You clearly don't know what ROI is or how its calculated. And again with this:

What part of 3 trillion dollars do you not understand? Its not a tax collection problem. Its a spending problem. Yes people could contribute more, but that's not the point. In its current state, the government would waist that revenue to.

I am a hardcore java developer. I work on a lot of heavy back end web services that have a lot of threading and data manipulation over millions and millions of rows. The idea of doing that in javascript makes me sick.

Node.js seems to be more about giving front end developers the idea that they can program server side, which is even worse. The concepts and practices of a front end developer should never be allowed on server side code. Node.js is cute for small websites with minimal server side code, but for an enterprise solution, it still falls very short.

A little off topic but ok. Lets focus on the key to your argument:

We don't have a tax problem, but an appropriations problem. We collected over 3 trillion in taxes last year and only 1% went to science and technology. That's abysmal, but reflects our overall stance to disregard facts and science (selective ignorance), and indulge our gross sense of self entitlement.

Economically speaking, there are only two areas of government spending that have a positive ROI, research and development (10:1), and infrastructure (3:1). If you are concerned for future generation, the last thing you want to cut are these two areas of spending. If you really want to fix the problem, cut medicare, medicaid, welfare, social security and military spending.

I completely agree with going back to the moon for the scientific and engineering advances it would provide, but this reason is far down the list. This is like looking for a specific needle in a trillion other needles.

Um... no. You do not have the right to put those around you at risk. If you don't vaccinate your children, they shouldn't be allowed to go to public school, period.

There are other good examples of laws that are designed to prevent you from being a risk to everyone else. Minimum speed limits on highways comes to mind. Someone going under 40 on a road everyone else is going 60 is just dangerous. Same thing with talking on the phone or drunk driving.

Vaccinations shouldn't be mandatory, however, they only work if the group as a whole is vaccinated. How do you propose we solve this paradox?

Slight misnomer there. England is leading the charge, the US just likes where they are going and stays in close step.

/sarcasm

Yep, right away it is clear, this is capitalism's fault.

Really? If someone comes to the US and gets a graduate degree in a STEM field, they should be given citizenship, not a temporary work visa. We need more intelligent people in this country. Next, if we could only somehow deport the stupid American citizens...

You don't pay attention to the news much:
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyli...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01...

To say that religious polarization didn't play a part in terrorism in Northern Ireland and that politics doesn't play a part in terrorist acts committed by Muslims, is rather ignorant. And yet, you were modded insightful...

You're being modded down because your comments give nothing to the discussion at hand and in the cases above are even attempts to start unrelated arguments.

Every person has innumerous mutations throughout their lifetime. With ~37 trillion cells constantly replicating, it happens a lot. The human body is also very good at catching and correcting this errors. Some are genetically predisposed to better handle mutations which is why cancers are genetic. As you age, you're immune system becomes more and more compromised increasing your risk of cancer.

My point is, our body already knows how to fight cancer very well. Using this knowledge, there is no reason to think we couldn't completely prevent cancer by increasing our immune responses to both mutagens and mutations.

Working for a cable company, that is the general perception of most people outside the industry. What you and they also fail to consider is the packages (Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, Spike, +11 others) are all from the same company, in this case Viacom. The content providers, like Viacom, are the ones most threatened by al a carte programming. We as a cable company would love this model as we could grab many more subscribers while reducing costs paid to the content providers.

Here is an example of how these content deals work. Viacom has several niche channels that wouldn't sell without being tied to huge money makers like Comedy Central. Viacom doesn't want its channels to fail, so it'll agree to sell us CC only if we also buy their crappy channels. The majority of the cost of cable comes from these kind of deals through the numerous content providers that make up the whole cable television market. This is why we have 200+ channels of which 15 or so are any good.