For all you know, every humanoid species that was intelligent was equally as destructive. Maybe we're the least destructive and you should be praising us.

As far as I know, nobody except maybe Microsoft(for finetuning Bing) has access to the base model. And probably not even them.

And similarly, somebody stuffing money under their mattress would be removing 20x the amount from circulation as they gain, with 5% deflation. So while one can easily imagine the 5% is financially equivalent to interest, the effect on the circulation isn't.

"Remove money from circulation" seems different than simple funding of services, though. It's not even obvious there should be any difference there, if the money were infinitely subdivisible. I don't think using personal finance equivalents like funding goods and services is sufficient to explain the effect.

An economist has probably written something in excruciating detail, making sure there's no shell games being played with the terms. So it's probably on me for not reading that instead of commenting here.

Why's deflation different from e.g. sitting on treasury bonds? The money was originally printed by the government, the bonds are issued by the government, so sitting on bonds does nothing except pays you for taking money out of the economy temporarily, same as deflation.

If e.g. nobody would ever buy a computer because it'd be 2% cheaper if you wait a year, you could just as well argue that if bonds yield 2% above inflation you could park your money in them and wait a year and have 2% more money so nobody would ever buy anything.

Most internet commenters read the title and immediately jump to the comments to start writing their response without ever opening the article.

Why were the owners liable? They notified the court and were prevented by the court from removing the machine, so my first thought is they should be blameless: The court assumed control and therefore responsibility.

Personally, I thought everyone(including Google) was crazy for using Java or any JVM language in any form until the Supreme Court case was settled. Even if the internet commenters tell you it's safe, do you really trust them to make a legal case so iron-tight that Oracle's thousands of lawyers won't find some way to sue you and cost you $500/hour in defense fees for months if you come to their attention?

In either case, if the behavior is to change, it should change as an informed decision and not because nobody noticed.

"I may not know what cos(x) means, but whatever it is shouldn't depend on what OS version I'm running"