But if there was already a gallon of benzine going into my swimming pool, I wouldn't give a rat's ass about the guy with an eyedropper. Especially if all HE's going to be doing is change his output by a measly 10-20%.
Global warming tracks far closer to solar output than greenhouse gas emissions.
"One predicted effect of an increase in solar activity would be a warming of most of the stratosphere, whereas an increase in greenhouse gases should produce cooling there. The observed trend since at least 1960 has been a cooling of the lower stratosphere" (Wikipedia). On the other hand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Climate_Change_Attribution.png
It's been significantly warmer and cooler, both within human experience. Climate records suggest that large scale natural climate changes have occurred in very short timeframes.
First: Don't use the word "significantly" in a scientific context unless you happen to be presenting some statistical data which proves statistical significance. Otherwise you're it's a red flag that you're not someone who's done any real research, much less, fully understands what you just claimed. Scientists aren't as worried about the straight temperature as they are the rate of temperature change versus the ability of the natural environment to adapt to it. The problem has never been about "warm", it's about "climate change". There are few events where it warmed as quick as it has. Even more important is the projected warming.
It's not even clear (ASSUMING the globe is warming, and ASSUMING it's anthropogenic, and ASSUMING that it's possible for us to change the carbon output of humanity with 6+ billion people riotously reproducing, and most of them now starting to want cars, TVs, etc.) that climate change would be all negative for humanity.
Do you even have a clue about what is projected to happen if the global thermohaline circulation shuts down because of glacial runoff flowing into a critical portion of it (in the northern atlantic)? You don't sound like you do. How many specific climate change consequences have you looked into besides just the temperature?
Penn & Teller had it right; the 'carbon credits' industry is far more like selling indulgences (buying freedom from guilt, from people who have neither the authority nor the power to do anything with your money) than science.
Except that indulgences were sold without limit and at a fixed price. Carbon credits will be limited, and increase in value when their supply drops. The carbon-credit idea will allow particular businesses to "indulge", but not the entire economy because the government would have only allocated out a fixed number of credits. The net sum of all the carbon credits allocated to the economy is the economy's carbon-output cap. It can only behave equivalent to indulgences if they were to allocate too many credits to everyone (a very easy problem to avoid). Don't mistake local flexibility in carbon output for flexibility on the net output.
Despite its relatively small concentration overall in the atmosphere, CO2 is an important component of Earth's atmosphere because it absorbs and emits infrared radiation at wavelengths of 4.26 Âm (asymmetric stretching vibrational mode) and 14.99 Âm (bending vibrational mode), thereby playing a role in the greenhouse effect.
So what if it's a small amount of gas relative to the total atmosphere? That doesn't change the fact that its properties with respect to a specific band of thermal radiation are problematic for us.
It's easy to belittle small numbers. But how big of a number representing benzene concentration would you like to be exposed to? How much does it take to give you cancer? I promise you it's a tiny number.
There are different because indulgences you buy them from a single centralized source, and there was no limit to their supply.
This is not the case with carbon credits, as they are limited in supply. Companies buy them from each other. When you run out of credits, you must buy them. But you can't buy from just anyone, you have to buy from people who haven't use up all theirs. As unpurchased credits become more scarce, their value goes up, which puts a soft, flexible restriction on the pollutant without a hard cap.
This allows the government to cap the net pollution, which is what matters.
It only appears analogous with indulgences if you deliberately narrow your perspective to only the sinner/polluter. You need to see this from the government's point of view, which is attempting to manage the system as a whole. Just because every individual's carbon output doesn't go down, doesn't mean this technique wouldn't reduce the net carbon output.
You're forgetting also the legal ramifications of patented GM organisms which require licenses to grow.
Nothing like GM crops accidentally creeping into an unwitting farmer's crop, giving the GM-corporation (coughmonsantocough) an excuse to sue the heck out of people who didn't even want anything to do with their modified crops.
Ah wonderful, I learned something new, thank you. The wiki article mentions several times that the API isn't easy to learn & use. You seem to have implied you're experienced with it. What's your opinion of its difficulty learning and debugging with?
Also, is there a reason you'd use that over sockets?
And if you think it's hard to use (as suggested in the Wiki article you linked), what are the chances this researcher (a non-professional programmer) would be able to maintain it once his application is written? (please don't read that question as feigning sincerity, though I understand its wording could be misread as such).
While it wouldn't get me to drop C/C++/Objective-C/Objective-C++, it's nice to know about nonetheless. I prefer handling things at a low-enough level like C (and its variations), but not so low that I have to learn something as unpleasant as assembly.
Apparently the guy looking for a developer has one.
Being in the OS minority doesn't mean that it isn't worth writing software for the platform. Look at the first Web-browser & Web-server, it was done on NeXTSTEP for God sakes. Their tiny sliver of the marketshare was so miniscule, by comparison it makes Macs look common. Yup, helluva lot of good that worthless web-browser and web-server did us today eh? Silly CERN researchers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:First_Web_Server.jpg
If you find a random pool of experienced coders, chances are that 95% have never touched a Mac before.
Fictitious statistics are so easy to use, aren't they? The vast majority of experienced coders have probably never owned a Mac, but never touching one, that is an unlikely hyperbole.
By setting the "must be on a Mac" requirement, you're immediately narrowing the field - and adding a $3000 cost-of-entry requirement. Macs don't grow on trees.
More likely $2000, given that's the entry price on their increasingly popular Macbook Pro line, but that's besides the point. If he already has that computer, or, if the workplace he does research at relies on those computers, that's the type of developer he should consider looking for.
As great as you believe Cocoa and Objective-C to be,.Net and C# are every bit as awesome - particularly for ease of use if your primary goal is just "get it done." And with the Mono runtime, apps should also work as-is on Linux and Mac.
That's nice, but you don't know if the guy asking for a programmer wants to be able to modify the code himself in the future. If this is the case, he may not be familiar with C# or mono, and may already be comfortable with what he was originally asking for.
Accept the fact that sometimes people ask for hard to find things that they actually need, and that these things are not what you would ever need. What you prefer might not work for his needs. Contributing to one fo the countless and pointless OS/API/language holy-wars on the Internet is unlikely to be the best use of anyone's time.
Before recommending it though, I'd be sure to check a few things first: 1. Does the employer intend to play with the open-source code he hired someone to make (assumably yes or he wouldn't care about it being open-source). In which case, you must consider if he's comfortable, or even capable by himself of using code written in Java. 2. Assuming he knows both Java & Obj-C, and could use both, do his needs/preferences lend themselves to either language by virtue of the languages biases toward statically typed objects (Java) or dynamically typed objects (Obj-C). 3. Does he need all the low-level features of C (which Obj-C inherently has)? Pointer arithmetic is useful. 4. Does he need to include any pre-existing C or C++ libraries?
If he wants a widely adopted, mult-iplatform application, then yes an open source Java/Swing might be his ticket. But if he doesn't care about it being widely adopted, doesn't care if it's multi-platform, and only cares about getting an open-source Mac application made for his research, then he doesn't have to. Sure, you and I would prefer to have him do what benefits us most, because we're all "gimme free stuff!", but maybe he doesn't care about us. Who knows.
What I do know is that simply having to use a pre-existing C or C++ library is reason enough for him to choose Cocoa over Java.
What matters is that you shut out a significant number of potential community members when you are too narrow in your requirements, and that always hurts your chances for success when you are trying to leverage a community-dependent process like open source software development.
Don't confuse not-being-able-to-find-programmers with not-knowing-where-to-start-looking-for-programmers. Also I'd like to point out all he has to do is ask some professors at a nearby university if they have any biomedical grad students who know how to program on Macs. You may think this is a near non-existent demographic, but I'm an environmental science major who's done Mac software for my own research purposes (and had fun doing it), so hey, we're out there.
Use something truly multi-platform, like C or perl, and eschew toolset specifications.
I'm doubtful anyone would be willing to use strict C to write an entire application nowadays, especially not for research which requires flexibility and the ability to do quick/easy experimentation with ideas that might end up going nowhere. Don't get me wrong, C is great for tons of stuff, but I'd avoid writing an entire program with a GUI in just that alone (especially if a non-professional-programmer like him is supposed to be able to make use of that open-source code). Objective-C & Cocoa really let you get away with letting the code evolve from nothing, with fairly little planning. It feels so casual. ANSI-C, well, takes more planning to avoid the code from becoming a mess. Once it becomes a mess, he'll be wasting time on managing the code rather than using the fruits of the code to further his research.
By the way, you could always tell the programmer to develop a C-backend, and turn it into a library for an Objective-C frontend.
Objective-C is is totally compatible with C. In fact, there is no Objective-C compiler, just a preprocessor that turns Obj-C into straight-C, THEN GCC compiles that. This is also the reason why you can get away with things like Objective-C++ which let you mix Obj-C code and C++ code in the same source code files. (You can't tell Obj-C objects to call C++ methods, but hey, you can always exchange data via primitive int/float/double). The C/C++ backend method is what I personally prefer.
All I'm suggesting is to avoid the knee-jerk reaction to tell-him-what-he-really-wants and help him get what he's asking for. Don't assume he's completely clueless. If he wants to be able to use Cocoa, or at least a Cocoa front-end, let the man do as he pleases.
Transmission doesn't just give the appearance of being a good Mac app, it actually is. There's real, solid Cocoa goodness here. Based on a quick survey of the project (so don't hold me to the details), it looks like the developers did this by separating the core application logic out into a library called libtransmission, which I assume is shared across the different platforms.
The Mac application project imports libtransmission and uses Objective-C's natural integration with ansi C to layer a Mac UI on top of the core library. The Torrent Objective-C class wraps the low-level C structs, acting as a bridge for the data model.
Cocoa doesn't have to break multi-platform compatibility except at the GUI. If you're porting software, then you were probably going to have to rewrite the GUI anyway which makes that issue relatively moot.
Try "my own personal development experience." Are you disagreeing that he is narrowing down potential coders by selecting their platform for them?
Though you seem to be implying that biases & experience are different, experience does result in biases, and this isn't inherently good nor bad. Some of my best professors openly state on the first day of their classes what their personal biases are. Everyone has them. Experience is an educated bias. This isn't bad, except when the bias is not the result of experience (you may be thinking now "Hey, that was my entire reason you dipshit, I am experienced", but I'd point out that you're not experienced specifically in what the guy was asking for). You misread what I wrote if you felt you needed to take personal offense to my suggestion that your biases were behind the statement that I contested. To me, this is little different than a biologist getting corrected by a geologist regarding a geological topic. You aren't a Cocoa programmer. You aren't even a Mac programmer.
Are you disagreeing that he is narrowing down potential coders by selecting their platform for them?
Of course he is. Doesn't mean he won't be able to easily find the type of developer he was asking for.
Cocoa is by far the easiest application framework I've seen so far.
Great! Now, how the hell do I start that when I refuse to pay over a grand for a machine just to get the OS?
Except that the fact he is asking for Mac software probably means he already has the hardware and OS, thus making it cheaper for him to get the type of programmer he was asking for. Maybe he's not totally clueless and actually knows what he needs, and is only really needs to know how to go about getting it.
Or are you asking me to buy into Apple just so I can learn Cocoa?
My my, you've gotten personal. This was never about you, this is about what advice to give to a biomedical researcher who is asking for a Mac software developer to do a job. Don't try to make it more about you than it really should be. (Of course I'm assuming he hasn't hired you for this proposed job).
you'd also realize that for scientific research, Cocoa really can be ideal.
I think it is you who are trying to force platforms & technologies on others.
Or maybe if you did your homework you'd realize that OpenStep (later renamed Cocoa) has always been attractive to researchers. Page 3 of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass (a former NeXTSTEP programmer):
Programmers loved OpenStep. It enabled them to experiment more easily with new ideas. In fact, Tim Berners-Lee developed the first Web browser and the first Web server on NeXTSTEP. Securities analysis could code and test new financial models much more quickly. Colleges were developing the applications that made their research possible. I don't know what the intelligence community was using it for, but they bought thousands of copies of OpenStep.
Keep in mind that this was back when OpenStep was very expensive and many people could not afford this stuff, but still, the people who had it loved it. Also refer to the website http://www.macresearch.org/ which is devoted solely to Mac/Cocoa developers in the scientific community. I wasn't just pulling lauds out of my ass. There is history you could have researched which supports my original statement.
Should have known never to speak about Cocoa lest an Apple fanboy hear me.
Yeah, I'm such an Apple fanboy that I go out of my way to keep my software's backend C/C++ so it's portable to non-Apple systems. I suppose what makes me an even bigger Apple fanboy is suggesting that other people do the same to keep their stuff portable too
It sounds to me like you might be trying to change his mind purely because of your own personal development biases. It's not like Linux is supposed to have some sort of monopoly on open-source software. And in a medical setting, you're going to want as few potential technical problems as possible. Using a Mac there makes quite a bit of sense.
Cocoa is by far the easiest application framework I've seen so far. If you know C++, you can learn Objective-C in an afternoon on a weekend. And you'll be better off for it, as it's a dream to use. If he wants software made on a Mac, there's almost no reason to avoid using Cocoa.
The best thing that this guy could have done is to get the backend in C++/C so its portable and keep parts like the GUI as Objective-C. The parts between can be compiled as Objective-C++. It's not like if it was a Linux/Windows application you weren't going to have to rewrite the GUI-code to port in the future it anyway. I can tell you if the programs I wrote weren't Cocoa apps, they'd have taken much more time, and if that had been the case I probably wouldn't have even attempted them.
If you know Cocoa's history (dating back to NeXTSTEP), you'd also realize that for scientific research, Cocoa really can be ideal. Scientists/researchers are often able to program, but they're not "professional programmers", so when they do it, they want it to consume as little of their time as possible. A scientist's priorities are not the same as a programmers priorities. Cocoa definitely makes sense there. I doubt this guy would be asking for an open source app in the first place if he didn't plan to at least review and consider modifying some code himself.
No, they don't diminish the same way in non-ideal settings, like the real universe. "gravity is important at long distances is because all masses are positive and therefore gravity's interaction cannot be screened like in electromagnetism." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interaction )
if black holes existed, we should be able to see a black, lightless area around them.
We have observed massive sources of gravity (affecting visible neighboring bodies) which are not emitting light, which appears to confirm the presence of the event horizon shielding a large object with a ton of gravity from direct observation.
When an electric field gets intense enough, it also affects light, which is after all an electromagnetic wave which travels throughout the immense distance of space just fine.
Light can't be attractive & repulsive which is why it has range. Like how gravity can't be attractive & repulsive. It doesn't get cancelled out over long ranges. Electromagnetic forces can be attractive or repulsive, and over long distances are balanced out by multiple sources of electromagnetic force. This is analogous to why my hands doesn't have noticeable magnetic interactions with each other, the charged particles in each are balancing each other out.
The so called "event horizon" has to be reworked, if, as is now theorized, black holes can "evaporate".
Please don't tell me you're taking a word out of context to mislead people with it. Black holes don't evaporate in the sense that they lose mass by emitting particles (in a classical sense). They lose mass due to particle/anti-particles pairs generated spontaneously by quantum-fluctuations in otherwise empty space, are torn apart from eachother near the event horizon, (more anti-particles fall inward than normal-particles). Being 'eroded' by antimatter is not the same thing as actually shooting off bits of mass.
This can easily explain the so called "gravitational" lensing also.
When any star, regardless of mass gets under sufficient electrical stress, it may explode. We call this a nova or even if it's a really big explosion a supernova.
You're claiming that stars can't lose internal pressure and undergo gravitational collapse? They just always get electrically unstable and blow up? And that it actually has absolutely nothing to do with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-degenerate_matter ?
By a black hole's inherent properties you can't directly observe it and to expect such direct observations is foolish. Electric forces aren't going to cause the space-time curvature that would hide the black hole to begin with. If black holes were wells of primarily electric force, why would they trap light making them so well, "black"?
We know that the electric force is 36 orders of magnitude greater than gravity.
Too bad the range of that electric force is too short for any of this pseudoscience to make any sense. Gravity, on the other hand actually has non-negligible range over astronomical distances.
When black holes were first theorized, we considered them to be a cosmic sewer from which nothing, not even light can escape. Then observations were made of objects which were _believed_ to be black holes, which indicated that matter is ejected from these objects in intense "jets". This necessitated an extensive reworking of the gravitational theory involving black holes.
When you mentioned "matter is ejected", you're thinking of quasars, which are a type of black hole, but not all black holes are quasars. By the way, no reworking ever done says anything leaves a black hole (quasar or otherwise). Emissions are from stuff falling toward it, which is why quasars emissions cease when they don't have matter to feed on. The rule of event-horizons being a point-of-no-return for light has not been "reworked".
By the way, if you don't believe black holes should exist, what do you think is supposed to happen when a star's mass exceeds the Chandrasekhar Limit eh? How does your EU junk explain gravitational lensing which is successfully observed? The General Theory of Relativity has a proven record of successful experimental predictions, and this electric universe junk doesn't. Explain all that.
The cosmologists who admit only gravity as the controlling force operative in the large-scale universe, find it necessary to come up with all sorts of exotic constructs, such as black holes, dark matter and dark energy. If the 36 orders of magnitude greater electric interaction is ALSO taken into account, in addition to the force of gravity, then these exotic, weird figments of the astronomers imagination become unnecessary to explain the latest observation coming in from advanced, sophisticated space probes.
What are you talking about?
Black Holes were not some exotic construct necessary cooked up to make sense of observations. They were predicted by theorists on paper, and only after we calculated they must exist did anyone actually try looking for them. Which we did.
As I understand it, part of coke's corrosive behaviors are from the acids 2 other posters mentioned (carbonic & phosphoric), but one they left out was that the sugar provides an amazingly good food source for bacteria in your mouth. They form a biofilm on your teeth (scrape your tooth after not having brushed for a while, that smoothness you feel is the biofilm). As the bacteria metabolize the sugars, they excrete waste compounds which are a corrosive acid(s?). Because there's a biofilm there which provides them a safe place to live, the waste compounds are trapped there, against your tooth, helping the corrosive chemicals do their work.
Drinks with fake sugar which isn't metabolized by your body (or no sugar at all) is also not metabolized by bacteria and gives them less to work with.
Normally two types of events related to eutrophication can cause fish kills. It is either toxic algae or low oxygen concentrations. Low oxygen concentrations in the bottom waters result in the release of hydrogen sulphide (H2S) from the sediments. The H2S is lethal to most animals and the result of the sudden release is often extensive and leads to the immediate death of animals living at or near the sea floor as well as in the water column.
Of course if it's one of the toxic algae blooms it's easy to understand what kills the first fish.
For non-toxic algae, just a guess here, but large amounts of dying algae? Eventually algae die & decompose like any other living thing.
Another guess is given the eutrophication is caused (usually) by agricultural runoff, maybe pesticides & herbicides accompany the nutrients. Fish are killed by the pesticides quickly, or either slowly via bioaccumulation.
I don't know what kind of biological waste algae produce, but if it were anything like animal waste, I know enough of it in one place will ruin an environment. On top of that, shit decomposes too.
Also, just because they produce oxygen doesn't mean they produce it at a rate equal to or greater than the rates of decomposition & organisms' respiration.
Ultimately I don't know which (if any) of these are true, but I just felt like tossing out some ideas. Maybe it's something as simple as clogging up their gills.
Astrology is actually more valid than ID, since it's a scientific theory.
No, no it's not. Maybe back in the "stupid ages" you could have argued it was a hypothesis, but never a theory.
According to the National Academy of Sciences, "Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature that is supported by many facts gathered over time."
About any variant of astrology is falsifiable -- it gives testable consistent predictions.
Wether something is falsifiable or not isn't relevant to wether something is true. It's only relevant to wether you can prove it's true. Imagine it's the year 1000 BC. Some crackpot submits a hypothesis called Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics would be as true back then as it is nowadays, but you'd never be able to prove it in that era with their technology.
If you're really suggesting that a falsifiable idea is in some way superior to non-falsifiable ones, then surely in the year 1000 BC astrology would be superior to Quantum Mechanics, which would be quite wrong.
Do not mix falsifiable ideas with non-falsifiable ones. They don't mix. It's apple's and oranges, *not* apples and rotten-apples.
A theory, something that ID is not.
I'm gonna go with "duh" here. And besides, who here ever said it was a theory?
Just because they can doesn't also mean it would prevent shortages though.
It may only increase the level of supply toward an asymptote.
Also, citing crops is arguably a bad example since it's not analogous to metals. Crops are sustainable indefinitely. Natural nutrient cycles supplemented by artificially added nutrients, along with an infinite supply of light, as well as land that never disappears. Problems can be rebounded from.
On the other hand, minerals (as well as oil) are not sustainable (in human timescales). More can't be made (unlike crops). If you have a cake, cutting off increasingly small yet expensive pieces of it only works to a point. Eventually the pieces you cut off will to small to be useful for any applications. (a microgram of cake is pretty useless).
Proving that there is some return from higher prices doesn't mean it won't be a diminishing return. Thus, critical shortages remain a possibility.
Because the demand for cheap spaceflight would be present industry with a large enough market to encourage investment in the technology. Cryogenic rocket fuel is fairly cheap stuff - like $.50 a pound same as gasoline -
I've got sources suggesting as low as "under a dollar", but none went that low. Can you cite some sources? And it's worth mentioning that the cost of that fuel can rise as the price of oil rises. The RP-1 is a petroleum product, and as such, the cost can never remain constant nor decrease, it can only become more expensive. If you're hoping for asteroid-mining to become cheap, that alone makes things difficult by the time the space-mining & delivery technology were to be developed. You have to use fuel-cost estimates that consider the future price of oil at the time of mining.
so the cost is in the vehicle and the operations.
Which would be nice, assuming the fuel burns on its own. But it doesn't, since it still requires the LOX to be useful. The cost of producing & storing liquid-oxygen isn't negligible.
Besides, once your actually in space, you can use things like solar sails or magnetic sails.
For probes and small crews. Not for mining operations. While your statement read by itself is innocent enough, in-context, I'm gonna go with a big "heck no". Mining inherently involves huge amounts of mass. The equipment & containers alone aren't going be driven by sails (not to mention ore/metals). Non-small masses are exactly the achilles heel of solar/magnetic sails.
Even plain old rockets aren't so bad then because they no longer have to get off of the surface of the Earth, so they can operate at a lower thrust level (lower engine mass) and require less fuel (low delta-V).
I get the feeling all you did here was look up a table on the various delta-V's between each place. I'm skeptical that equating cost to delta-V gives a feasible estimate of the actual costs.
Mining in space requires delivery of the ore to Earth in a way that doesn't destroy it. That requires ships or at least containers capable of withstanding reentry. They would need to be brought back into space. Thus, right off the bat, whatever protects your ore from re-entry will add an Earth-to-LEO delta-V cost. That sucks.
Now add the cost of "exploration". I'd suggest asking someone in the oil industry how much exploration costs them. In 1983, BP spent $120 million on what the geologists/reservoir-engineers considered a great prospect called Mukluk in Alaska, which turned out to not have any oil (just water). And that was on Earth where stuff is easy! In space, you'd have to do similar exploratory digging to know exactly what metal is there (if it's valuable). That's a damn scary thing to spend money on, because mistakes do happen. How terribly bad will the economy have to be for investors to be desperate enough to invest in exploratory space mining, when they can always invest in safer things?
So, really, the issue is low demand. If more people had a good valuable reason to go into space, the market would provide them with a way. So far, the only way to make money is with telecommunications, and at the low rate of launch, it is more profitable for companies to build a smaller number of expendable launch vehicles that have a higher per unit cost.
What if the demand required to get to the break-even-cost were such a great cost that it was still unattainable? Just because there is a break-even point for all market costs doesn't mean that there will ever be anyone with enough money to pay for it. I could have a vending machine that gives me platinum bars for a $5.00 each, but if I don't have the 5 bucks, I'm still not getting jack from that machine.
Knowing a theoretical break-even point exists isn't enough.
You also have to prove it's something that someone, anyone in the practical world, would be able to write the check for.
The assumption that this would be the case hasn't been demonstrated to be true for something this astronomically expensive (in terms of dollars & raw joules of energy).
Slashdot Mirror
But if there was already a gallon of benzine going into my swimming pool, I wouldn't give a rat's ass about the guy with an eyedropper. Especially if all HE's going to be doing is change his output by a measly 10-20%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png (Reposted because you appear to have not read it properly, otherwise you'd see the error inherent in what you said).
Global warming tracks far closer to solar output than greenhouse gas emissions.
"One predicted effect of an increase in solar activity would be a warming of most of the stratosphere, whereas an increase in greenhouse gases should produce cooling there. The observed trend since at least 1960 has been a cooling of the lower stratosphere" (Wikipedia). On the other hand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Climate_Change_Attribution.png
It's been significantly warmer and cooler, both within human experience. Climate records suggest that large scale natural climate changes have occurred in very short timeframes.
First: Don't use the word "significantly" in a scientific context unless you happen to be presenting some statistical data which proves statistical significance. Otherwise you're it's a red flag that you're not someone who's done any real research, much less, fully understands what you just claimed. Scientists aren't as worried about the straight temperature as they are the rate of temperature change versus the ability of the natural environment to adapt to it. The problem has never been about "warm", it's about "climate change". There are few events where it warmed as quick as it has. Even more important is the projected warming.
It's not even clear (ASSUMING the globe is warming, and ASSUMING it's anthropogenic, and ASSUMING that it's possible for us to change the carbon output of humanity with 6+ billion people riotously reproducing, and most of them now starting to want cars, TVs, etc.) that climate change would be all negative for humanity.
Do you even have a clue about what is projected to happen if the global thermohaline circulation shuts down because of glacial runoff flowing into a critical portion of it (in the northern atlantic)? You don't sound like you do. How many specific climate change consequences have you looked into besides just the temperature?
Penn & Teller had it right; the 'carbon credits' industry is far more like selling indulgences (buying freedom from guilt, from people who have neither the authority nor the power to do anything with your money) than science.
Except that indulgences were sold without limit and at a fixed price. Carbon credits will be limited, and increase in value when their supply drops. The carbon-credit idea will allow particular businesses to "indulge", but not the entire economy because the government would have only allocated out a fixed number of credits. The net sum of all the carbon credits allocated to the economy is the economy's carbon-output cap. It can only behave equivalent to indulgences if they were to allocate too many credits to everyone (a very easy problem to avoid). Don't mistake local flexibility in carbon output for flexibility on the net output.
Despite its relatively small concentration overall in the atmosphere, CO2 is an important component of Earth's atmosphere because it absorbs and emits infrared radiation at wavelengths of 4.26 Âm (asymmetric stretching vibrational mode) and 14.99 Âm (bending vibrational mode), thereby playing a role in the greenhouse effect.
So what if it's a small amount of gas relative to the total atmosphere? That doesn't change the fact that its properties with respect to a specific band of thermal radiation are problematic for us.
It's easy to belittle small numbers. But how big of a number representing benzene concentration would you like to be exposed to? How much does it take to give you cancer? I promise you it's a tiny number.
What is relevant is what that concentration of something does. And in the case of atmospheric carbon this is significant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png
There are different because indulgences you buy them from a single centralized source, and there was no limit to their supply.
This is not the case with carbon credits, as they are limited in supply. Companies buy them from each other. When you run out of credits, you must buy them. But you can't buy from just anyone, you have to buy from people who haven't use up all theirs. As unpurchased credits become more scarce, their value goes up, which puts a soft, flexible restriction on the pollutant without a hard cap.
This allows the government to cap the net pollution, which is what matters.
It only appears analogous with indulgences if you deliberately narrow your perspective to only the sinner/polluter. You need to see this from the government's point of view, which is attempting to manage the system as a whole. Just because every individual's carbon output doesn't go down, doesn't mean this technique wouldn't reduce the net carbon output.
You're forgetting also the legal ramifications of patented GM organisms which require licenses to grow.
Nothing like GM crops accidentally creeping into an unwitting farmer's crop, giving the GM-corporation (coughmonsantocough) an excuse to sue the heck out of people who didn't even want anything to do with their modified crops.
Ah wonderful, I learned something new, thank you. The wiki article mentions several times that the API isn't easy to learn & use. You seem to have implied you're experienced with it. What's your opinion of its difficulty learning and debugging with?
Also, is there a reason you'd use that over sockets?
And if you think it's hard to use (as suggested in the Wiki article you linked), what are the chances this researcher (a non-professional programmer) would be able to maintain it once his application is written? (please don't read that question as feigning sincerity, though I understand its wording could be misread as such).
While it wouldn't get me to drop C/C++/Objective-C/Objective-C++, it's nice to know about nonetheless. I prefer handling things at a low-enough level like C (and its variations), but not so low that I have to learn something as unpleasant as assembly.
For fuck's sake: Nobody has a Mac.
Apparently the guy looking for a developer has one.
Being in the OS minority doesn't mean that it isn't worth writing software for the platform. Look at the first Web-browser & Web-server, it was done on NeXTSTEP for God sakes. Their tiny sliver of the marketshare was so miniscule, by comparison it makes Macs look common. Yup, helluva lot of good that worthless web-browser and web-server did us today eh? Silly CERN researchers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:First_Web_Server.jpg
If you find a random pool of experienced coders, chances are that 95% have never touched a Mac before.
Fictitious statistics are so easy to use, aren't they? The vast majority of experienced coders have probably never owned a Mac, but never touching one, that is an unlikely hyperbole.
By setting the "must be on a Mac" requirement, you're immediately narrowing the field - and adding a $3000 cost-of-entry requirement. Macs don't grow on trees.
More likely $2000, given that's the entry price on their increasingly popular Macbook Pro line, but that's besides the point. If he already has that computer, or, if the workplace he does research at relies on those computers, that's the type of developer he should consider looking for.
As great as you believe Cocoa and Objective-C to be, .Net and C# are every bit as awesome - particularly for ease of use if your primary goal is just "get it done." And with the Mono runtime, apps should also work as-is on Linux and Mac.
That's nice, but you don't know if the guy asking for a programmer wants to be able to modify the code himself in the future. If this is the case, he may not be familiar with C# or mono, and may already be comfortable with what he was originally asking for.
Accept the fact that sometimes people ask for hard to find things that they actually need, and that these things are not what you would ever need. What you prefer might not work for his needs. Contributing to one fo the countless and pointless OS/API/language holy-wars on the Internet is unlikely to be the best use of anyone's time.
True, that is certainly an option.
Before recommending it though, I'd be sure to check a few things first:
1. Does the employer intend to play with the open-source code he hired someone to make (assumably yes or he wouldn't care about it being open-source). In which case, you must consider if he's comfortable, or even capable by himself of using code written in Java.
2. Assuming he knows both Java & Obj-C, and could use both, do his needs/preferences lend themselves to either language by virtue of the languages biases toward statically typed objects (Java) or dynamically typed objects (Obj-C).
3. Does he need all the low-level features of C (which Obj-C inherently has)? Pointer arithmetic is useful.
4. Does he need to include any pre-existing C or C++ libraries?
If he wants a widely adopted, mult-iplatform application, then yes an open source Java/Swing might be his ticket. But if he doesn't care about it being widely adopted, doesn't care if it's multi-platform, and only cares about getting an open-source Mac application made for his research, then he doesn't have to.
Sure, you and I would prefer to have him do what benefits us most, because we're all "gimme free stuff!", but maybe he doesn't care about us. Who knows.
What I do know is that simply having to use a pre-existing C or C++ library is reason enough for him to choose Cocoa over Java.
What matters is that you shut out a significant number of potential community members when you are too narrow in your requirements, and that always hurts your chances for success when you are trying to leverage a community-dependent process like open source software development.
Don't confuse not-being-able-to-find-programmers with not-knowing-where-to-start-looking-for-programmers. Also I'd like to point out all he has to do is ask some professors at a nearby university if they have any biomedical grad students who know how to program on Macs. You may think this is a near non-existent demographic, but I'm an environmental science major who's done Mac software for my own research purposes (and had fun doing it), so hey, we're out there.
Use something truly multi-platform, like C or perl, and eschew toolset specifications.
I'm doubtful anyone would be willing to use strict C to write an entire application nowadays, especially not for research which requires flexibility and the ability to do quick/easy experimentation with ideas that might end up going nowhere. Don't get me wrong, C is great for tons of stuff, but I'd avoid writing an entire program with a GUI in just that alone (especially if a non-professional-programmer like him is supposed to be able to make use of that open-source code). Objective-C & Cocoa really let you get away with letting the code evolve from nothing, with fairly little planning. It feels so casual. ANSI-C, well, takes more planning to avoid the code from becoming a mess. Once it becomes a mess, he'll be wasting time on managing the code rather than using the fruits of the code to further his research.
By the way, you could always tell the programmer to develop a C-backend, and turn it into a library for an Objective-C frontend.
Objective-C is is totally compatible with C. In fact, there is no Objective-C compiler, just a preprocessor that turns Obj-C into straight-C, THEN GCC compiles that. This is also the reason why you can get away with things like Objective-C++ which let you mix Obj-C code and C++ code in the same source code files. (You can't tell Obj-C objects to call C++ methods, but hey, you can always exchange data via primitive int/float/double). The C/C++ backend method is what I personally prefer.
All I'm suggesting is to avoid the knee-jerk reaction to tell-him-what-he-really-wants and help him get what he's asking for. Don't assume he's completely clueless. If he wants to be able to use Cocoa, or at least a Cocoa front-end, let the man do as he pleases.
Take a look at how the leading BitTorrent client on Mac OS X was designed: http://theocacao.com/document.page/548
Transmission doesn't just give the appearance of being a good Mac app, it actually is. There's real, solid Cocoa goodness here. Based on a quick survey of the project (so don't hold me to the details), it looks like the developers did this by separating the core application logic out into a library called libtransmission, which I assume is shared across the different platforms.
The Mac application project imports libtransmission and uses Objective-C's natural integration with ansi C to layer a Mac UI on top of the core library. The Torrent Objective-C class wraps the low-level C structs, acting as a bridge for the data model.
Cocoa doesn't have to break multi-platform compatibility except at the GUI. If you're porting software, then you were probably going to have to rewrite the GUI anyway which makes that issue relatively moot.
I suggest next time you try learning Cocoa, you first have this book handy:
"Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" by Aaron Hillegass.
Try "my own personal development experience." Are you disagreeing that he is narrowing down potential coders by selecting their platform for them?
Though you seem to be implying that biases & experience are different, experience does result in biases, and this isn't inherently good nor bad. Some of my best professors openly state on the first day of their classes what their personal biases are. Everyone has them. Experience is an educated bias. This isn't bad, except when the bias is not the result of experience (you may be thinking now "Hey, that was my entire reason you dipshit, I am experienced", but I'd point out that you're not experienced specifically in what the guy was asking for). You misread what I wrote if you felt you needed to take personal offense to my suggestion that your biases were behind the statement that I contested. To me, this is little different than a biologist getting corrected by a geologist regarding a geological topic. You aren't a Cocoa programmer. You aren't even a Mac programmer.
Are you disagreeing that he is narrowing down potential coders by selecting their platform for them?
Of course he is. Doesn't mean he won't be able to easily find the type of developer he was asking for.
Cocoa is by far the easiest application framework I've seen so far.
Great! Now, how the hell do I start that when I refuse to pay over a grand for a machine just to get the OS?
Except that the fact he is asking for Mac software probably means he already has the hardware and OS, thus making it cheaper for him to get the type of programmer he was asking for. Maybe he's not totally clueless and actually knows what he needs, and is only really needs to know how to go about getting it.
Or are you asking me to buy into Apple just so I can learn Cocoa?
My my, you've gotten personal. This was never about you, this is about what advice to give to a biomedical researcher who is asking for a Mac software developer to do a job. Don't try to make it more about you than it really should be. (Of course I'm assuming he hasn't hired you for this proposed job).
you'd also realize that for scientific research, Cocoa really can be ideal.
I think it is you who are trying to force platforms & technologies on others.
Or maybe if you did your homework you'd realize that OpenStep (later renamed Cocoa) has always been attractive to researchers.
Page 3 of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass (a former NeXTSTEP programmer):
Programmers loved OpenStep. It enabled them to experiment more easily with new ideas. In fact, Tim Berners-Lee developed the first Web browser and the first Web server on NeXTSTEP. Securities analysis could code and test new financial models much more quickly. Colleges were developing the applications that made their research possible. I don't know what the intelligence community was using it for, but they bought thousands of copies of OpenStep.
Keep in mind that this was back when OpenStep was very expensive and many people could not afford this stuff, but still, the people who had it loved it. Also refer to the website http://www.macresearch.org/ which is devoted solely to Mac/Cocoa developers in the scientific community. I wasn't just pulling lauds out of my ass. There is history you could have researched which supports my original statement.
Should have known never to speak about Cocoa lest an Apple fanboy hear me.
Yeah, I'm such an Apple fanboy that I go out of my way to keep my software's backend C/C++ so it's portable to non-Apple systems. I suppose what makes me an even bigger Apple fanboy is suggesting that other people do the same to keep their stuff portable too
It sounds to me like you might be trying to change his mind purely because of your own personal development biases. It's not like Linux is supposed to have some sort of monopoly on open-source software. And in a medical setting, you're going to want as few potential technical problems as possible. Using a Mac there makes quite a bit of sense.
Cocoa is by far the easiest application framework I've seen so far. If you know C++, you can learn Objective-C in an afternoon on a weekend. And you'll be better off for it, as it's a dream to use. If he wants software made on a Mac, there's almost no reason to avoid using Cocoa.
The best thing that this guy could have done is to get the backend in C++/C so its portable and keep parts like the GUI as Objective-C. The parts between can be compiled as Objective-C++. It's not like if it was a Linux/Windows application you weren't going to have to rewrite the GUI-code to port in the future it anyway. I can tell you if the programs I wrote weren't Cocoa apps, they'd have taken much more time, and if that had been the case I probably wouldn't have even attempted them.
If you know Cocoa's history (dating back to NeXTSTEP), you'd also realize that for scientific research, Cocoa really can be ideal. Scientists/researchers are often able to program, but they're not "professional programmers", so when they do it, they want it to consume as little of their time as possible. A scientist's priorities are not the same as a programmers priorities. Cocoa definitely makes sense there. I doubt this guy would be asking for an open source app in the first place if he didn't plan to at least review and consider modifying some code himself.
Of course, how much beer & pizza is an important factor. Given sufficient quantities of pizza & beer, hell, I'd do it.
Its not like programming with Cocoa is terribly hard or anything.
That 100X was in the context of the word "sensitivity", which I'm guessing is not an synonym for efficiency.
Both diminish the same way[...]
No, they don't diminish the same way in non-ideal settings, like the real universe. "gravity is important at long distances is because all masses are positive and therefore gravity's interaction cannot be screened like in electromagnetism." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interaction )
if black holes existed, we should be able to see a black, lightless area around them.
We have observed massive sources of gravity (affecting visible neighboring bodies) which are not emitting light, which appears to confirm the presence of the event horizon shielding a large object with a ton of gravity from direct observation.
When an electric field gets intense enough, it also affects light, which is after all an electromagnetic wave which travels throughout the immense distance of space just fine.
Light can't be attractive & repulsive which is why it has range. Like how gravity can't be attractive & repulsive. It doesn't get cancelled out over long ranges. Electromagnetic forces can be attractive or repulsive, and over long distances are balanced out by multiple sources of electromagnetic force. This is analogous to why my hands doesn't have noticeable magnetic interactions with each other, the charged particles in each are balancing each other out.
The so called "event horizon" has to be reworked, if, as is now theorized, black holes can "evaporate".
Please don't tell me you're taking a word out of context to mislead people with it. Black holes don't evaporate in the sense that they lose mass by emitting particles (in a classical sense). They lose mass due to particle/anti-particles pairs generated spontaneously by quantum-fluctuations in otherwise empty space, are torn apart from eachother near the event horizon, (more anti-particles fall inward than normal-particles). Being 'eroded' by antimatter is not the same thing as actually shooting off bits of mass.
This can easily explain the so called "gravitational" lensing also.
Except for the fact there are visible things in space (with estimable masses) that we observe cause this lensing. And it appears that gravity alone explains it just fine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lensing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Gravitational_Lensing_Experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDSSJ0946%2B1006
The mass of a star is only a secondary effect.
Effect? huh? I'm not even sure that makes sense.
When any star, regardless of mass gets under sufficient electrical stress, it may explode. We call this a nova or even if it's a really big explosion a supernova.
You're claiming that stars can't lose internal pressure and undergo gravitational collapse? They just always get electrically unstable and blow up? And that it actually has absolutely nothing to do with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-degenerate_matter ?
There are plenty of people who debunked this crap. Here's a starting point:
http://www.tim-thompson.com/electric-sun.html
http://www.bautforum.com/against-mainstream/28596-electric-universe-model.html
By a black hole's inherent properties you can't directly observe it and to expect such direct observations is foolish. Electric forces aren't going to cause the space-time curvature that would hide the black hole to begin with. If black holes were wells of primarily electric force, why would they trap light making them so well, "black"?
We know that the electric force is 36 orders of magnitude greater than gravity.
Too bad the range of that electric force is too short for any of this pseudoscience to make any sense. Gravity, on the other hand actually has non-negligible range over astronomical distances.
When black holes were first theorized, we considered them to be a cosmic sewer from which nothing, not even light can escape. Then observations were made of objects which were _believed_ to be black holes, which indicated that matter is ejected from these objects in intense "jets". This necessitated an extensive reworking of the gravitational theory involving black holes.
When you mentioned "matter is ejected", you're thinking of quasars, which are a type of black hole, but not all black holes are quasars.
By the way, no reworking ever done says anything leaves a black hole (quasar or otherwise). Emissions are from stuff falling toward it, which is why quasars emissions cease when they don't have matter to feed on. The rule of event-horizons being a point-of-no-return for light has not been "reworked".
By the way, if you don't believe black holes should exist, what do you think is supposed to happen when a star's mass exceeds the Chandrasekhar Limit eh? How does your EU junk explain gravitational lensing which is successfully observed? The General Theory of Relativity has a proven record of successful experimental predictions, and this electric universe junk doesn't. Explain all that.
The cosmologists who admit only gravity as the controlling force operative in the large-scale universe, find it necessary to come up with all sorts of exotic constructs, such as black holes, dark matter and dark energy. If the 36 orders of magnitude greater electric interaction is ALSO taken into account, in addition to the force of gravity, then these exotic, weird figments of the astronomers imagination become unnecessary to explain the latest observation coming in from advanced, sophisticated space probes.
What are you talking about?
Black Holes were not some exotic construct necessary cooked up to make sense of observations. They were predicted by theorists on paper, and only after we calculated they must exist did anyone actually try looking for them. Which we did.
Yes there were some big prehistoric bugs, but not all of them were.
Please link to some information on such giant-mosquitos existing.
As I understand it, part of coke's corrosive behaviors are from the acids 2 other posters mentioned (carbonic & phosphoric), but one they left out was that the sugar provides an amazingly good food source for bacteria in your mouth. They form a biofilm on your teeth (scrape your tooth after not having brushed for a while, that smoothness you feel is the biofilm). As the bacteria metabolize the sugars, they excrete waste compounds which are a corrosive acid(s?). Because there's a biofilm there which provides them a safe place to live, the waste compounds are trapped there, against your tooth, helping the corrosive chemicals do their work.
Drinks with fake sugar which isn't metabolized by your body (or no sugar at all) is also not metabolized by bacteria and gives them less to work with.
http://www2.dmu.dk/1_Viden/2_Miljoe-tilstand/3_vand/4_eutrophication/fish.asp
Normally two types of events related to eutrophication can cause fish kills. It is either toxic algae or low oxygen concentrations. Low oxygen concentrations in the bottom waters result in the release of hydrogen sulphide (H2S) from the sediments. The H2S is lethal to most animals and the result of the sudden release is often extensive and leads to the immediate death of animals living at or near the sea floor as well as in the water column.
Of course if it's one of the toxic algae blooms it's easy to understand what kills the first fish.
For non-toxic algae, just a guess here, but large amounts of dying algae? Eventually algae die & decompose like any other living thing.
Another guess is given the eutrophication is caused (usually) by agricultural runoff, maybe pesticides & herbicides accompany the nutrients. Fish are killed by the pesticides quickly, or either slowly via bioaccumulation.
I don't know what kind of biological waste algae produce, but if it were anything like animal waste, I know enough of it in one place will ruin an environment. On top of that, shit decomposes too.
Also, just because they produce oxygen doesn't mean they produce it at a rate equal to or greater than the rates of decomposition & organisms' respiration.
Ultimately I don't know which (if any) of these are true, but I just felt like tossing out some ideas. Maybe it's something as simple as clogging up their gills.
Astrology is actually more valid than ID, since it's a scientific theory.
No, no it's not. Maybe back in the "stupid ages" you could have argued it was a hypothesis, but never a theory.
According to the National Academy of Sciences,
"Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature that is supported by many facts gathered over time."
About any variant of astrology is falsifiable -- it gives testable consistent predictions.
Wether something is falsifiable or not isn't relevant to wether something is true. It's only relevant to wether you can prove it's true. Imagine it's the year 1000 BC. Some crackpot submits a hypothesis called Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics would be as true back then as it is nowadays, but you'd never be able to prove it in that era with their technology.
If you're really suggesting that a falsifiable idea is in some way superior to non-falsifiable ones, then surely in the year 1000 BC astrology would be superior to Quantum Mechanics, which would be quite wrong.
Do not mix falsifiable ideas with non-falsifiable ones. They don't mix. It's apple's and oranges, *not* apples and rotten-apples.
A theory, something that ID is not.
I'm gonna go with "duh" here.
And besides, who here ever said it was a theory?
Just because they can doesn't also mean it would prevent shortages though.
It may only increase the level of supply toward an asymptote.
Also, citing crops is arguably a bad example since it's not analogous to metals. Crops are sustainable indefinitely. Natural nutrient cycles supplemented by artificially added nutrients, along with an infinite supply of light, as well as land that never disappears. Problems can be rebounded from.
On the other hand, minerals (as well as oil) are not sustainable (in human timescales). More can't be made (unlike crops). If you have a cake, cutting off increasingly small yet expensive pieces of it only works to a point. Eventually the pieces you cut off will to small to be useful for any applications. (a microgram of cake is pretty useless).
Proving that there is some return from higher prices doesn't mean it won't be a diminishing return. Thus, critical shortages remain a possibility.
Because the demand for cheap spaceflight would be present industry with a large enough market to encourage investment in the technology. Cryogenic rocket fuel is fairly cheap stuff - like $.50 a pound same as gasoline -
I've got sources suggesting as low as "under a dollar", but none went that low. Can you cite some sources? And it's worth mentioning that the cost of that fuel can rise as the price of oil rises. The RP-1 is a petroleum product, and as such, the cost can never remain constant nor decrease, it can only become more expensive. If you're hoping for asteroid-mining to become cheap, that alone makes things difficult by the time the space-mining & delivery technology were to be developed. You have to use fuel-cost estimates that consider the future price of oil at the time of mining.
so the cost is in the vehicle and the operations.
Which would be nice, assuming the fuel burns on its own. But it doesn't, since it still requires the LOX to be useful. The cost of producing & storing liquid-oxygen isn't negligible.
Besides, once your actually in space, you can use things like solar sails or magnetic sails.
For probes and small crews. Not for mining operations. While your statement read by itself is innocent enough, in-context, I'm gonna go with a big "heck no". Mining inherently involves huge amounts of mass. The equipment & containers alone aren't going be driven by sails (not to mention ore/metals).
Non-small masses are exactly the achilles heel of solar/magnetic sails.
Even plain old rockets aren't so bad then because they no longer have to get off of the surface of the Earth, so they can operate at a lower thrust level (lower engine mass) and require less fuel (low delta-V).
I get the feeling all you did here was look up a table on the various delta-V's between each place. I'm skeptical that equating cost to delta-V gives a feasible estimate of the actual costs.
Mining in space requires delivery of the ore to Earth in a way that doesn't destroy it. That requires ships or at least containers capable of withstanding reentry. They would need to be brought back into space. Thus, right off the bat, whatever protects your ore from re-entry will add an Earth-to-LEO delta-V cost. That sucks.
Now add the cost of "exploration". I'd suggest asking someone in the oil industry how much exploration costs them. In 1983, BP spent $120 million on what the geologists/reservoir-engineers considered a great prospect called Mukluk in Alaska, which turned out to not have any oil (just water). And that was on Earth where stuff is easy! In space, you'd have to do similar exploratory digging to know exactly what metal is there (if it's valuable). That's a damn scary thing to spend money on, because mistakes do happen. How terribly bad will the economy have to be for investors to be desperate enough to invest in exploratory space mining, when they can always invest in safer things?
So, really, the issue is low demand. If more people had a good valuable reason to go into space, the market would provide them with a way. So far, the only way to make money is with telecommunications, and at the low rate of launch, it is more profitable for companies to build a smaller number of expendable launch vehicles that have a higher per unit cost.
What if the demand required to get to the break-even-cost were such a great cost that it was still unattainable? Just because there is a break-even point for all market costs doesn't mean that there will ever be anyone with enough money to pay for it. I could have a vending machine that gives me platinum bars for a $5.00 each, but if I don't have the 5 bucks, I'm still not getting jack from that machine.
Knowing a theoretical break-even point exists isn't enough.
You also have to prove it's something that someone, anyone in the practical world, would be able to write the check for.
The assumption that this would be the case hasn't been demonstrated to be true for something this astronomically expensive (in terms of dollars & raw joules of energy).
How will asteroid mining become economically viable when basic orbital spaceflight hasn't?
The Carbon-Nano-Tubes, they're made of PEOPLE !!!