Being shot and killed by a cop is a violation of your constitutional right to due process, therefore the police should not be allowed to carry lethal weapons. 
You can find buttloads of stories about cops busting into the wrong house, some of which result in exchange of fire between them and the innocent resident, and some of those result in the death of that resident.  And those are the honest mistakes.

Discuss.

Thanks to the mysterious god-like being who fixed my post count issue.  This may not be a strictly technological topic, but that's what you get for having something called "The Geek Forum" without a science forum!

So, a while back, I started seeing commercials for a new show on History Channel called "The Universe". 
"Nice!" I though. 
Finally it came and I have been thoroughly disappointed, probably because I am not in the target audience for the show. For example, I already understand what a black hole is.
However, one episode has reminded me of a question I have been wondering about for a while.

I know and understand that light travels extremely quickly but is not infinitely fast. It takes 8 minutes for light from The Sun to reach The Earth. The nearest star to Earth, besides the Sun, is Proxima Centauri, 4 light years away. That means that light from that star takes 4 years to reach Earth, and therefore anything that happens there will not be seen by us for 4 years. Likewise, some (most!) stars are millions of light years away, and so the light we see from those stars is millions of years old. It is quite possible that a lot of the stars we see today are no longer in existence, and we will see their novas in the far future, once the light reaches us.

This leads a lot of scientists, especially ones you see on shows like "The Universe" to describe the light from distant stars as a sort of 'time machine'. You are, in fact, see what happened loooong ago. What they also say, and this is the point of confusion for me, is that the more powerful your telescope is, the farther back into the past you can see. Many say that some day a powerful enough telescope will be able to see the Big Bang, or shortly thereafter. By the above logic, that does not seem so ridiculous.

However-

The light that hits your eye or instrument is made of photons that are either emitted or reflect by the object you are looking at, are they not? As described above, those photons move at a fast but finite speed. Further, once they are past your eye, you can't see them again unless you are farther away.
If this is true, then these scientists are saying that the Big Bang happened so far away and so long ago, that the light from it has not yet reached us. If it had, it would be too late to observe it. (Yet we have observed the Cosmic Background Radiation, which is supposedly the remnant of the Big Bang. Hmmm...)

But by most current estimates, the Universe is ~13 billion years old... so this light has been traveling for that long and if it still not reached us, it would seem to be an indication that its origin is at least 13 billion light years away. If the Universe is expanding at the speed of light or slower, relative to the point of origin (if that can even be meaningful in this context), then we should see it now and at all times (CBR perhaps?), or else never if it has already passed us by. But if the Universe is expanding faster than the speed of light (again, relatively), then the light from that period will NEVER reach Earth.

Not to mention that recent data shows that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. All these things don't seem to add up to the message that is communicated in these popular science TV programs. I think everyone interviewed on them are incredibly intelligent people, and I'm sure they have good reasoning behind the statements that they make. They just never explain what it is, so obviously I expect laymen on the internet to be able to do so.

Go ahead and burn one if you think it will help, dude.

Mike Huckabee and.... Chuck Norris? 

Did I imagine this, or was Chuck Norris actually standing behind Huckabee during his speech last night?  Perhaps it was some other ruggedly handsome volunteer, I'm not sure. 

Also, at the risk of sounding tacky, shouldn't Chuck Norris be on Edwards' campaign, so he can cure his wife's cancer with his tears?

And since I have already thrown whatever class I had right out the window, Huckabee looks like Richard Nixon and Kevin Spacey's lovechild.

USA! USA!

I was going to harass Hotdog4free some more, but it no longer brings me any joy.