It would be nice if science reported were color coded or something. Green for robust, independently verified and generally accepted stuff (general relativity, evolution, etc.), yellow for new stuff that's not yet independently verified but in line with well-tested models, and red for stuff that's exciting but very uncertain and/or likely to be wrong (faster-than-light neutrinos, string theory, dark matter annihilation observations in galaxies, etc). The sort of stuff you read about in the news is usually red or yellow, but is presented as if it were green. The article you quote falls squarely into the red category.
In general your model is broken because you're not considering the metric. The most important effect you are neglecting in this case is the time-time component of the metric, which indicates how quickly stationary local clocks tick compared to coordinate time (there is also the radius-radius component which tells you that the event horizon is much further away than you would naively think, but we'll ignore that here). It looks like this for the metric outside a nonrotating, uncharged, massive body: 1-R/r, where R is the Schwartzchild radius of that source, and r is a radial coordinate. At large distances this factor approaches 1, so coordinate time moves at the same speed as the time of a far-away observer, such as us here on earth. But as r approaches R, the factor goes to 0. So time close to the horizon moves ever more slowly as one gets closer to it, according to our far-away reference frame. That is why crossing the horizon takes an infinite amount of (our) time.
However, the frequency and intensity of light is multiplied by the same factor, and very quickly becomes almost zero. So you would not see the object hanging there forever. You would see it quickly fade to blackness, leaving an incredibly faint and ever fainter afterimage in far radio wavelengths.
The surface will get very close to the apparent horizon very quickly though, and after that it will be so redshifted that it looks just like one of the idealized black hole solutions, and will be indistinguishable from one to any observer. It will be just as black, just as compact and just attractive, and still deserves to be called a black hole. When people say "black hole" they don't necessarily mean "Schwartzchild black hole" or "Kerr black hole".
Similar also when Google was mostly blocked, allowing Baidu to fill up the void.
Even at its best, before it closed google.cn and started redirecting people to google.com.hk, Google only had half the number of users as Baidu in China. It never had the dominance we're used to in the USA and most of Europe, and it's not certain that it would have come to dominate in China anyway, considering the stable dominance of other search engines in other large countries. Your statement made it sound like Baidu only caught on once google was out of the picture.
I've thought a bit about this too, but I arrived at the opposite conclusion. I think the single most valuable thing one gets from being a programmer is debugging experience, which is actually quite similar to the scientific method: You start with a mental model of how your program works. You observe symptoms that indicate that that model is wrong - the program isn't behaving according to the model. You form a new model based on the observed behavior, and then modify the program to test the new model. And repeat until you have a model that correctly predicts the future behavior or the program.
I can't think of many better ways to teach yourself that your mental model of the world can be wrong and the importance of testing it. Lacking that insight seems to be one of the defining characteristics of crackpots. That's why I think it's surprising to hear all the anecdotes here of crackpot programmers. Based on the reasoning above I would have expected them to be among the more madness-resistant segments of the population.
I think they might do something like this: You run a program on your server. That program establishes an encrypted connection to the Let's Encrypt server (using normal SSL). The Let's Encrypt server sends a secret message over the encrypted channel. The program on your server sets up a web page with that secret on it and sends the URL back to over the encrypted connection. The Let's Encrypt server then accesses the given URL normally, and checks whether it contains the correct secret. If so, it issues a certificate for the host name contained in that URL, since you have proved that you were in control of that server.
This is immune to man-in-the-middle attacks on your side, but it would still be vulnerable to somebody who can intercept all of the traffic to the Let's Encrypt server. But perhaps they're doing something cleverer than what I describe here. (If you had multiple Let's Encrypt servers spread across the internet, then you could have multiple ones participate in the handshake. That would mean that somebody would have to intercept the traffic of all those servers in order to fool them.)
The size of the images also doesn't mesh with the size described in the article text. The figurines in the images are actually quite large, and should be clearly visible even with much less than 400x magnification. For example, the head of a small ant might be 0.5 mm wide. That would make the figurine about 0.1 mm long. With 400x magnification it would be like looking at an object 4 cm long, which would be quite visible. Yet the text claims these were only visible with electron microscopes.
But of course, none of that is as strong evidence as the parent's damning link to a the pre-photoshopped picture of the needle head, with all the little dust motes and imperfections in exactly the same location, but missing the figurine.
Tor anonymous services sound quite similar to Freenet, but the latter is built for this from the bottom up rather than having it added on later. In Freenet, files are stored as encrypted blocks distributed across all freenet nodes, and files are retrieved by hashes. I don't think there's anything like gatekeeper nodes here - the only nodes that know that they host a given block is that node itself (and even it doesn't know what that block contains). Since blocks are stored redundantly, both storage and distribution is robust against the removal of nodes (or hostile nodes).
Freenet is a pretty neat idea. But the last time I tried it (many years ago now) the latency was as high as to make it pretty much unusable. I also didn't find anything worthwhile on it, since it doesn't act like an internet gateway like Tor does. But perhaps Tor can learn something from it?
Despite the flood of high-precision data from particle accelerators, in some sense particle physics is a data-starved science. It's much easier to come up with a new hypothesis than to perform an experiment that can distinguish it from others, and so there is usually a plethora of theories that match any given new observation, and all the ones before it. But some of these hypotheses will be simpler and hence more predictive (fewer free parameters) than others. As far as I'm aware, the "standard model Higgs" is the simplest and oldest hypothesis that matches all the data. There is good reason to prefer it, though of course there are always other possibilities.
It's a bit like trying to determine the species of a bird. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quaks like a duck, etc, then "it's a duck" would be your nr. 1 hypothesis. But it could still be some some alien creature from another planet that just came out of an invisible UFO. Perhaps it's been engineered to look just like a duck. Or perhaps it's just a coincidence. I think most of us wouldn't spend too much time worrying about those possibilities.
Thechnicolor higgs and other alternative hypotheses are much more reasonable than the alterntaive hypotheses above, but the standard model higgs is still the default explanation.
The exact GR you speak of sounds interesting. Is that related to calculating the gravity in the galaxy more accurately than treating it as all the mass being in the center?
No, it's a bit more subtle than that. The problem is that General Relativity is non-linear. In Newtonian gravity, which is linear, you can just add up the gravitational influence from each source to get the total force. This is not strictly true in GR. But we know that GR reduces to Newtonian gravity in the weak field limit, and the gravitational field is weak (in the technical sense) in the overwhelming majority of the galaxy (everywhere except very close to black holes), so it makes sense that those few small regions shouldn't mess things up. A closely related problem is what's called the averaging problem: If you compute the metric based on a lumpy mass distribution and then take a spatial average of it, that's not necessarily the same as taking the spatial average of a lump matter distribution and then computing its metric. (Sorry, that's probably too technical and poorly explained)
There is a way to take all of this properly into account, called numerical relativity. It is extremely computationally intensive, and currently not feasible to do for simulations of galaxies (or the universe). But it may be possible in a few years, so we might know if this really is a problem or not in the relatively near future. Currently a set of small-scale investigations have been done. They are inconclusive, but it seems like one needs pretty contrived matter distributions to get any noticeable effect.
I don't quite see how that would hold the elliptical galaxies together in the same fashion as they are all moving pretty randomly as I understand it.
Elliptical galaxies are indeed different from disk galaxies in how they are held up. Disk galaxies are held up by coherent angular momentum. Elliptical galaxies are held up by velocity instead. Velocities are typically much more radial than in a disk galaxy, and stars move a bit like the "hole through the center of the earth" example I described earlier - falling in towards the central region, sweeping past it and then heading out again. The galaxy doesn't collapse because its hard to get rid of those velocities without any stars colliding. But there is a very weak form of friction available called dynamical friction that slowly redistributes the kinetic energy between stars.
I guess it still leads to a smaller universe in the distant past and you don't quite get around it leading back to a point in space. Unless new matter is created somewhere in between the current matter. Then you could have expansion indefinitely where it didn't start at one point or one time.
What you are describing here is called the steady state theory. It has an eternally expanding universe that nevertheless always looked qualitatively the same because new matter was continuously created to compensate for the dilution from the expansion. It was quite popular in the early 20th century. It does predict the presence of background radiation, just like the Big Bang does, but it fails at the details: The radiation would not be expected to follow a black-body spectrum, nor would one expect it to be as cold as 2.7 K. It does not correctly predict the pattern of waves we observe to be imprinted on it, and it incorrectly predicts it to be unpolarized. It also cannot explain the chemical abundances in the universe (why is there so much hydrogen and so much helium, etc.). And it predicts that galaxies far-away should look qualitatively the same as galaxies nearby, while we actually observe them to look quite different, being smaller and messier, as one would expect from galaxies which are just in the presence of forming.
Ok, I went back and looked at what she was saying about the Coma galaxy cluster again. The dark matter was in the center, but the galaxies did not collide like I thought she was saying. They are just swirling around each other.
Oh, it was about the Coma cluster, not the Bullet Cluster. I apologize for confusing you with an unrelated discussion. The Coma cluster evidence is based on the velocity dispersion of the galaxies in the cluster, not separation of components like the Bullet Cluster is. The argument here is that the galaxies move too quickly compared to the gravity produced by the stars, so if there isn't some extra matter the cluster would blow apart (the Coma cluster is not unique in that way, the same thing is observed in every cluster). The argument is not as clear cut here as in the Bullet Cluster, since small modifications of the law of gravity can explain it as well as dark matter can. Modified gravity without dark matter fails for the Bullet Cluster though.
You do realize they decide what dark matter must do, then put it into the simulation that way. Of course it will act in the exact way they said it should. That is quite obvious.
Nobody is claiming that simulations in themselves constitute empirical evidence. Simulations are used as a step in the hypotetico-deductive method to work out the consequences of a hypothesis. It goes like this: We propose that we have some dark matter with a few simple properties (interacts only via gravity, initially distributed homogeneously, 5 times more of it than baryons). We then run that through a simulation to see what the world would look like if things really were like that. Then we compare the simulation to observations to see how well they match. If all the different observables match well, we consider the hypothesis to be strengthened. If they don't match at all, it would be weakened. One then repeats this for lots of different hypotheses to see which ones work best. Lots of things might seem like good ideas while they're at the handwavy stage, but turn out not to work when actually implemented in detail. That's where simulations help you.
The question is whether there is actually matter or something else causing these observations.
That is indeed the question, and there are (and have been) lots of different alternatives.
Dark matter
MACHOs: Compact dark objects made of normal matter. For example, planets, brown dwarfs, cold neutron stars and white dwarfs, black holes, etc. These don't emit much light, and are hence dark matter. The Earth is an example of one of these. They definitely exist, the question is if there are enough of them to provide the needed gravity. This used to be the most popular hypothesis, but it has fallen out of favor for two main reasons. Firstly, while these objects are hard to find individually, if they are around in the needed quantity they would cause large amounts of gravitational microlensing, which we are getting quite good at measuring. We do not observe anywhere near enough microlensing events for there to be that many MACHOs out there. Secondly, all the baryonic matter the MACHOs are made from messes up the production of deuterium, helium-3 and helium-4 during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. There is no doubt that a considerable amount of MACHOs exist, but very probably not enough of them.
Diffuse gas: There could also be a lot of mass in diffuse gas that's not part of stars. This gas can be quite hard to observe, and we didn't use to be very good at seeing it. And after our instruments got better, it turned out that there was in fact several times more mass in this diffuse gas than mass in stars. However, we are now
The stellar mass of the milky way is about 64 billion solar masses, giving a Schwartzchild radius of 0.02 light years. The time dilations should therefore be corrected to 1% at 1 light year, 2e-5 at 1% of the galaxy's radius and 3e-7 at our radius. It does not change the conclusion noticeably..
How likely do you think it is that scientists haven't thought of clumping of dark matter or gravitational time dilation in galaxies? It sounds like you really believe that all dem stoopid scientists and their entire field of research have missed your "novel" and "revolutionary" points. I think usually when it seems that way, the natural thing to do is to assume that you've misunderstood something, at least until you've properly researched the issue.
And it clumps together forming the scaffolding for the galaxies, but it also somehow separates out to only show up as a halo around the outer edge of the galaxies.
Have you thought about why our galaxy is the size it is? Gravity is definitely pulling inwards, so why doesn't it just collapse? The answer is velocity and angular momentum. The stars are all in free fall, but they keep missing the center of the galaxy because of their tangential velocity. Even if you start with very low angular velocity, as something collapses its angular velocity grows (just like figure skaters rotate faster when pulling in their arms). And to form galaxy-size objects you already have to get rid of a lot of angular momentum, and the way you do that is through pressure and friction. They baryonic gas that makes up the raw materials for the galaxy has some of this, and is therefore better at collapsing to small objects than dark matter is. This isn't just a handwavy argument - when you put dark matter and baryons into detailed physical simulations and let them run from a start state corresponding to our pictures of the primordial universe, you actually end up with galaxies embedded in dark matter halos.
Plus, nowhere do they ever say they account for time dilation in the galactic rotation speed. If gravity is more intense in the center of the galaxies, then time there will be slower. Which will appear as the outer edge of the galaxy rotating faster than it should. Time is moving faster for the matter there, so it moves further from our viewpoint. Our most accurate clock shows a difference from moving the clock from the floor to putting it up on the wall, I think there would be somewhat more of a difference when you move towards the center of a galaxy.
The Schwartzchild radius of our galaxy (counting the visible matter) is 0.0003 light years. 1 light year away, the gravitational time dilation would be a tiny 0.015% compared to the outside of the galaxy. At 1% of the radius of the galaxy it would be 3e-7. At our position it would be 5e-9. So if you ignored it, you would still be 99.9999% correct about velocities in almost all the galaxy, and only do slightly worse at the core. So why can we measure this effect on earth? Because we have ridiculously accurate clocks.
She also says how it passes through when two galaxies collide without interacting, but in some cases it collides and stays in the middle while the galaxies pass through and are on opposite sides. No it doesn't. You seem to be talking about the explanation of the Bullet Cluster here. The bullet cluster (like any galaxy cluster) is believed to consist of three components: Stars (which we can observe directly), diffuse gas (which we can observe directly) and dark matter (which does not emit light). Stars are compact and practically never hit each other. When two galaxy clusters collide, none of the stars hit each other due to the enormous distances between each individual star, so the stellar part of all the galaxies pass straight through each other as if nothing happened. But the stars aren't the main component of the galaxies. There is much more diffuse gas (the same kind of stuff stars are made of, but not yet collapsed to form stars). This gas has a pressure, and fee
I was very suspicious when I saw the vixra.org link, but you've actually found a non-crackpot vixra article (if a very short one)! I guess it goes to show that one shouldn't be too quick to judge something by its company.
(Some context for other readers. arxiv.org is where all scientific papers in the fields of astronomy, particle physics and related fields are posted and read by working scientists. In these fields it has in practice supplanted traditional journals - on still submits articles to them, but nobody actually reads them, since articles appear on arxiv much earlier, and arxiv is free to everybody and much more convenient than dozens of scattered journals. But not everybody can post on arxiv. One must either be part of an academic institution or be endorsed by somebody who is. vixra was formed as a completely open alternative where anybody could post. But it quickly drowned in a deluge of crackpots. I've sampled it at several points (mostly the astronomy section), and did not succeed in finding a single remotely worthwhile paper in several pages of listing in any of the attempts. Hence my surprise this time.)
To follow up, I'd like to point out plot 2 in the article under discussion (go on, have a look. Opening a PDF isn't that painful). It is a plot of part of the parameter space for dark matter particle candiates, with weakly interacting, relatively light particles in the lower left corner and strongly interacting very heavy particles in the top right corner. MACHOs live to the right in this plot, and WIMPs near and below the bottom. The interesting thing about the plot is that it shows all the regions that have been excluded, color coded by how they were excluded. MACHO territory is basically completely excluded by microlensing. That doesn't mean that MACHOs don't exist - they definitely do (the earth basically qualifies, since it's compact and doesn't shine), but there can't be anywhere enough of them for their gravity to be important.
If you make the MACHOs smaller so that they aren't as good at lensing, you have to compensate by having more of them to get enough gravity, so microlensing can exclude a pretty wide parameter range. But if things get too light the lensing effect gets too small for us to detect, ending the microlensing exlusion range at a particle mass of about 10^24 g, about 1/10000 of the Earth's mass. But if they get a bit smaller, then can then be detected using lensing interferometry (=nanolensing), and for even lighter objects, by their imprints on crystals found in deep mines that act as natural particle detectors.
Anyway, I encourage everybody to read the paper: It details all the different techniques used to exclude models. The paper is really quite the opposite of what the [rant]typical Slashdotter anti-science prejudice[/rant] is. It's not somebody pulling some hypothesis out of thin air and then not bothering to test it. As the plot shows, this is really a case of eliminating slice after slice of the model space, with 75% of the area in the figure already being excluded.
Why would you think they're all exactly the same or even similar? Usually when you compare countries you find that there is a large scatter in whatever metric you choose to use. Why should espionage be any different? Do you have any reason to think the scatter would be less than a factor of 2, or a factor of 5 or a factor of 20? If I were to hazard a guess, I would expect it to show similar variability as military budgets do (and I wouldn't be surprised to see a large covariance between the two). But I don't have any direct data on this. Do you?
I think it is important to distinguish between three things here. The theory (the equations and predictions of measurements), our interpretations of the theory (what picture of the world we associate with the theory), and the real world itself.
For example, let's say that you need a theory for describing how a hypothetical time-ray works. The observed effect is that physical processes of whatever it is shot at occur at twice the rate as before compared to the rest of the world. This is straightforward to measure and can be modeled exactly using equations. But how should we interpret what happens? One interpretation is that the time-ray speeds up the passing of time for the object it hits. But another, equivalent interpretation is that the ray slows down the passing of time for the entire rest of the world, and protects only the target object from the effect. These interpretations both lead to the same observations, since all we can observe are the *relative* rate of events, but they make different claims about what actually happens. In this case one interpretation is clearly more appealing because it is simpler, but no experiment could distinguish between them. So in some sense the distinction is meaningless.
Similarly, the theory of general relativity, which is our modern description of gravity, can be interpreted as spacetime being curved by the presence of energy, and the curvature affecting the paths of objects. But it is also possible to interpret it as spacetime being flat, but filled with a field of self-interacting, massless, spin-2 particles (gravitons). Both these pictures lead to the same predictions, so in that sense they are the same theory. But they are clearly very different descriptions of reality.
The point of making the distinction between theory and interpretation is that the former can be tested, while the latter can't. The theory of general relativity has been put through a huge number of tests, and it has held up under all of them. Like most theories of fundamental physics it has been tested to exquisite precision, and if it is wrong, it has to be wrong in a very subtle way. But the interpretation of general relativity can't be tested at all. Which one to use is a bit like choosing whether to use a cartesian or polar coordinate system in maths. One might be easier to use or prettier in some situations, but they give exactly the same results.
The same applies to quantum physics to perhaps an even greater extent. Quantum Electrodynamics, one of the building blocks of the standard model of particle physics, may be the most precistly tested theory in science. The archetypical example is the anomalous dipole moment which is correctly predicted to 14 decimal places (all the ones we could measure so far). So the theory part of quantum physics is trustworthy. It may not be 100% correct, but it is pretty damned close. But there is a plethora of interpretations of quantum physics, and these are completely uncertain - we can't tell them apart because they are mathematically equivalent and hence all make the same predictions. Each one corresponds to a different real world, but we can't tell which one it is.
Electrons bound to atoms are relatively simple quantum systems, and I don't think our ability to measure them is the limiting factor. It sounds like you are arguing for a Hidden Variables description of the electron, where a point-like electron moves around the nucleus in an well-defined particle orbit like a planet, and it only looks like it's this complex non-local wavefunction (electron cloud) because it moves to quicky for us to resolve its actual orbit. The good news is that it it is possible to interpret standard quantum physics that way
Only 42% of quantum physicisists would agree with the statement in the summary that "When two identical photons are coupled and the phase of one is changed, then thanks to the magic of quantum mechanics, the phase of the other photon also changes", and 40% of them would actively disagree. While the mathematics and measurement predictions of quantum mechanics is quite uncontroversial, the interpretation beyond that is a topic of much debate (much of which belongs in philosopy rather than physics).
The summary is using one such metaphysical interpretation, called the Copenhagen interpretation, which has more "magic" than most (spooky, faster-than-light action at a distance; wavefunctions that collapse when I, the Observer, looks at them, but not when anyone else does), and might be the most confusing one to the public (though admittedly, all the interpretations are confusing to some extent).
Currently we use normal time (as in time where 00:00 is approximately the middle of the night) in the winter, and move if away from that correspondence in the summer. If anything, the opposite would make sense. In summer daylight is plentiful anyway, it's winter where daylight is limited and one could make an argument for tampering with our timekeeping to make the most out of that limited light. The current system is backwards. But I'm not in favor of winter-daylight-saving-time either. What I've read on the subject indicates that the switchover comes with significant costs in the form of extra accidents and worse health in the days just after the switch. These are admittedly small effects, but then, so is the argued benefit.
Worse than either of these systems is the proposal of permanent daylight savings time. Here one breaks the logical basis for our time system (the position of the sun) for the forseeable future just to save oneself from a one-time transition period of updating people's schedules, which would have the same effect without messing with our clocks. It is a bit of a dirty hack rather than a proper fix, and only makes sense from a short-term perspective. If one is going down this route, why limit yourself to one hour? Wouldn't it be nice if the sun were still up when you get home from work in the middle of winter at northerly latitudes, and lasted long enough to enjoy the sun with your family? At, say, 60 degrees north, the sun sets around 15:00 in winter. So just add 5 hours to the time, making it set at a comfortable 20:00. And then, in the year 2150 when a child asks why midnight occurs at 05:00 and noon at 17:00, they'll be happy to hear that it was because people 6 generations ago couldn't be bothered to change their actual schedules.
On the other hand, our time system isn't exactly a work of beauty to begin with. Perhaps one more wart won't matter. Especially when we already have a nearly equivalent one in the form of the current temporary daylight savings time.
Your comment is a bit terse. Would you mind elaborating on why dark matter is like the aether? In particular it would be great if you could summarize the different lines of evidence that make astronomers think there is a lot of dark matter, and how you think each of them is being misinterpreted.
The grandparent's example was not made up. It was how it's actually done on FreeBSD. Invoking make there downloads the sources, patches them, and then invokes the standard build procedure you quoted. So yes, somebody had to do some work to wrap the build process in a uniform interface, but it's no more work than what's needed for maintaining binary packages like Debian's apt packages. And once that work is done, anybody else using that operating system distribution can do it as simply as the grandparent showed.
When an object collapses to a black hole, its gravity doesn't get any stronger. If you replaced the Sun with a black hole of the same mass, the Earth would continue in the same orbit, and light would behave quite normally in the solar system. The only place where strange stuff happens is when you get very close to the black hole (a few km away from its center in the case of one with the mass of the sun).
Still, let's assume that a star has somehow ended up really close to a black hole. First of all, if the star is so close that it experiences the kind of extreme gravitational lensing you describe, if would be so close that the black hole would be inside the star. Black hole radii are typically a few kilometers, and the heavily distorted regions are a few times that. Star radii are millions of kilometers.
But let's assume that the star is really compact, so you can have it close enough to the black hole to be interesting without actually touching it. In that case, you can get one of the beams you want, but not both of them. The easy one to get it the one that goes from the start, past the black hole and then towards us. That one gets stronger when the star is at moderate distances. The beaming in the other direction requires the star to be super-close to the black hole - so close that it couldn't be in a stable orbit.
So the best version of this model would have a tiny, bright star in an orbit around a black hole, being periodically magnified by the lensing of the black hole as it passes behind it (seen from us). It wouldn't really look like a pulsar, though.
I don't find their hypothesis very persuasive. They don't go into any details. How exactly is this mechanism supposed to work? How high luminosities should be expected? What limits on pulse rates does their model predict? How is the energy generated? How large are pulsars? If they aren't compact objects, why do we have pairs of them that are separated by half the diameter of the sun?
If the standard model of pulsars were held to the same stnadard of handwaviness, one wouldn't even have discovered that there might be a problem with a too high luminosity for this pulsar. You only discover that sort of problems once you actually get down to it and calculate the consequences of your model. Examples of predictions made by the neutron star model of pulsars is: Pulsars should have quite well-defined maximum and minimum masses, and maximum and minimum sizes and surface gravities. They can't be too light, or they wouldn't collapse to form neutron stars, they would be white dwarves instead. And they can't be too heavy, or they would collapse to form black holes. These upper and lower bounds are called the Chandrasekhar limit (1.4 solar masses) and Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit (about 3 solar masses). If the neutron star is to stay together it can't rotate so fast that the centrifugal force wins over gravity. This, together with the limits on surface gravity and diameter implies a maximum rotation frequency. All pulsars we have seen so far fit with these limits.
The reason why a too high luminosity is considered problematic is that the energy source of ultraluminous pulsars is belived to be accretion: Matter falling down towards the surface of the neutron star, and converting lots of potential energy into kinetic energy and then heat radiation as it does so. But if too much radiation is emitted, this radiation exerts a pressure on the infalling matter that is so great that it pushes the matter back out. So if the pulsar (or any other thing driven by accretion) gets too bright, it ends up starving itself, and can't stay brighter than the point where radiation exactly cancels gravity for very long. That limit is called the Eddington limit, and the problem in this case is that the pulsar is 100 times brighter than this limit.
You can get around the Eddington limit by allowing for an asymmetric infall: More matter falling from some directions than other directions (example: a meteor hitting the earth is asymmetric accretion). But it's hard to go all the way up to 100 times the Eddington limit with realistic accretion scenarios. So this really is an interesting object.
But my point is that the Electric Universe guys don't do anything to explain the power source of the pulsar. If one assumes that it is powered by accretion as in the standard model, then they have exactly the same problem as the standard model. And if it isn't powered by accretion, where does it get its energy from? The article you link to talks about emission mechanisms, but not where the energy comes from in the first place. Also, the link they give to the press release is about a variant on the standard neutron star picture - it does not support the Electric Pulsar hypothesis.
If the government needs to collect more tax, why not raise the general tax levels rather than introduce this tax? The tax burden will be the same in both cases, but the internet tax takes it all from internet users rather than spreading it out (or even taking it preferentially from those who can afford it, like progressive tax does).
The main argument for specific taxes like this is to use it as an incentive for people to change their behavior. For example, one may tax driving in city centers to reduce the car traffic there. But surely internet is something one would want to encourage rather than discourage? It's an environmentally friendly way of obtaining knowledge and communicate, for example. The high use of internet probably increases children's reading skills too.
It's hard to see a good reason for using this kind of tax.
I would just like to point out that we've had Internet relay Chat for 26 years, and it's still free to use with no ads. I guess it helps that it wasn't invented by a company.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be nice if science reported were color coded or something. Green for robust, independently verified and generally accepted stuff (general relativity, evolution, etc.), yellow for new stuff that's not yet independently verified but in line with well-tested models, and red for stuff that's exciting but very uncertain and/or likely to be wrong (faster-than-light neutrinos, string theory, dark matter annihilation observations in galaxies, etc). The sort of stuff you read about in the news is usually red or yellow, but is presented as if it were green. The article you quote falls squarely into the red category.
In general your model is broken because you're not considering the metric. The most important effect you are neglecting in this case is the time-time component of the metric, which indicates how quickly stationary local clocks tick compared to coordinate time (there is also the radius-radius component which tells you that the event horizon is much further away than you would naively think, but we'll ignore that here). It looks like this for the metric outside a nonrotating, uncharged, massive body: 1-R/r, where R is the Schwartzchild radius of that source, and r is a radial coordinate. At large distances this factor approaches 1, so coordinate time moves at the same speed as the time of a far-away observer, such as us here on earth. But as r approaches R, the factor goes to 0. So time close to the horizon moves ever more slowly as one gets closer to it, according to our far-away reference frame. That is why crossing the horizon takes an infinite amount of (our) time.
However, the frequency and intensity of light is multiplied by the same factor, and very quickly becomes almost zero. So you would not see the object hanging there forever. You would see it quickly fade to blackness, leaving an incredibly faint and ever fainter afterimage in far radio wavelengths.
The surface will get very close to the apparent horizon very quickly though, and after that it will be so redshifted that it looks just like one of the idealized black hole solutions, and will be indistinguishable from one to any observer. It will be just as black, just as compact and just attractive, and still deserves to be called a black hole. When people say "black hole" they don't necessarily mean "Schwartzchild black hole" or "Kerr black hole".
Similar also when Google was mostly blocked, allowing Baidu to fill up the void.
Even at its best, before it closed google.cn and started redirecting people to google.com.hk, Google only had half the number of users as Baidu in China. It never had the dominance we're used to in the USA and most of Europe, and it's not certain that it would have come to dominate in China anyway, considering the stable dominance of other search engines in other large countries. Your statement made it sound like Baidu only caught on once google was out of the picture.
I've thought a bit about this too, but I arrived at the opposite conclusion. I think the single most valuable thing one gets from being a programmer is debugging experience, which is actually quite similar to the scientific method: You start with a mental model of how your program works. You observe symptoms that indicate that that model is wrong - the program isn't behaving according to the model. You form a new model based on the observed behavior, and then modify the program to test the new model. And repeat until you have a model that correctly predicts the future behavior or the program.
I can't think of many better ways to teach yourself that your mental model of the world can be wrong and the importance of testing it. Lacking that insight seems to be one of the defining characteristics of crackpots. That's why I think it's surprising to hear all the anecdotes here of crackpot programmers. Based on the reasoning above I would have expected them to be among the more madness-resistant segments of the population.
I think they might do something like this: You run a program on your server. That program establishes an encrypted connection to the Let's Encrypt server (using normal SSL). The Let's Encrypt server sends a secret message over the encrypted channel. The program on your server sets up a web page with that secret on it and sends the URL back to over the encrypted connection. The Let's Encrypt server then accesses the given URL normally, and checks whether it contains the correct secret. If so, it issues a certificate for the host name contained in that URL, since you have proved that you were in control of that server.
This is immune to man-in-the-middle attacks on your side, but it would still be vulnerable to somebody who can intercept all of the traffic to the Let's Encrypt server. But perhaps they're doing something cleverer than what I describe here. (If you had multiple Let's Encrypt servers spread across the internet, then you could have multiple ones participate in the handshake. That would mean that somebody would have to intercept the traffic of all those servers in order to fool them.)
The size of the images also doesn't mesh with the size described in the article text. The figurines in the images are actually quite large, and should be clearly visible even with much less than 400x magnification. For example, the head of a small ant might be 0.5 mm wide. That would make the figurine about 0.1 mm long. With 400x magnification it would be like looking at an object 4 cm long, which would be quite visible. Yet the text claims these were only visible with electron microscopes.
But of course, none of that is as strong evidence as the parent's damning link to a the pre-photoshopped picture of the needle head, with all the little dust motes and imperfections in exactly the same location, but missing the figurine.
Tor anonymous services sound quite similar to Freenet, but the latter is built for this from the bottom up rather than having it added on later. In Freenet, files are stored as encrypted blocks distributed across all freenet nodes, and files are retrieved by hashes. I don't think there's anything like gatekeeper nodes here - the only nodes that know that they host a given block is that node itself (and even it doesn't know what that block contains). Since blocks are stored redundantly, both storage and distribution is robust against the removal of nodes (or hostile nodes).
Freenet is a pretty neat idea. But the last time I tried it (many years ago now) the latency was as high as to make it pretty much unusable. I also didn't find anything worthwhile on it, since it doesn't act like an internet gateway like Tor does. But perhaps Tor can learn something from it?
Despite the flood of high-precision data from particle accelerators, in some sense particle physics is a data-starved science. It's much easier to come up with a new hypothesis than to perform an experiment that can distinguish it from others, and so there is usually a plethora of theories that match any given new observation, and all the ones before it. But some of these hypotheses will be simpler and hence more predictive (fewer free parameters) than others. As far as I'm aware, the "standard model Higgs" is the simplest and oldest hypothesis that matches all the data. There is good reason to prefer it, though of course there are always other possibilities.
It's a bit like trying to determine the species of a bird. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quaks like a duck, etc, then "it's a duck" would be your nr. 1 hypothesis. But it could still be some some alien creature from another planet that just came out of an invisible UFO. Perhaps it's been engineered to look just like a duck. Or perhaps it's just a coincidence. I think most of us wouldn't spend too much time worrying about those possibilities.
Thechnicolor higgs and other alternative hypotheses are much more reasonable than the alterntaive hypotheses above, but the standard model higgs is still the default explanation.
The exact GR you speak of sounds interesting. Is that related to calculating the gravity in the galaxy more accurately than treating it as all the mass being in the center?
No, it's a bit more subtle than that. The problem is that General Relativity is non-linear. In Newtonian gravity, which is linear, you can just add up the gravitational influence from each source to get the total force. This is not strictly true in GR. But we know that GR reduces to Newtonian gravity in the weak field limit, and the gravitational field is weak (in the technical sense) in the overwhelming majority of the galaxy (everywhere except very close to black holes), so it makes sense that those few small regions shouldn't mess things up. A closely related problem is what's called the averaging problem: If you compute the metric based on a lumpy mass distribution and then take a spatial average of it, that's not necessarily the same as taking the spatial average of a lump matter distribution and then computing its metric. (Sorry, that's probably too technical and poorly explained)
There is a way to take all of this properly into account, called numerical relativity. It is extremely computationally intensive, and currently not feasible to do for simulations of galaxies (or the universe). But it may be possible in a few years, so we might know if this really is a problem or not in the relatively near future. Currently a set of small-scale investigations have been done. They are inconclusive, but it seems like one needs pretty contrived matter distributions to get any noticeable effect.
I don't quite see how that would hold the elliptical galaxies together in the same fashion as they are all moving pretty randomly as I understand it.
Elliptical galaxies are indeed different from disk galaxies in how they are held up. Disk galaxies are held up by coherent angular momentum. Elliptical galaxies are held up by velocity instead. Velocities are typically much more radial than in a disk galaxy, and stars move a bit like the "hole through the center of the earth" example I described earlier - falling in towards the central region, sweeping past it and then heading out again. The galaxy doesn't collapse because its hard to get rid of those velocities without any stars colliding. But there is a very weak form of friction available called dynamical friction that slowly redistributes the kinetic energy between stars.
I guess it still leads to a smaller universe in the distant past and you don't quite get around it leading back to a point in space. Unless new matter is created somewhere in between the current matter. Then you could have expansion indefinitely where it didn't start at one point or one time.
What you are describing here is called the steady state theory. It has an eternally expanding universe that nevertheless always looked qualitatively the same because new matter was continuously created to compensate for the dilution from the expansion. It was quite popular in the early 20th century. It does predict the presence of background radiation, just like the Big Bang does, but it fails at the details: The radiation would not be expected to follow a black-body spectrum, nor would one expect it to be as cold as 2.7 K. It does not correctly predict the pattern of waves we observe to be imprinted on it, and it incorrectly predicts it to be unpolarized. It also cannot explain the chemical abundances in the universe (why is there so much hydrogen and so much helium, etc.). And it predicts that galaxies far-away should look qualitatively the same as galaxies nearby, while we actually observe them to look quite different, being smaller and messier, as one would expect from galaxies which are just in the presence of forming.
Ok, I went back and looked at what she was saying about the Coma galaxy cluster again. The dark matter was in the center, but the galaxies did not collide like I thought she was saying. They are just swirling around each other.
Oh, it was about the Coma cluster, not the Bullet Cluster. I apologize for confusing you with an unrelated discussion. The Coma cluster evidence is based on the velocity dispersion of the galaxies in the cluster, not separation of components like the Bullet Cluster is. The argument here is that the galaxies move too quickly compared to the gravity produced by the stars, so if there isn't some extra matter the cluster would blow apart (the Coma cluster is not unique in that way, the same thing is observed in every cluster). The argument is not as clear cut here as in the Bullet Cluster, since small modifications of the law of gravity can explain it as well as dark matter can. Modified gravity without dark matter fails for the Bullet Cluster though.
You do realize they decide what dark matter must do, then put it into the simulation that way. Of course it will act in the exact way they said it should. That is quite obvious.
Nobody is claiming that simulations in themselves constitute empirical evidence. Simulations are used as a step in the hypotetico-deductive method to work out the consequences of a hypothesis. It goes like this: We propose that we have some dark matter with a few simple properties (interacts only via gravity, initially distributed homogeneously, 5 times more of it than baryons). We then run that through a simulation to see what the world would look like if things really were like that. Then we compare the simulation to observations to see how well they match. If all the different observables match well, we consider the hypothesis to be strengthened. If they don't match at all, it would be weakened. One then repeats this for lots of different hypotheses to see which ones work best. Lots of things might seem like good ideas while they're at the handwavy stage, but turn out not to work when actually implemented in detail. That's where simulations help you.
The question is whether there is actually matter or something else causing these observations.
That is indeed the question, and there are (and have been) lots of different alternatives.
The stellar mass of the milky way is about 64 billion solar masses, giving a Schwartzchild radius of 0.02 light years. The time dilations should therefore be corrected to 1% at 1 light year, 2e-5 at 1% of the galaxy's radius and 3e-7 at our radius. It does not change the conclusion noticeably..
How likely do you think it is that scientists haven't thought of clumping of dark matter or gravitational time dilation in galaxies? It sounds like you really believe that all dem stoopid scientists and their entire field of research have missed your "novel" and "revolutionary" points. I think usually when it seems that way, the natural thing to do is to assume that you've misunderstood something, at least until you've properly researched the issue.
And it clumps together forming the scaffolding for the galaxies, but it also somehow separates out to only show up as a halo around the outer edge of the galaxies.
Have you thought about why our galaxy is the size it is? Gravity is definitely pulling inwards, so why doesn't it just collapse? The answer is velocity and angular momentum. The stars are all in free fall, but they keep missing the center of the galaxy because of their tangential velocity. Even if you start with very low angular velocity, as something collapses its angular velocity grows (just like figure skaters rotate faster when pulling in their arms). And to form galaxy-size objects you already have to get rid of a lot of angular momentum, and the way you do that is through pressure and friction. They baryonic gas that makes up the raw materials for the galaxy has some of this, and is therefore better at collapsing to small objects than dark matter is. This isn't just a handwavy argument - when you put dark matter and baryons into detailed physical simulations and let them run from a start state corresponding to our pictures of the primordial universe, you actually end up with galaxies embedded in dark matter halos.
Plus, nowhere do they ever say they account for time dilation in the galactic rotation speed. If gravity is more intense in the center of the galaxies, then time there will be slower. Which will appear as the outer edge of the galaxy rotating faster than it should. Time is moving faster for the matter there, so it moves further from our viewpoint. Our most accurate clock shows a difference from moving the clock from the floor to putting it up on the wall, I think there would be somewhat more of a difference when you move towards the center of a galaxy.
The Schwartzchild radius of our galaxy (counting the visible matter) is 0.0003 light years. 1 light year away, the gravitational time dilation would be a tiny 0.015% compared to the outside of the galaxy. At 1% of the radius of the galaxy it would be 3e-7. At our position it would be 5e-9. So if you ignored it, you would still be 99.9999% correct about velocities in almost all the galaxy, and only do slightly worse at the core. So why can we measure this effect on earth? Because we have ridiculously accurate clocks.
She also says how it passes through when two galaxies collide without interacting, but in some cases it collides and stays in the middle while the galaxies pass through and are on opposite sides.
No it doesn't. You seem to be talking about the explanation of the Bullet Cluster here. The bullet cluster (like any galaxy cluster) is believed to consist of three components: Stars (which we can observe directly), diffuse gas (which we can observe directly) and dark matter (which does not emit light). Stars are compact and practically never hit each other. When two galaxy clusters collide, none of the stars hit each other due to the enormous distances between each individual star, so the stellar part of all the galaxies pass straight through each other as if nothing happened. But the stars aren't the main component of the galaxies. There is much more diffuse gas (the same kind of stuff stars are made of, but not yet collapsed to form stars). This gas has a pressure, and fee
I was very suspicious when I saw the vixra.org link, but you've actually found a non-crackpot vixra article (if a very short one)! I guess it goes to show that one shouldn't be too quick to judge something by its company.
(Some context for other readers. arxiv.org is where all scientific papers in the fields of astronomy, particle physics and related fields are posted and read by working scientists. In these fields it has in practice supplanted traditional journals - on still submits articles to them, but nobody actually reads them, since articles appear on arxiv much earlier, and arxiv is free to everybody and much more convenient than dozens of scattered journals. But not everybody can post on arxiv. One must either be part of an academic institution or be endorsed by somebody who is. vixra was formed as a completely open alternative where anybody could post. But it quickly drowned in a deluge of crackpots. I've sampled it at several points (mostly the astronomy section), and did not succeed in finding a single remotely worthwhile paper in several pages of listing in any of the attempts. Hence my surprise this time.)
To follow up, I'd like to point out plot 2 in the article under discussion (go on, have a look. Opening a PDF isn't that painful). It is a plot of part of the parameter space for dark matter particle candiates, with weakly interacting, relatively light particles in the lower left corner and strongly interacting very heavy particles in the top right corner. MACHOs live to the right in this plot, and WIMPs near and below the bottom. The interesting thing about the plot is that it shows all the regions that have been excluded, color coded by how they were excluded. MACHO territory is basically completely excluded by microlensing. That doesn't mean that MACHOs don't exist - they definitely do (the earth basically qualifies, since it's compact and doesn't shine), but there can't be anywhere enough of them for their gravity to be important.
If you make the MACHOs smaller so that they aren't as good at lensing, you have to compensate by having more of them to get enough gravity, so microlensing can exclude a pretty wide parameter range. But if things get too light the lensing effect gets too small for us to detect, ending the microlensing exlusion range at a particle mass of about 10^24 g, about 1/10000 of the Earth's mass. But if they get a bit smaller, then can then be detected using lensing interferometry (=nanolensing), and for even lighter objects, by their imprints on crystals found in deep mines that act as natural particle detectors.
Anyway, I encourage everybody to read the paper: It details all the different techniques used to exclude models. The paper is really quite the opposite of what the [rant]typical Slashdotter anti-science prejudice[/rant] is. It's not somebody pulling some hypothesis out of thin air and then not bothering to test it. As the plot shows, this is really a case of eliminating slice after slice of the model space, with 75% of the area in the figure already being excluded.
Why would you think they're all exactly the same or even similar? Usually when you compare countries you find that there is a large scatter in whatever metric you choose to use. Why should espionage be any different? Do you have any reason to think the scatter would be less than a factor of 2, or a factor of 5 or a factor of 20? If I were to hazard a guess, I would expect it to show similar variability as military budgets do (and I wouldn't be surprised to see a large covariance between the two). But I don't have any direct data on this. Do you?
I think it is important to distinguish between three things here. The theory (the equations and predictions of measurements), our interpretations of the theory (what picture of the world we associate with the theory), and the real world itself.
For example, let's say that you need a theory for describing how a hypothetical time-ray works. The observed effect is that physical processes of whatever it is shot at occur at twice the rate as before compared to the rest of the world. This is straightforward to measure and can be modeled exactly using equations. But how should we interpret what happens? One interpretation is that the time-ray speeds up the passing of time for the object it hits. But another, equivalent interpretation is that the ray slows down the passing of time for the entire rest of the world, and protects only the target object from the effect. These interpretations both lead to the same observations, since all we can observe are the *relative* rate of events, but they make different claims about what actually happens. In this case one interpretation is clearly more appealing because it is simpler, but no experiment could distinguish between them. So in some sense the distinction is meaningless.
Similarly, the theory of general relativity, which is our modern description of gravity, can be interpreted as spacetime being curved by the presence of energy, and the curvature affecting the paths of objects. But it is also possible to interpret it as spacetime being flat, but filled with a field of self-interacting, massless, spin-2 particles (gravitons). Both these pictures lead to the same predictions, so in that sense they are the same theory. But they are clearly very different descriptions of reality.
The point of making the distinction between theory and interpretation is that the former can be tested, while the latter can't. The theory of general relativity has been put through a huge number of tests, and it has held up under all of them. Like most theories of fundamental physics it has been tested to exquisite precision, and if it is wrong, it has to be wrong in a very subtle way. But the interpretation of general relativity can't be tested at all. Which one to use is a bit like choosing whether to use a cartesian or polar coordinate system in maths. One might be easier to use or prettier in some situations, but they give exactly the same results.
The same applies to quantum physics to perhaps an even greater extent. Quantum Electrodynamics, one of the building blocks of the standard model of particle physics, may be the most precistly tested theory in science. The archetypical example is the anomalous dipole moment which is correctly predicted to 14 decimal places (all the ones we could measure so far). So the theory part of quantum physics is trustworthy. It may not be 100% correct, but it is pretty damned close. But there is a plethora of interpretations of quantum physics, and these are completely uncertain - we can't tell them apart because they are mathematically equivalent and hence all make the same predictions. Each one corresponds to a different real world, but we can't tell which one it is.
Electrons bound to atoms are relatively simple quantum systems, and I don't think our ability to measure them is the limiting factor. It sounds like you are arguing for a Hidden Variables description of the electron, where a point-like electron moves around the nucleus in an well-defined particle orbit like a planet, and it only looks like it's this complex non-local wavefunction (electron cloud) because it moves to quicky for us to resolve its actual orbit. The good news is that it it is possible to interpret standard quantum physics that way
Only 42% of quantum physicisists would agree with the statement in the summary that "When two identical photons are coupled and the phase of one is changed, then thanks to the magic of quantum mechanics, the phase of the other photon also changes", and 40% of them would actively disagree. While the mathematics and measurement predictions of quantum mechanics is quite uncontroversial, the interpretation beyond that is a topic of much debate (much of which belongs in philosopy rather than physics).
The summary is using one such metaphysical interpretation, called the Copenhagen interpretation, which has more "magic" than most (spooky, faster-than-light action at a distance; wavefunctions that collapse when I, the Observer, looks at them, but not when anyone else does), and might be the most confusing one to the public (though admittedly, all the interpretations are confusing to some extent).
Currently we use normal time (as in time where 00:00 is approximately the middle of the night) in the winter, and move if away from that correspondence in the summer. If anything, the opposite would make sense. In summer daylight is plentiful anyway, it's winter where daylight is limited and one could make an argument for tampering with our timekeeping to make the most out of that limited light. The current system is backwards. But I'm not in favor of winter-daylight-saving-time either. What I've read on the subject indicates that the switchover comes with significant costs in the form of extra accidents and worse health in the days just after the switch. These are admittedly small effects, but then, so is the argued benefit.
Worse than either of these systems is the proposal of permanent daylight savings time. Here one breaks the logical basis for our time system (the position of the sun) for the forseeable future just to save oneself from a one-time transition period of updating people's schedules, which would have the same effect without messing with our clocks. It is a bit of a dirty hack rather than a proper fix, and only makes sense from a short-term perspective. If one is going down this route, why limit yourself to one hour? Wouldn't it be nice if the sun were still up when you get home from work in the middle of winter at northerly latitudes, and lasted long enough to enjoy the sun with your family? At, say, 60 degrees north, the sun sets around 15:00 in winter. So just add 5 hours to the time, making it set at a comfortable 20:00. And then, in the year 2150 when a child asks why midnight occurs at 05:00 and noon at 17:00, they'll be happy to hear that it was because people 6 generations ago couldn't be bothered to change their actual schedules.
On the other hand, our time system isn't exactly a work of beauty to begin with. Perhaps one more wart won't matter. Especially when we already have a nearly equivalent one in the form of the current temporary daylight savings time.
Your comment is a bit terse. Would you mind elaborating on why dark matter is like the aether? In particular it would be great if you could summarize the different lines of evidence that make astronomers think there is a lot of dark matter, and how you think each of them is being misinterpreted.
The grandparent's example was not made up. It was how it's actually done on FreeBSD. Invoking make there downloads the sources, patches them, and then invokes the standard build procedure you quoted. So yes, somebody had to do some work to wrap the build process in a uniform interface, but it's no more work than what's needed for maintaining binary packages like Debian's apt packages. And once that work is done, anybody else using that operating system distribution can do it as simply as the grandparent showed.
When an object collapses to a black hole, its gravity doesn't get any stronger. If you replaced the Sun with a black hole of the same mass, the Earth would continue in the same orbit, and light would behave quite normally in the solar system. The only place where strange stuff happens is when you get very close to the black hole (a few km away from its center in the case of one with the mass of the sun).
Still, let's assume that a star has somehow ended up really close to a black hole. First of all, if the star is so close that it experiences the kind of extreme gravitational lensing you describe, if would be so close that the black hole would be inside the star. Black hole radii are typically a few kilometers, and the heavily distorted regions are a few times that. Star radii are millions of kilometers.
But let's assume that the star is really compact, so you can have it close enough to the black hole to be interesting without actually touching it. In that case, you can get one of the beams you want, but not both of them. The easy one to get it the one that goes from the start, past the black hole and then towards us. That one gets stronger when the star is at moderate distances. The beaming in the other direction requires the star to be super-close to the black hole - so close that it couldn't be in a stable orbit.
So the best version of this model would have a tiny, bright star in an orbit around a black hole, being periodically magnified by the lensing of the black hole as it passes behind it (seen from us). It wouldn't really look like a pulsar, though.
I don't find their hypothesis very persuasive. They don't go into any details. How exactly is this mechanism supposed to work? How high luminosities should be expected? What limits on pulse rates does their model predict? How is the energy generated? How large are pulsars? If they aren't compact objects, why do we have pairs of them that are separated by half the diameter of the sun?
If the standard model of pulsars were held to the same stnadard of handwaviness, one wouldn't even have discovered that there might be a problem with a too high luminosity for this pulsar. You only discover that sort of problems once you actually get down to it and calculate the consequences of your model. Examples of predictions made by the neutron star model of pulsars is: Pulsars should have quite well-defined maximum and minimum masses, and maximum and minimum sizes and surface gravities. They can't be too light, or they wouldn't collapse to form neutron stars, they would be white dwarves instead. And they can't be too heavy, or they would collapse to form black holes. These upper and lower bounds are called the Chandrasekhar limit (1.4 solar masses) and Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit (about 3 solar masses). If the neutron star is to stay together it can't rotate so fast that the centrifugal force wins over gravity. This, together with the limits on surface gravity and diameter implies a maximum rotation frequency. All pulsars we have seen so far fit with these limits.
The reason why a too high luminosity is considered problematic is that the energy source of ultraluminous pulsars is belived to be accretion: Matter falling down towards the surface of the neutron star, and converting lots of potential energy into kinetic energy and then heat radiation as it does so. But if too much radiation is emitted, this radiation exerts a pressure on the infalling matter that is so great that it pushes the matter back out. So if the pulsar (or any other thing driven by accretion) gets too bright, it ends up starving itself, and can't stay brighter than the point where radiation exactly cancels gravity for very long. That limit is called the Eddington limit, and the problem in this case is that the pulsar is 100 times brighter than this limit.
You can get around the Eddington limit by allowing for an asymmetric infall: More matter falling from some directions than other directions (example: a meteor hitting the earth is asymmetric accretion). But it's hard to go all the way up to 100 times the Eddington limit with realistic accretion scenarios. So this really is an interesting object.
But my point is that the Electric Universe guys don't do anything to explain the power source of the pulsar. If one assumes that it is powered by accretion as in the standard model, then they have exactly the same problem as the standard model. And if it isn't powered by accretion, where does it get its energy from? The article you link to talks about emission mechanisms, but not where the energy comes from in the first place. Also, the link they give to the press release is about a variant on the standard neutron star picture - it does not support the Electric Pulsar hypothesis.
If the government needs to collect more tax, why not raise the general tax levels rather than introduce this tax? The tax burden will be the same in both cases, but the internet tax takes it all from internet users rather than spreading it out (or even taking it preferentially from those who can afford it, like progressive tax does).
The main argument for specific taxes like this is to use it as an incentive for people to change their behavior. For example, one may tax driving in city centers to reduce the car traffic there. But surely internet is something one would want to encourage rather than discourage? It's an environmentally friendly way of obtaining knowledge and communicate, for example. The high use of internet probably increases children's reading skills too.
It's hard to see a good reason for using this kind of tax.
I would just like to point out that we've had Internet relay Chat for 26 years, and it's still free to use with no ads. I guess it helps that it wasn't invented by a company.