Oops ...
Saw this reported on the Beeb, apparently Google has already waived the bill. However it shows that Google's product naming may need to be revisited since it seems pretty easy to get all of these things mixed up.
A child in Spain has received a bill of €100,000 from Google after confusing its AdWords and AdSense services. José Javier, 12, had signed up for Google's AdWords programme in order to make money from advertisements placed alongside YouTube videos of his band, the Torrevieja llamada Los Salerosos – en inglés, the Torrevieja …
Yeah. It's an absolute pain. I'm sure for people who are using Google's ad backend regularly, it's becomes clear, but for someone who just has a couple of monetised vids, and places an ad or two it's an absolute mess. And I'm used to dealing with complex systems.
It's like they've made no effort to distinguish sections relating to ads you host and ads you're paying for. *Never the twain should meet!*
"By early September the family was being billed by Google, receiving charges which reportedly rose quickly from an initial €15 to €19,700.
Seems pretty clear, we're talking about multiple billings, so Google hasn't received payment for the latest 100k one, but it did receive money for earlier ones.
Right, 78000, not 100000, but that seems to be what they meant by "not only hasn't received payment from the family, but will proceed to cancel the outstanding balance on its Adwords service."
Well, not saying anything yet about refunding the money already paid, hopefully that's in the works already.
"By early September the family was being billed by Google, receiving charges which reportedly rose quickly from an initial €15 to €19,700.
Didn't a parent notice the initial billings and look into it? I'd think by the time the billings were a few hundred euros they'd inquire why this money was being spent.
It's so unclear that I think the person who wrote this article ran the original El País article through Google Translate rather than ask someone who speaks Spanish to give him the gist. I saw the original article a couple of days ago and was wondering whether anyone outside Spain would pick it up; I can spot a few errors in this one.
(1) The band's name is just Los Salerosos, and it doesn't mean The Saltshakers. I would translate it something like The Fun Guys.
(2) It's not that they planned to get rich and buy a mansion: they planned to buy musical instruments, and if they got rich to buy a mansion.
(3) The bank account wasn't a family account. It was José Javier's own savings account, which was intended to pay for, among other things, driving lessons in the future.
(4) It's not that the account went 2000€ into debt, but that the account only had 2000€ in it to start with. The bank notified the parents after receiving (and this isn't entirely clear to me in the original Spanish) either bills totalling 19700€ or a bill for 19700€. (Fairly literal translation: "At the start of September the charges from Google began to arrive, and increased exponentially from some 15 euros, at the start, until reaching 19,700.")
(5) The boy's father isn't quoted at any point. It was his mother who is quoted as saying, among other things, that he didn't understand the consequences.
Not saying it isn't correct what has been translated above, but how do you know what he is saying *is* correct if you relied on translation tools to write the articles in the first place. What he's put isn't so much as a correction as a complete article pretty much ready made for you! Plus I doubt he'd ever imagine you'd use an unverified source since he could in theory be telling you anything.
Correct. According to the Oxford Dictionary, a teenager is a person aged between 13 and 19 years. Which does puzzle me. Why 13? You'd think it'd be any age that is expressed as a two-digit number starting with "1" because it's derived from "ten" in some way or other.
"Etymology - the discipline that conclusively proves that your intuitive explanation is thorougly wrong." -- Harry Rowohlt
This post has been deleted by its author
"@GKraut - Re: "realizes..." - Please upgrade to the UK Dictionary."
If you are going to snark at least be accurate. either use is perfectly acceptable in written English. (although one shouldn't mix within the same written piece) The -ize ending commonly associated as being of American English is in fact of British origin and was the way we used to spell all -ize type words. At some point this began to be replaced with the -ise type ending because as we all know language evolves; so in actual fact the Americans are using a purer form of written English than we ourselves do.
No charge, you're welcome.
Yeah, I kinda only realized it when my daughter neared her own transformation into Ms. Dracula. I had heard "teen" so much that the etymology for it went right past my head. Teen is also a quite colloquial term, hardly the stuff that your lit and grammar classes spend time on.
Jeez, from the downvotes you'd think the poor guy had commented positively on Windows Teen.
Thats because we used to have a base 12 number system and then someone decided we should move to a base ten system. Hence there are distinct words for 1 to 12 and then we move onto teens, thirteen, fourteen, <number>teen etc.. You will see the same in german.
It also explains why there are twelve months in a year, 24 hours in a day etc etc etc
it doesn't explain why there are 14lbs in a stone though :(
"Thats because we used to have a base 12 number system and then someone decided we should move to a base ten system. Hence there are distinct words for 1 to 12 and then we move onto teens, thirteen, fourteen, <number>teen etc.. You will see the same in german."
We never had a base 12 number system. The Babylonians used base 10 and also base 60. The Romans used twelfths in fractions, but Western Europeans have never in history used base 12 for actual counting, only time.English and German have words up to 12, Spanish up to 15, French up to 16.
"http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/11/15/3364432.htm"
Was that intended to support or refute my post? In that it said that we measure time in twelves because of the Babylonians, who used base 10 for counting but then grouped larger numbers into 60s. In my post I said that the Babylonians used base 10 and also base 60. I am not sure what you wanted to say, especially since you said nothing.
Oh, and add to my list of other cultures don't go up to twelve, Slavonic languages such as Russian start with one-teen.
"No. There used to be 13 Moon-ths in a year but various Roman emperors stole days from one of them to increase their favourites until it disappeared completely."
Hang on! Are you saying the Romans are stealing a month of my life from me every fricken` year?
So THAT'S what the Romans did for us! Bastards!
Count to 12 using the finger bones of one hand - touching each with the thumb of the same hand.
I was originally told this as something from Papua New Guinea, but a quick search has it going all the way back to Babylon.
Personally, i find it useful to count to 14 by including the thumb joints as well - just something to work through a 2 week swing at work.
This brings another interesting question, though: bank account details should not be enough to take money from it. There should also be a signed form sent to the bank allowing it. Though it's not rare that nowadays, banks let unauthorized withdrawals go through if they come from reputable sources, assuming the signed form is in the mail. They're still engaging their responsibility when they do that, though.