Don't forget true factual information disappearing due to things like the GDPR Right to be Forgotten. It's not just about creation of misinfo, but also about censorship of true info.
First, you take USD4-5 off that in tax. Then more for support, finance and and marketing. Then electricity, bandwidth and insurance. Then games licences. Then hw...
Corporate tax is a flat 21%, and that's on profit, not revenue. I don't believe Nvidia pays anything for "licenses" either. There's no way that overhead should make them unprofitable even at retail prices.
Historically it was always interesting and quite challenging legal work, reconciling some things a bit like this with privacy, lawful intercept and anti-remote-exploitation-tool (anti-trojan) laws, especially in Europe (think: the cookie rule, which goes beyond cookies and PII). Then again, more recently mobile apps and operating systems (on all platforms, e.g. desktop OSs) seem to be doing quite a lot of it, so maybe those legal concerns were overblown.
> Then again, more recently mobile apps and operating systems (on all platforms, e.g. desktop OSs) seem to be doing quite a lot of it, so maybe those legal concerns were overblown.
I think its possible that the laws are still being violated, but good luck suing companies like MS or Google as an individual. Governments won't go after them because their spy agencies love the constant stream of data they can collect from it.
Who knew? But that article indicates America has used the short scale (base ten) forever and the UK has used it since 1974, so let's just assume that FT (an English language paper) is not worried about confusion regarding the meaning of 'billion' and there's a different norm at work here.
> the UK has used it since 1974, so let's just assume that FT (an English language paper) is not worried about confusion
Anyone aged around 60 or older would have been learning these numbers before 1974, and that's a significant overlap with FT's audience. You are dismissing this as if it's Middle English. It's an entirely reasonable explanation, at least one that shouldn't be dismissed.
And there was a transition period where younger people need to know that the term could be ambiguous. It's not like they burned all the maths texts in 1974 and replaced them with newer literature. Older text books were probably in use into the 80s and perhaps the 90s.
From the writing of the era, it's clear this new definition for million was not popular, and many chose to continue using the "British meaning." So it was probably in colloquial use for quite a while, and the transitional term "1 thousand million" became the proper style.
>let's just assume that FT (an English language paper) is not worried about confusion
The FT has a big international audience. As a German reader where a "Billion" is still 10^12 it does sometimes trip me up a little. So I at least find it useful.
That's a decent point, but what I don't get is, when I do a Google Translate from English to German for "billion," I get "Milliarde." Is the concern that German readers, reading the article in translation to German, will be confused? It would seem like the German readers reading the English article would understand.
Not trying to argue any point (I mean honestly...), just trying to understand the German POV here, which is interesting.
You may not be aware that it's a false friend. The German word Billion exists, and it means trillion.
So the German reader will read the English article (in English, not auto-translated), see the word billion, think “oh that looks familiar” and might assume it means the same as the German word Billion.
Machine translation makes quite a few mistakes, so I think if you have some decent knowledge of a language, you might be better off reading the original rather than a machine translation. At least my point of view from a couple of years ago. But it's also possible that machine translation has gotten WAY better in the last couple of years, I'm not sure.
I disagree, as a native speaker of a language where "bilion" means 10^12, it's clear to me that "billion" means 10^9 when used in English text. So I disagree that is ambiguous. But maybe that's wiem that way to make sure foreigners with poor understanding of English don't read it incorrectly, because I guess it gets confusing (even journalists sometimes make a mistake of translating that wrong).
"Billion" meant 10^12 in England until... some time in the 1950s, I think? But 10^9 in the USA.
So there was confusion, even in the English-speaking world. Was. If I understand correctly, England has adopted 10^9, and so now there is no ambiguity.
This isn't (AIUI) relevant to that exact problem. As Wikipedia explains:
"[T]he Orange Book lists patents that are purported to protect each drug. Patent listings and use codes are provided by the drug application owner, and the FDA is obliged to list them. In order for a generic drug manufacturer to win approval of a drug under the Hatch-Waxman Act, the generic manufacturer must certify that they will not launch their generic until after the expiration of the Orange Book-listed patent, or that the patent is invalid, unenforceable, or that the generic product will not infringe the listed patent. "
It sounds like it's easy for manufacturers to.keep adding patents, and the onus is on the generics to make the case that they're not violating. Perhaps most are just scared away, until every listed patent expires (and no new ones are added in the interim)
