It's not a matter of knowing how big it is, it's a matter of knowing how small it isn't.

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." - Douglas Adams

Depends on the mechanism - if you're going with most Sci-fi conventions of "disassemble person into energy and data, transmit, then re-assemble", technically it goes at the speed of light, instead of faster, unless you're also using quantum entanglement to transmit the data at FTL speeds. It goes into the whole chicken/egg thing, really.

Then again, since we've already achieved Faster Than Light travel, the whole poll is irrelevant. After all, if the only thing required is that we be moving faster than light, a brisk walk beside a Bose-Einstein Condensate is sufficient. A bit disappointing to people who wanted interstellar travel, but hey, it's here, so it already won.

The short answer: Yes.

The long answer involves two factors:

First, unvaccinated, disease-ridden older children who go near children too young to be vaccinated (or children who could not be vaccinated for health reasons such as a compromised immune system) cause those children too young to be vaccinated to become infected, and often to then die horrible painful deaths. This is the fault of the parents who refused to vaccinate their child, and said parents should be arrested and put on trial (and then imprisoned) for said death in the same way they would if they'd been planting random explosives around the suburbs and had blown the children up instead. The net result is the same, even if the explosions are slightly less painful.

Second, when a sufficient number of unvaccinated people become infected with a disease, this weird thing called "mutation" happens, and the vaccines become ineffective as the new strain created by irresponsible parents refusing to vaccinate their children then spreads unchecked. This is why the Flu vaccines that are available need to be re-done every single year, and while it's entirely possible for it to happen with even a single infected carrier, as more people become infected, it becomes more likely. Again, the parents responsible for this should be put on trial and imprisoned in exactly the same way they would had they used their own personal lab to cook up a bio-weapon and spread it around town to slaughter the neighbor's children.

Yes, it's true, you're totally free to go and build your own explosive devices*, or cook up designer virii** in the privacy of your own mad science lab, but it becomes illegal once you start spreading it around town where people will get hurt. The same thing should apply to deliberately allowing your children to go unvaccinated - if you are turning your children into a public health risk, you should be keeping them away from the public that you're risking.

* Technically this does require a license to work with explosives in some areas, but not all.

** This one however, there are currently no actual laws against that I am aware of. Yet. Most laws like that show up because someone, somewhere, demonstrated that it was necessary.

The "lead" antivaxers do benefit from it though - they sell books, get paid to make public appearances and speeches, get their egos stroked with the attention they crave, and the fraud who started the whole thing did it entirely for profit - he was at the time very much involved with development of a non-functional "alternative" to vaccination, and attempted to use the bad publicity he was creating for vaccines to promote his snake oil replacement.

Also, I'm not sure he qualifies as a billionaire, (possibly only a multi-millionaire) but Jim Carey was definitely eccentric, and was pushing funding into the movement while he was sleeping with the porn star who is it's main spokesperson.

That, combined with the general anti-science movement you mentioned earlier, which has taken up the cause with enthusiasm, for exactly the profitable reason you mention. It's kind of funny, in a sad way, that the people screaming "CONSPIRACY!!!!" the loudest here are the ones being manipulated for profit.

And the linked video on the Register article is some conspiracy theorist rambling about image filters and increasing the gain to see the "black spherical anomoly" (his spelling), and has nothing to do with triangles. The register article then goes off into wild theories about aliens, and gives misleading partial quotes from astronomers to make it seem as though they agree. The register article, which is linked in the summary as "takes the shape of a black triangle" has nothing to do with triangles.

Of course, the problem there is that the entries that search returns which actually contain a programming language at all are entirely done in python, so still no javascript.

No no no! The Ancestor is born in 2003. Since this already requires time travel, seeing their descendant's 77th birthday 26 years or so before they're born shouldn't be a problem.

And yet publishers still complain about used book stores, and accuse them of being thieves. I have also seen complaints from big publishers (and one really stupid author) about their books being found in public libraries depriving them of income.

Yeah, but the people who wrote the article were full of it, and demonstrably incorrect. Thus, science does already have the answer to the question of "Why don't people live past 114?" - the answer is "They do - here are some examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people#Oldest_people_ever "

The actual research in question of course, was likely nothing even resembling this, but since it was filtered through the screen of low quality pseudo-science journalism that was more interested in getting web page hits than accurately reporting the state of scientific research on the matter. Once you've got a few good quotes to sling at the masses, who cares if it's accurate?

Well, the last time I stopped when it was still orange, I got rear-ended (by an off-duty cop...) and the back end of my car broke. Does that count?

Otherwise I'll credit that one to lack of sleep. (Like the cop did.)