Really, all "great" nations that have had their day in the sun never stay there forever. The US is no different. Why should this come as a surprise? Who props up the US debt these days? Who has the US by its financial balls? Hello! Is anyone paying attention?
I personally welcome China in its rise to technological and ecomonic dominance. The US had its chance and has failed miserably. Them are the breaks. The US still hasen't figured out that in the 21st century, it is not military might that will win the day, but ecomonic might.
But the death-thoes of the US has been clearly visible for awhile now. Notice how the stuborn US continues to try to push for military solutions to geopolitical problems, and makes big fanfare on beating up small countries that could not hope to poise a real military threat to the US.
What's scary is that the US people seem to think this is a "good thing", this big bully on the block beating up all the little kids and thinking that that in and of itself makes "America Strong". How utterly pathetic, how utterly puerile, and how utterly futile.
China has the right idea -- allow the US to waste all of its borrowed money on building something that has no return -- the military -- whilst it uses its smarts and invest in new technologies and projects that will have a return.
The public schools in the US are abysmal with regards to the rest of the world. The US doesn't even see it as fit to invest in the stock of its own young. This too is also very telling.
Not to mention the rise of religious fundamentalism in the US, which attacks science every chance it gets. Yet another bone-head move for the US.
You know what? You get what you frelling deserve. Wake up and smell the coffee. Me? I'm going to start studying my Manderain, so at least I'll have a chance to survive and hang on when reality hits the idiots.
"Libertarianism : noun, an economic model for the justification of selfishness and abject greed."
You obviously have no clue about Libertarianism. Nor do you have a clue about how wasteful your government is (assuming the US), that it spends way more than it collects in revenue (taxes), that it conducts torture and kills innocents in needless wars (hint: it didn't start with the Bush Administration, and it won't end their either.)
But since we are into slinging mud at political ideologies, let me add my 2 cents:
Liberalism: noun, a word that has become a misnomer over the decades, as it now means "Socialism". Ecomonic model which encouarges dependence on "mommy government" instead of fostering self reliance. Also, a ecomonic model where those who work hard to make money is forced at gunpoint to pay for failed institutions with no hope of improvement.
Democracy: noun, political model where the majority to beat up on the minority.
Republic: noun, political model where the majority to pick a handful to beat up on everyone!
Conservative: noun, politcal model where hatred and intolerance is encouarged through the guise of religious piety.
Now that I have that off my chest, a word about the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD formats.
Firstly, "Blu-Ray" rolls off the tongue much better than "HD-DVD". Ugh!
Secondly, Blu-Ray storage capacity is quite a bit higher than HD-DVD's
Thirdly, it's about frelling time Toshiba finally woke up to smell reality!
Now that HD-DVD is effectively dead, the market can simply focus on one format, which should result in a quicker price-drop and faster deployment of content, devices, and the like for Blu-Ray. Also, I am so glad I waited until this fallout happened. I predicted that Blu-Ray would finally win, especially since Sony woke up and smelt the reality of PORN! Finally, someone learns from past mistakes and refuses to make them again! A frelling miracle, if you ask me.
Quite frankly, all I care about is having something to back up my terabyte drives to. DVDs have become the floppy disks of the past -- who really wants to shuffle 40 or 50 of them just to backup one frelling drive?
As one who recently switched from Fedora to Ubuntu, I like not having to hand-compile a lot of the applications I use -- I like the fact that they are available from apt-get without a hitch. However, I do have one case where I can't even get Ubuntu installed properly because it lacks a good video driver to work with Nvidia Quatro Pro NVS -- and I really don't have the time to work around this problem. I just want it to install and work already, as it has done on other machines I've dropped it on.
More hi-tech for killing. Have we entered another arms race? Cold War II?
Clearly, we have to find something better for our idiots governments to do other than creating a high-tech killing toys arms race.
I think it's time for a world-wide rev...<static> acck...<BANG!> <bzzzzzzz>
THIS TRANSMISSION HAS BEEN CENSORED FOR YOUR SAFETY. YOUR GOVERNMENTS ALWAYS HAVE YOUR BEST INTERESTS AT HEART. LOVE AND BE PROUD OF YOUR GOVERNMENTS AND NEVER QUESTION THEIR MOTIVES. BE THE BEST OBEDIENT CITIZEN YOU CAN BE. THAT IS ALL.
The first law states, "The increase in the internal energy of a system is equal to the amount of energy added by heating the system, minus the amount lost as a result of the work done by the system on its surroundings."
Accordingly, since no energy is being added to the system, its internal energy must not increase. That's fine, because in you example, the total energy does not increase.
Clearly, if I put a couple of these negative-positive ball pairs on the perimiter of a wheel, the wheel would spin indefinitely, and obviously I can extract work from a spinning wheel, and thus the first law of thermodynamics is violated.
Since negative matter doesn't exist, this is all hypothetical, anyway. The negative matter would have to emit a negative gravitational field for this to work, and I'm not at all sure if gravity could have polarity that way. But if gravity is a warp in space-time as Einstien predicted, there is no reason why you can't have a negative warp.
BTW, a manned landing on Mars currently is an unsolved problem. The atmosphere is too thin for areobraking -- you'd smack into the surface long before you could slow enough to safely deploy parachutes.
Sofware development deals with all kinds of problems not too far removed from this particular dilemma, which would be tough to engineer for.
As far as space exploration goes, I'd much see the money and effort spent on sending lots of unmanned probes all over the solar system rather than do a manned mission, which would be hideously more expensive and cover far less. And if you loose a probe or two, nobody cares. If you loose a live human, that's a major tragedy that could shut down the space programmes. Kinda silly since countless thousands of humans are lost in car accidents every year without a single thougt, but that's humans for ya.
Just because a kid might be reading something about blowing stuff up is no cause for concern.
I recall my mother getting all antzy about me reading a book on witchcraft when I was a kid. I had no intentions on getting into Wicca, and big deal if I did. I was just curious, that's all.
Such paranoia that permeates our culture today. Everyone needs to calm down, take a chill pill, and honestly ask the question of is there any real reason to be concerned? What do the reliable stats show? What's all the screaming about, and is there a real problem?
Oh, but people love fear and paranoia. Life gets too boring if there's nothing to worry about.
Yes, we were all pesky 20-somethings at some point in our lives (unless you're still a teen), so been there and done that.
Now, I'm a pesky 40-something, and work in an environment with a wide age range demographic. I find it amusing that I've been in the computer field for almost as many years as my boss is old!:-)
But you know what? Being a pesky 40-something gives me a huge advantage: I know how to make things happen, how to get shit done. You 20-somethings may know all the ins and outs about the latest technologies and what not, but do you know how to put it all togeher to produce something? Can you navigate around the myriad problems and issues with integration, for instance? And I just don't mean integrating the technology itself, but integrating your firm's goals with what vendors wish to give you? Or integrating the expectations of many departments and keeping them all on the same page? Or even members of your team?
Oh, and in some areas, I can still run circles around most 20-somethings tech-wise. Being 20-something is not what it's all cracked up to be. Youth is wasted on the young. That is to say, by the time you understand how to actually take avantage of being a 20-something, you're now a 40-something!!!!
In other words, if a parent is actually being a parent in the first place, then there is no cause for concern. Articles like this never cease to amaze me because they are rendered moot if the parent is doing his job.
Aside from all the stuff already said about kids being online, one amusement that I often have is in the notion of what a "kid" or "minor" is. Yes, there's the one-size-fits-all legal definition, but that definition is largely meaningless.
Parents are the best ones to be able to gauge the maturity level of their own individual "kids". No law can determine that. No bureaucrat can define that.
Personally, I have no problem with a 19-year-old going out with a 16-year-old, unless the 16-year-old (or the 19-year-old, for that matter) had some sort of mental deficiency or a problem with making mature decisions.
As for the stranger question, the article did not clarify what type of "strangers" the kids were meeting, nor what venue these meeting were taking place in, nor did it state anything about the distribution of age ranges of kids that were actively engaging in meeting "strangers." Personally, I don't see a problem with 16-, 17-, or 18-year-olds meeting people in person they met online as long as they use their commonsense -- the same commensense one uses whenever you meet someone new for the first time. On the other hand, I would be somewhat concerned about the 9-year-old doing the same, but if the venue is her own school where she is meeting a fellow classmate she found out about on MySpace or Facebook, I would not have a problem with that either.
This article seems to be more about spreading FUD than to impart understanding. It immediately assigns "danger" to an activity that it makes no attempt to explain or clairfy the important details to. Nor does it mention anything about the actual rates that the strangers were actually innapropriate for the kids. If in 10,000 encounters there's just one that turned out to be mildly innappropriate, I would not see a huge level of concern. It all comes down to using your commonsense, after all.
So I would completely discount the article on those reasons alone. And by the way, I do have 3 kids of my own, including 2 daughters who have grown up around the Internet. Indeed, I introduced them to the Internet long before it became a household word that your average "socker mom" would recognize!
Keep in mind that the way you build a bridge doesn't change all that much over time. It's a well understood disclipine that's not up-ended every 2 years.
Constrast that with the computer field, both for both hardware and software. Just a few years ago, multicore systems were the sole province of big expensive servers. Now you can buy a quad-core system for under $500 USD.
In my 30 years of software engineering/development/architecture, all kinds of languages and programming methodoligies come and go. It's bewildering how quickly the market changes, and what was true when you first start school for computer science is dinosaur stuff by the time you graduate. Then you throw away nearly everything you learned in school as you cut your teeth on the realities of the corporate world.
Mechnical engineers have is easy in comparasion. What you learn stays useful for a while, and your degree actually means something. For a software engineer, no number of degrees means diddly. The only thing that matters is are you competent in the current development platforms and can you think on your feet to solve problems that never existed before.
It's the perpetual novelty in the field of software "engineering" that will forever keep it from becoming what many would recognize as "true engineering".
Many joke about a software engineer designing planes. But the truth is, a software engineer is perpetually at the Wright Brother's stage of development. Really, be honest -- would you feel perfectly comfortable and safe flying in a Wright Brother's plane?
SCHecjkerX wrote: Some software could be called engineered, but only if it was carefully thought out and built and compiled and worked as designed with all exception handling done on the first go.
I would have to disagree with that assessment. A perfect compile on the first go cannot be a requirement for "true" software engineering. However, I would say a successful deployment on the first go, bug and defect free, would be.
Having said that, in my 30-year experience, I have rarely, if ever, gotten an exact-enough spec from the customers that would allow for that. Most customers simply do not know what they really want until they actually see it and use it.
In short, software development is less like engineering and more like anthropology. You have to interview and interact closely with your customer to product the software he actually will find useful. If your customer is not happy, you make the necessary adjustments until he is.
But even when doing engineering and architecture, you do build rough models to show to your customer early on to make sure said customer is happy. The difference being that in those cases, there are far fewer choices for the customer to make. 99% of the actual work lies with the engineer who can control all the details. Also, you can build a model that looks very much like the finished product very easily, which is also not the same for software production.
But in the end, the goals are the same. It's all about making the customer happy. So perhaps "software development" and "engineering" is not all that dissimilar, beside what proud camp you wish to belong to.
I can tell many of the posters did not bother to read the full article. Perhaps your excuse is because his site crumbled under the "slash-dot effect", but still.
Having actually read what Jonathan Wise wrote, I thought he made quite a few good salient points. Going from idea to finished product is as much about art as it is about science. There is artistry involved at many different levels. Alas, the end-user only gets to directly see the top layers of that art. The actual organization of the code, the algorithms used, to optimizations, the kludges -- if any! --, the language constructs exploited, the database schema, if applicable, all add to the art and elegance of a software.
Most of the beauty will forever lie hidden from any but those who dive into and interact directly with the code itself. But the end-user will be presented with the form and function, and perhaps can have a appreciation for the art behind the art.
Perhaps another term for what we do, which embraces all aspects of creating software, is hacker. To the cognoscenti who appreciates the true meaning of that term and not the disparaging, derogatory version the silly media created, "hacker" says it all.
And is a greater thing than just being a dry boring "engineer". After all, we are not building planes and bridges, but creating "art" that just happens to be wicked useful and pay wicked well!
Excuse me, but this particular software engineer, who has never had formal schooling beyond high school, actually could pass the EIT.
I was actually considering it for a while when I was considering switching careers to become a patent attorney. I took a look at the EIT prepratory exam, and found I knew most, if not everything there. Not only would I have passed the EIT, but would have done so with a near-perfect score.
Engineering is not all that hard as you make it out to be. Really.
While this all sounds "cool" and very "Star Trekish", I would caution on entertaining wild-ass theories without at least some theoricial backing.
Negative matter, if it could exist, would be cool, though, because that would allow you to construct a perpetual motion machine of the first kind. For example, if you had a one ton ball of "regular" matter and a -1 ton ball of this "negative" matter, and were to hook them together on a fixed rod, you basically would've constructed a perpetual motion "engine" that would accelerate along the axis of that rod without any expenditure of energy.
Since such a thing would violate the first law of thermodynamics, I would tend to rule this out as a possibility.
Think real hard about this now. We've had a comet smack into Jupiter not too long ago, leaving lasting marks. We've had smaller objects hit the earth before, like the Tunguska event. Hello? Hint?
Crash into your house? What if it crashes into YOU?
You don't have to be a "conspiracy theorist" to point out the obvious!
Besides, the only problem with "conspiracy theorists" is that they spend way too much time and effort on the wrong conspiracies!!!!
The real conspiracists love it because the nut cases make them practically "invisible". It's the boy who cried wolf syndrome...
Having read the article, it would seem that the government is far more concerned about "loosing state secrets" than loosing lives due to the uncontrolled fall of this 12-tonne satellite. If it falls into a heavily populated area like, say, New York or London, those killed by it could care less about some silly and inane "secrets" that are over 10 years out of date, anyway.
Evolutionary Conditions for the Emergence of Commu
on
Robots Learn To Lie
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, I don't buy it. They've been sucking for a while now, and it's only getting worse.
A large part of the problem is that the entire teaching profession falls under my rubric of:
If you are smart enough to do the job,
You're not dumb enough to do the job!
I personally welcome China in its rise to technological and ecomonic dominance. The US had its chance and has failed miserably. Them are the breaks. The US still hasen't figured out that in the 21st century, it is not military might that will win the day, but ecomonic might.
But the death-thoes of the US has been clearly visible for awhile now. Notice how the stuborn US continues to try to push for military solutions to geopolitical problems, and makes big fanfare on beating up small countries that could not hope to poise a real military threat to the US.
What's scary is that the US people seem to think this is a "good thing", this big bully on the block beating up all the little kids and thinking that that in and of itself makes "America Strong". How utterly pathetic, how utterly puerile, and how utterly futile.
China has the right idea -- allow the US to waste all of its borrowed money on building something that has no return -- the military -- whilst it uses its smarts and invest in new technologies and projects that will have a return.
The public schools in the US are abysmal with regards to the rest of the world. The US doesn't even see it as fit to invest in the stock of its own young. This too is also very telling.
Not to mention the rise of religious fundamentalism in the US, which attacks science every chance it gets. Yet another bone-head move for the US.
You know what? You get what you frelling deserve. Wake up and smell the coffee. Me? I'm going to start studying my Manderain, so at least I'll have a chance to survive and hang on when reality hits the idiots.
"DVD" use to mean "Digital Video Disc" initially. But really, if you don't know what "Blu-Ray" is by now, you must live in a cave somewhere....
You obviously have no clue about Libertarianism. Nor do you have a clue about how wasteful your government is (assuming the US), that it spends way more than it collects in revenue (taxes), that it conducts torture and kills innocents in needless wars (hint: it didn't start with the Bush Administration, and it won't end their either.)
But since we are into slinging mud at political ideologies, let me add my 2 cents:
Now that I have that off my chest, a word about the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD formats.
Firstly, "Blu-Ray" rolls off the tongue much better than "HD-DVD". Ugh!
Secondly, Blu-Ray storage capacity is quite a bit higher than HD-DVD's
Thirdly, it's about frelling time Toshiba finally woke up to smell reality!
Now that HD-DVD is effectively dead, the market can simply focus on one format, which should result in a quicker price-drop and faster deployment of content, devices, and the like for Blu-Ray. Also, I am so glad I waited until this fallout happened. I predicted that Blu-Ray would finally win, especially since Sony woke up and smelt the reality of PORN! Finally, someone learns from past mistakes and refuses to make them again! A frelling miracle, if you ask me.
Quite frankly, all I care about is having something to back up my terabyte drives to. DVDs have become the floppy disks of the past -- who really wants to shuffle 40 or 50 of them just to backup one frelling drive?
So, I may see myself going back to Fedora...!
"Make a tool easy enough for even idiots to use, and only idiots will use it."
Clearly, we have to find something better for our idiots governments to do other than creating a high-tech killing toys arms race.
I think it's time for a world-wide rev...<static> acck...<BANG!> <bzzzzzzz>
THIS TRANSMISSION HAS BEEN CENSORED FOR YOUR SAFETY. YOUR GOVERNMENTS ALWAYS HAVE YOUR BEST INTERESTS AT HEART. LOVE AND BE PROUD OF YOUR GOVERNMENTS AND NEVER QUESTION THEIR MOTIVES. BE THE BEST OBEDIENT CITIZEN YOU CAN BE. THAT IS ALL.
TRANSMISSION ENDS.
Accordingly, since no energy is being added to the system, its internal energy must not increase. That's fine, because in you example, the total energy does not increase.
Clearly, if I put a couple of these negative-positive ball pairs on the perimiter of a wheel, the wheel would spin indefinitely, and obviously I can extract work from a spinning wheel, and thus the first law of thermodynamics is violated.
Since negative matter doesn't exist, this is all hypothetical, anyway. The negative matter would have to emit a negative gravitational field for this to work, and I'm not at all sure if gravity could have polarity that way. But if gravity is a warp in space-time as Einstien predicted, there is no reason why you can't have a negative warp.
Well, this old bird decided to stay in the computer field. I knew it would rebound -- it was just a matter of hanging on long enough for it to do so.
BTW, a manned landing on Mars currently is an unsolved problem. The atmosphere is too thin for areobraking -- you'd smack into the surface long before you could slow enough to safely deploy parachutes.
Sofware development deals with all kinds of problems not too far removed from this particular dilemma, which would be tough to engineer for.
As far as space exploration goes, I'd much see the money and effort spent on sending lots of unmanned probes all over the solar system rather than do a manned mission, which would be hideously more expensive and cover far less. And if you loose a probe or two, nobody cares. If you loose a live human, that's a major tragedy that could shut down the space programmes. Kinda silly since countless thousands of humans are lost in car accidents every year without a single thougt, but that's humans for ya.
Well, let us hope that my wild-ass speculations are nothing more than that!
I recall my mother getting all antzy about me reading a book on witchcraft when I was a kid. I had no intentions on getting into Wicca, and big deal if I did. I was just curious, that's all.
Such paranoia that permeates our culture today. Everyone needs to calm down, take a chill pill, and honestly ask the question of is there any real reason to be concerned? What do the reliable stats show? What's all the screaming about, and is there a real problem?
Oh, but people love fear and paranoia. Life gets too boring if there's nothing to worry about.
Now, I'm a pesky 40-something, and work in an environment with a wide age range demographic. I find it amusing that I've been in the computer field for almost as many years as my boss is old! :-)
But you know what? Being a pesky 40-something gives me a huge advantage: I know how to make things happen, how to get shit done. You 20-somethings may know all the ins and outs about the latest technologies and what not, but do you know how to put it all togeher to produce something? Can you navigate around the myriad problems and issues with integration, for instance? And I just don't mean integrating the technology itself, but integrating your firm's goals with what vendors wish to give you? Or integrating the expectations of many departments and keeping them all on the same page? Or even members of your team?
Oh, and in some areas, I can still run circles around most 20-somethings tech-wise. Being 20-something is not what it's all cracked up to be. Youth is wasted on the young. That is to say, by the time you understand how to actually take avantage of being a 20-something, you're now a 40-something!!!!
Sorry, fresh out of time machines.
In other words, if a parent is actually being a parent in the first place, then there is no cause for concern. Articles like this never cease to amaze me because they are rendered moot if the parent is doing his job.
Parents are the best ones to be able to gauge the maturity level of their own individual "kids". No law can determine that. No bureaucrat can define that.
Personally, I have no problem with a 19-year-old going out with a 16-year-old, unless the 16-year-old (or the 19-year-old, for that matter) had some sort of mental deficiency or a problem with making mature decisions.
As for the stranger question, the article did not clarify what type of "strangers" the kids were meeting, nor what venue these meeting were taking place in, nor did it state anything about the distribution of age ranges of kids that were actively engaging in meeting "strangers." Personally, I don't see a problem with 16-, 17-, or 18-year-olds meeting people in person they met online as long as they use their commonsense -- the same commensense one uses whenever you meet someone new for the first time. On the other hand, I would be somewhat concerned about the 9-year-old doing the same, but if the venue is her own school where she is meeting a fellow classmate she found out about on MySpace or Facebook, I would not have a problem with that either.
This article seems to be more about spreading FUD than to impart understanding. It immediately assigns "danger" to an activity that it makes no attempt to explain or clairfy the important details to. Nor does it mention anything about the actual rates that the strangers were actually innapropriate for the kids. If in 10,000 encounters there's just one that turned out to be mildly innappropriate, I would not see a huge level of concern. It all comes down to using your commonsense, after all.
So I would completely discount the article on those reasons alone. And by the way, I do have 3 kids of my own, including 2 daughters who have grown up around the Internet. Indeed, I introduced them to the Internet long before it became a household word that your average "socker mom" would recognize!
Constrast that with the computer field, both for both hardware and software. Just a few years ago, multicore systems were the sole province of big expensive servers. Now you can buy a quad-core system for under $500 USD.
In my 30 years of software engineering/development/architecture, all kinds of languages and programming methodoligies come and go. It's bewildering how quickly the market changes, and what was true when you first start school for computer science is dinosaur stuff by the time you graduate. Then you throw away nearly everything you learned in school as you cut your teeth on the realities of the corporate world.
Mechnical engineers have is easy in comparasion. What you learn stays useful for a while, and your degree actually means something. For a software engineer, no number of degrees means diddly. The only thing that matters is are you competent in the current development platforms and can you think on your feet to solve problems that never existed before.
It's the perpetual novelty in the field of software "engineering" that will forever keep it from becoming what many would recognize as "true engineering".
Many joke about a software engineer designing planes. But the truth is, a software engineer is perpetually at the Wright Brother's stage of development. Really, be honest -- would you feel perfectly comfortable and safe flying in a Wright Brother's plane?
Some software could be called engineered, but only if it was carefully thought out and built and compiled and worked as designed with all exception handling done on the first go.
I would have to disagree with that assessment. A perfect compile on the first go cannot be a requirement for "true" software engineering. However, I would say a successful deployment on the first go, bug and defect free, would be.
Having said that, in my 30-year experience, I have rarely, if ever, gotten an exact-enough spec from the customers that would allow for that. Most customers simply do not know what they really want until they actually see it and use it.
In short, software development is less like engineering and more like anthropology. You have to interview and interact closely with your customer to product the software he actually will find useful. If your customer is not happy, you make the necessary adjustments until he is.
But even when doing engineering and architecture, you do build rough models to show to your customer early on to make sure said customer is happy. The difference being that in those cases, there are far fewer choices for the customer to make. 99% of the actual work lies with the engineer who can control all the details. Also, you can build a model that looks very much like the finished product very easily, which is also not the same for software production.
But in the end, the goals are the same. It's all about making the customer happy. So perhaps "software development" and "engineering" is not all that dissimilar, beside what proud camp you wish to belong to.
Having actually read what Jonathan Wise wrote, I thought he made quite a few good salient points. Going from idea to finished product is as much about art as it is about science. There is artistry involved at many different levels. Alas, the end-user only gets to directly see the top layers of that art. The actual organization of the code, the algorithms used, to optimizations, the kludges -- if any! --, the language constructs exploited, the database schema, if applicable, all add to the art and elegance of a software.
Most of the beauty will forever lie hidden from any but those who dive into and interact directly with the code itself. But the end-user will be presented with the form and function, and perhaps can have a appreciation for the art behind the art.
Perhaps another term for what we do, which embraces all aspects of creating software, is hacker. To the cognoscenti who appreciates the true meaning of that term and not the disparaging, derogatory version the silly media created, "hacker" says it all. And is a greater thing than just being a dry boring "engineer". After all, we are not building planes and bridges, but creating "art" that just happens to be wicked useful and pay wicked well!
I was actually considering it for a while when I was considering switching careers to become a patent attorney. I took a look at the EIT prepratory exam, and found I knew most, if not everything there. Not only would I have passed the EIT, but would have done so with a near-perfect score.
Engineering is not all that hard as you make it out to be. Really.
Negative matter, if it could exist, would be cool, though, because that would allow you to construct a perpetual motion machine of the first kind. For example, if you had a one ton ball of "regular" matter and a -1 ton ball of this "negative" matter, and were to hook them together on a fixed rod, you basically would've constructed a perpetual motion "engine" that would accelerate along the axis of that rod without any expenditure of energy.
Since such a thing would violate the first law of thermodynamics, I would tend to rule this out as a possibility.
What do you choose to spend your money on?
Think real hard about this now. We've had a comet smack into Jupiter not too long ago, leaving lasting marks. We've had smaller objects hit the earth before, like the Tunguska event. Hello? Hint?
It was nice knowing us!
You don't have to be a "conspiracy theorist" to point out the obvious!
Besides, the only problem with "conspiracy theorists" is that they spend way too much time and effort on the wrong conspiracies!!!! The real conspiracists love it because the nut cases make them practically "invisible". It's the boy who cried wolf syndrome...
Having read the article, it would seem that the government is far more concerned about "loosing state secrets" than loosing lives due to the uncontrolled fall of this 12-tonne satellite. If it falls into a heavily populated area like, say, New York or London, those killed by it could care less about some silly and inane "secrets" that are over 10 years out of date, anyway.
I don't find it surprising at all that evolving autonomous agents would find a way to maximize its use of resources through deception.