com/retail/google-maps-ads)

(I previously had mentioned a second estimate but that was for regular ads)

To put it in perspective, let’s assume 10W lights (there are stronger and weaker ones, but it’s a good number for a strong LED bulb).

If you leave 5 of them on unnecessarily, for 5 hours a day, that’s 0.25 kWh. Repeat for 365 days a year, and it’s 91 kWh.

If you live in Germany (notorious for high electricity prices), that’ll be… about 40 EUR per year.

I would much rather pay for a missile that Ukraine fires against a Russian tank in Ukraine, than pay for a missile I have to fire against the Russian tank myself after it rolled through Ukraine and to my doorstep.

I would also much rather pay to educate the world (using Russia as an example) that the international community isn’t putting up with wars of aggression and won’t let you get away with them, than have the world thrown into disarray when the next country decides to disrupt global supply chains with their war of aggression.

Supporting Ukraine is a smart thing regardless of what you think of Ukraine. It’s also the morally right thing, but if you don’t care about that, egoism should drive you to the same decision.

Decent? I know I’ve heard about him before he decided to go to Russia to be arrested and slowly killed.

I still don’t understand why he committed suicide-by-Putin.

Did he really have more influence as a martyr in prison than a free man in exile?

I see two three pin 3.5mm stereo plugs (one of them color coded for the headphones and one for the mic), and zero 4-pin combo plugs?

How many of these mosques show secondary explosions after getting hit?

Skipping the wordle by messing with the system clock feels like cheating.

Weird. The article does have today’s date but only mentions the Nov 10 decision. I think maybe what happened today is the publication of the full text of the decision?

It’d be great if that was how it works, unfortunately it seems like the penalties are closer to once every 3-5 years than monthly, skewing the balance even further to “screw the law, just pay the fee”:(

I’d say that’s a huge problem actually.

For a normal company, abusing data is a small part of their business and profit is a few percent of revenue, so such a fine would be devastating.

For some tech companies, profit is in the double digit percent of revenue and half of it comes from breaking the law, so the 4% are a tax they can happily pay and still be more profitable than if they followed the law.

Same misleading nonsense. If you follow the links it becomes obvious that it’s the old news banning FB from using the data on the basis of contract and legitimate interest - which they’re avoiding by claiming “consent” after people choose that they’d rather not pay a triple-digit amount per year to use the site.

No, the article is just regurgitating old news and the old misleading claim (omitting the critical part that they’re only banned from using data “on the basis of contract and legitimate interest”).

This “news” is what made Facebook start with the “agree or pay” bullshit.

Sometimes they also came up with literal malware as DRM.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal

Same, except it’s a sofa and I’d have the TV remote up my ass.

Enforcing DRM has a big downside: it paints a massive target on the DRM implementation, and it will likely end up getting broken.

Bullshit article/study:

These numbers are estimates based on the assumption that the Bitcoin mines run on water-dependent cooling systems typical in large data centers.

So they took the typical datacenter water consumption per MW, applied that to some estimate of Bitcoin power consumption (wouldn’t be surprised if they did the usual “use current output rates and multiply with power-per-output numbers of long obsolete hardware”, often seen in “studies” “showing” how tech X is horrible for the environment), and assumed that would be it.

All pictures of Bitcoin mines I’ve seen used (direct) free cooling which doesn’t use water. That has changed now, but simply assuming it’s the same as for normal data centers is an obviously questionable assumption.

Fun experiment: look up the CO2 intensity of electricity, look up prices for industrial electricity, look up claims of “CO2 emission per Netflix movie streamed”, then compare with the cost of your Netflix subscription and wonder whether Netflix would really be profitable if streaming was that power hungry.

(Also, the author misunderstood how this system works: “However, some data centers and crypto mines use a different system that keeps computers cool and cuts down water consumption by immersing them in a non-conductive liquid.” Now that DC has a hot liquid, which they could cool in a number of different ways, some using water some not. Which system they use to get the heat from the chip to the cooling system doesn’t matter if they aren’t freecooling)