Actually the thing that "crushes" the astronaut is the gravity differential over the length of the astronaut. In a "small" (let's say football-sized) black hole that difference is huge, and so the astronaut will get torn apart.

However with a supermassive black hole (and there's never been any other kind detected, they may exist briefly, but that makes the chances of encountering one very small), the differential at the event horizon is tiny.

As for the astronaut, you might think he might have trouble sending nerve impulses from his feet (beyond the event horizon) to his head (outside), however he's guaranteed to fall in faster than any signal can propagate outward, so this is not true. The astronaut will not notice anything (except -maybe- hawking radiation, which will be very weak for large black holes too).

So what do you see when you cross an (realistically sized, ie. huuuuuuuuuuge) event horizon ? Why ... nothing at all. You will see a very, very slight natural luminescence, probably deep in the radio frequence (ie. not visible). Everything will still look normal, exactly like it looked before.

There is also a reason why black holes "look like" the end of time. What does an outside observer see when you fall into a black hole ? Well he sees you slow down, due to time slowing down. An outside observer will never see you actually cross the event horizon, and whatever light you reflect you will reflect "slower" the closer you are to the even horizon. So the light reflecting off of you will fade, but very very slowly. Even hundreds of years after you fell into a black hole, a very sensitive telescope will still be able to construct an image of you and it remains theoretically possible until the end of time (it's going to become damn hard though).

There is also the question of what exactly the edge of the universe is. Objects near the theoretical edge of the universe move away from us at nearly light speed ... which might be what you'd expect to see if these were objects that had just fallen through an event horizon. It makes a kind of sense. The edge of the universe is moving away from us at light speed, but a large black hole would pull in exactly enough space so that any light moving away would travel the distance, and yet still remain just inside the event horizon.

Way to make an argument. Don't bore people with the details.

Do you work for Fox News ?

Well according to the French HADOPI law, you get to do that three times, then you get disconnected.

"Freedom" of the French. Yeah, right.

The funny part is that the "stability" of the celestial system is what convinced Western Europe of a great many scientific facts, and was one of the driving forces of the enlightenment. Even recently, one of the tests of relativity theory (determining whether light really does have a finite speed to be exact) was done by looking at the interference patterns generated by Jupiter's moons. The funny thing about that is that if you were to redo that experiment today you would get totally different values. The same is true for earlier theories, like Kepler's laws or Newton's gravity. The measurements that they purported to explain, they could not actually explain. But very short subsets of those measurements followed the discovered laws to near-perfection.

So the solar system, that convinced the Western world that only a "mechanical God" or no God at all ruled the heavens, because everything is perfectly predictable ... turns out not to be predictable, fickle like the weather. They didn't know that at the time, because reliable measurements had just started mere decades earlier, and in the short term they are extremely stable. But the random perturbations of the system (ie. comets just happening to pass by, modifying moon and planetary orbits while they swing by) have an influence that is so big that they destroy whatever signal is in the measurements. Planetary orbits are not stable at all, nor are they even remotely elliptical in practice (they are perturbed too much).

And it's worse yet than merely those comets, the fact is that it was not yet known that the "three body problem" is chaotic, and the relation between starter positions and "end" states is completely unpredictable. So a 11 huge bodies, trillions of smaller bodies system, like the solar system, is completely unstable on all but the shortest time frames. Now, even though we have better scientific models and more accurate theories, we have also found that actually predicting planetary orbits or moon orbits as little as 100 years out is completely impossible to do with any accuracy. This is because of "black swan" events with huge influence, that occur with alarming regularity.

In a way, it's funny, that we were convinced of pretty much the central claim of the enlightenment ... by a measurement error. By a failure to detect omnipresent chaos. The people that convinced the world that physical laws, not God, ruled the heavens ... were wrong. Not about the principle, those laws do apply, but about the actual examples they gave. The laws about gravity do not really predict planetary or moon orbits with any accuracy if there's constantly trillions of disturbances happening everywhere that you cannot measure and thus cannot implement in the calculations. It was just really hard to prove them wrong in the short term. And people believed them, and of course they did not modify their beliefs once it did become clear they were wrong. In this case it was a positive force, of course, but that was mere luck.

The sad part is that this lesson hasn't sunk in. Predicting past events to near-perfect accuracy is easy in a chaotic system. Predicting the future, or even just measuring the present situation, is not impossible, but so absurdly hard that we can safely say that no technology or theory will ever be able to do it.

I'm kind of afraid that's the next lesson we'll have to learn the hard way. Just because we have correct theories does not mean we can accurately predict the future. Chaos is everywhere. Not just in the heavens, but on earth as well, from wall street to the climate.

If those are your 2 extremes then any possible situation is "in-between". Either the government is the actual government or it's whoever has the biggest gun. Anything else is in-between.

Plenty of FBI in Grand Theft Auto though.

Is that really so different ?

I love this moral equivalence bullshit. Can you elaborate ?

So wait ... let's get this straight ...

These nice people want to encourage game manufacturers to stop doing something, by threatening to stop selling and spreading pirated copies of their games ?

I'm guessing it's going slightly worse than planned.

Ok, and how do you talk your way out of this one. Since 1990 there have been various studies on the climate. The scientific consensus in 1990 was that the temperatures on earth would rise by 0.2 degrees per decade. The scientific consensus on climate in 2000 was that it would rise by 0.18 degrees per decade. The scientific consensus in 2005 was that it would rise 0.23 degrees per decade.

The reality ? http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=global+climate+studies+last+20+years

Now we can go through the motions if you like, but looking at that graph, is it so hard to believe that we're below every 95% certainty interval for temperature prediction made at least 5 years ago (5 years, because there was an IPCC assessment report in 2007).

Can you just remind me, because I seem to have trouble remembering my philosophy of science class. What does one do with theories whose predictions (which means measurements made AFTER publication) provide completely wrong ? And, given that climate theory has failed the only test that matters for science, accurate predictions, can you please explain to me why anyone believes it ? Please note that saying "others know better than you" is wrong, as made obvious by these "95% certain" predictions the "others" you speak of made.

Would it be wrong to point out that climate studies are nearly universally sponsored by governments, which obviously have a vested interest in "proving" their party's stand ?

If money corrupts climate studies, then all climate studies are corrupted, and there should be no signal.

Hmmmm, maybe that's exactly what's happening here.

So let's have more climate treaties, more inconsistent taxation, and move more production to China !

What does China/other developing economies use for energy for that production ?

Almost exclusively coal, which is pretty much the worst method of producing energy, environmentally speaking. Also, transporting those produced goods to the west is not exactly environmentally friendly either.

This is how the justice system should work. To be exact : the prosecutor doesn't assume the defendant is guilty, they only assume the police is right, and build the legal case to prove it. That does mean that they assume everyone else is wrong.

Because that's really what happening at trial : police ("the state") versus defendants. Obviously IF it gets to court, by that point the prosecutor does indeed think the defendant is guilty. Why ? Because otherwise he'd have dropped the case before embarrassing themselves in public.

We're talking here about tax departments that cannot manage to keep spreadsheet software operational on their office systems, cannot keep their own tax databases accessible of backed up, and worse. Never mind the fact that hardly any business administration is ever really correct in the first place. Having them run a centralized online service for millions and millions of customers sounds like a spectacularly bad idea. Besides, what about businesses without internet connection ?

I was amazed, when I first saw this, but cash registers never contain the amount of money their record claims they should at the end of the day. My jaw dropped to the floor for 20 minutes when I was told the same goes for ATMs. It tends to be a shortage because people are much more likely to complain when shortchanged (mostly accidentally), so it's expected to be a negative correction, up to 5% of the amount sold. This presents an obvious way to cheat that the taxman cannot (reasonably) attack businesses for.

Why fake the program when you could simply use the open source of that program to re-write the datafiles ?

Please note that it's an open question whether it's practical or not.

You could say the same about built-in kernel rootkits, they're very impractical to install on someone's machine. Yet we know about instances where machines were shipped with kernel rootkits installed.

Besides, why so complex ? Open sourcing these programs will lead to "tax optimizers". Write a program that reads in all the data files of the program, and outputs a "tax optimized" version with all the little details changed to better suit the business owner's tax situation. There will be absolutely zero ways of proving this was done, because the data files were generated by the exact same code that normally generates them based on sales, just with faked dates and missing transactions.

I wonder why everybody always comes with elaborate schemes to cheat using ridiculously complex methods to achieve these objectives when you could simply lie (and given the fact that no administration is ever accurate, finding an inconsistency is not exactly reason to throw the book at someone, keeping track of every single thing you do that involves money is a lot of work, you don't want to do it and as a result, accuracy is lacking at best).