All my Kodachrome slides, dating back to the 70s, look as good now as the day they came back from the lab.
A $90 bluray player is going to output THE EXACT SAME audio and video bits as a $5000 bluray player.
That's not quite true, though. A lot goes on in a Blu-Ray player between decoding the raw H.264 stream an pumping an HDMI video signal to the TV. There's the matter of handling all of the many nuances of turning an interlaced signal into a progressive signal, for example. Some players do this sort of thing way better than others, and the resulting difference in video quality is definitely noticeable. Then there's the matter of converting between different framerates. It may sound like a trivial task, but a lot of the low-end players do a quick-and-dirty job of it, resulting in lower-quality video. I'm not sure about audio. I suspect similar differentiating factors are at work there, too. That being said, paying $5000 for a Blu-Ray player is a bit ridiculous. Avoid the $90 Walmart specials, sure, but the average $400 Blu-Ray player or a PS3 will give you audio and video that you'd be pretty hard-pressed to distinguish from the best.
One thing I've never understood about this explanation is that it doesn't explain why it's always the anti-particle that falls into the black hole. Wouldn't chance dictate that half the time it will be the particle, causing the black hole to take on the extra mass?
(I'm sure the answer to this question is somehow related to a similar question that I've always had... and that is: why is the universe composed almost entirely out of matter rather than being a mix? and why aren't there any anti-matter black holes?)
Today is a good day for information-gathering. Read someone else's mail file.