Nope, Florida.

Whereas anonymously badmouthing someone is badass as hell.

Not at all. You're not going to get very far in a political discussion if you're endlessly seeking out logical fallacies. These are personal opinions and subjective value judgements, always have been and always will be.

Show me on the graph where your knowledge of Latin touched you.

With a loyal mujaheddin strapped on, I should hope..!

What if there's a school on Mars that has a girl in it? It's not going to blow itself up now, is it?!?! More short-sightedness from the 'clerics'.

Crush your enemies

Don't forget, emotional intelligence illuminates exponential excellence.

50% of the time it's right - every time.

Wishful thinking surely. Everyone I know despises ads and skips/blocks them whenever possible. I don't dispute that they have an affect when people do see them, but 'hooked' on them..?

Truly bizarre to see such a comment on Slashdot. Figured most people here would be sports nuts.

It seems perfectly reasonable to guarantee that no-one can guarantee their prediction. It's about the only thing you can guarantee I suppose.

Just in case anyone doesn't know, this is confirmation bias, and it's one of the inherent cognitive biases that pervades everyone's thinking. Remember, knowing is an undetermined fraction of the battle. Yay!

The most generous interpretation of this is that you're talking about the accretion disk. Yes if your trajectory takes you into the accretion disk (assuming there is one, there doesn't have to be) you'll be atomised. No reason you can't come in from an angle that doesn't take you into the disk though. In those instances you certainly won't be atomised; black holes are very very cold. So cold in fact that the vacuum in the universe won't be colder than any stellar-mass black hole for the very distant future.

It all depends where you're observing from.

If you're alice, falling through the black hole horizon, you see no horizon, and no firewall. It's a harmless point of no return. In a particularly large black hole say with a horizon the size of the solar system (this would have to be a super-galactic beastie) you could potentially live out your life in there before getting crushed by tidal forces.

If you're bob on the outside, it looks like alice slows down and gets increasingly red shifted. Alice moves asymptotically towards the horizon but never quite reaches it. Just getting slower and redder. Of course the reverse is also true, if alice looked back at bob she'd see him all sped up like keystone cops.

Because the light coming to you from the regime around alice is so red shifted, you conclude that it must be incredibly high energy/frequency down where alice is (the firewall)

The funny part is, if you send photons at alice hoping to reflect them back to yourself (to see if she's alright) - the photons have to be so energetic to make the return trip that you end up vapourising alice just as the firewall would have done.

This is the impression I get from reading Leonard Susskind's stuff, broadly taken to be black hole complementarity. Neither view is objectively more 'correct' than the other. We've accepted wave/particle duality so I don't really see how we can't have two pictures of what happens in a black hole.