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The energy requirements are proportional to the beaming angle, so if we assume FRBs to be beamed, then the energy required decreases significantly. For example assuming a beam of 10 deg^2, this would give a reduction of a factor 648.

This article makes a number of incorrect statements. First of all, all observed FRBs so far are at cosmological distances, well outside the Milky Way. Second, even before the discovery of a repeating source, neutron star collisions have already been ruled out as being a primary source of FRBs because of their rate. Only a very small fraction of neutron stars collide with another neutron star or black hole in the lifetime of the Universe (of the order of 1 every tens of thousands). On the other hand, the FRB rate inferred from the observations is around several percent of the core-collapse supernova rate, ie, the rate at which neutron stars are formed.

EDIT

Also the energy estimate given in the article are way off. The energy released by FRBs are of the order of what the Sun emits in 1 year not 1 day (assuming that FRB emit energy isotropically and that the distances estimated from the dispersion measurement of FRBs are correct).

Something to keep in mind is that gravitational waves are linearized solutions to Einstein equations. That is, they can only be meaningfully defined far away from those sources. What happens close to the black holes cannot be described in terms of waves. You should not think of the gravitational waves as being emitted directly by the black holes. Instead what happens is that the black holes distort spacetime in complex non-linear ways, which turn into gravitational waves at large distances (hundreds of Schwarzschild radii). As such, the time dilation imprinted in the waves depends on the motion of the "center of mass of the binary" and the cosmological redshift.

Actually the nice thing about gravitational waves is that we are sensitive to their amplitude, which scales as 1/r, and not to their energy, which scales as 1/r^2.

Gamma-ray bursts emission is strongly beamed into a small solid angle. So, although their equivalent isotropic energies (that is the energy that would be needed to power gamma-ray bursts if the emission was isotropic) are huge, the actual energies released in gamma-ray bursts are more or less compatible with those of supernovae (~0.1% of a solar mass).

I wouldn't say that traditional journals in my field are biased in favor of top U.S. research institutions. The bias comes from the readers. Someone reading articles that are not directly connected with their research has a hard time judging whether the results are solid or not. It is unfortunately natural that scientist, often without even realizing it consciously, end up using proxies, such as the author's affiliation, when evaluating papers. My worry is that adding comments to the arXiv might institutionalize these biases and contribute to the formation of a more closed and elitist scientific community.

Just immagine having to scan through 100 articles every day looking for new ideas. You find something that sounds interesting from somebody you do not know personally (happens to me all the time). The topic is of your interest, but you are not necessarily an expert of that particular subfield (because you are an observer, a "user" of models, not a "developer"). Judging its quality would take away one day of your work. Clearly, if there is a comment from a famous established professor saying that the work is wrong, you will happily forget about it.

It is also true that a famous professor can backstab you when reviewing your paper. But, first of all, your work is already on the arXiv, so everybody already had a chance to form their own opinion. Secondly, in a peer review process the reviewer cannot arbitrarily reject papers. It does not work like that. He/she has to provide good motivations for his/her recommendations. Reviewers can also be challenged to the editors, who can ask for second or third opinions.

Finally, as others commented, to truly disseminate your work you need to go out and engage the community, giving seminars and talks. I couldn't agree more with this. My issue with that, and I talk as a privileged because I work in one of the top Universities in the USA, is that going to conferences, giving seminars and so on, is way easier if you come from one of the top places. You have funds for traveling, you had a lot of chances to network with the right people (when they visited your institution, for example) and so on. It is much more difficult if you come from lesser known groups or from abroad. The system as it is now already strongly favors people working in the top research Universities in the USA and Canada.

The arXiv is great because it puts everybody at the same level. It ensures that the best ideas have a chance to come out, independently from their origin. I wouldn't want the scientific discussion to be dominated by few loud voices.

As somebody in the academia, I would see comments as potentially very dangerous. A comment system could be very easily abused by established researchers in some areas to prevent others from entering their niche sub-field. Do not get me wrong: the majority of scientists I know have very good professional integrity. However, I have also witnessed cases where established professors tried in all possible ways to prevent people from competing with them by discrediting or delaying the publication of very solid science. The arXiv as it is now is a great equalizer, because papers are presented without any string attached and this gives a chance to everyone (or at least to experts) to judge the quality of the various works without pre-conceptions.

As a fictitious example of what could go wrong. I am a theoretical astrophysicist. I am not established (I am not a tenured professor). Suppose that I come up with a good model to explain some astronomical observations. What I would want to do is to write a paper directed to my astronomers colleagues explaining how my model works and why it is better than competing models. I want to convince them to work with me to analyze their data. As it is now, I would post it on the arXiv, the astronomers would probably find it, read it and evaluate it. However, if the arXiv had comments, a single negative review by a more established theoretical astrophysicist would be enough to discourage any astronomer from even reading my paper. Remember that in the astro-ph section of the arXiv there are of the order of 100 new papers per day and we can realistically read only 1 or 2 papers per day on average. In this situation, the chances of my work being completely ignored because of that one comment would be very significant.

I think that the current channels for commenting on scientific work, private email and/or rebuttal papers, are perfectly adequate.

I am not an expert, but my understanding is that long GRBs are expected as the result of the collapse of very massive stars. These stars are short lived (few million years) and very luminous. Metals (in astrophysics anything heavier than Helium) in the envelope of such a massive star would drive strong radiation-pressure driven mass losses (because of the increased opacity). Only very metal poor stars are able to remain sufficiently compact and massive at the onset of collapse to be able to trigger a GRB.

I have the same machine as the author of this post and I have been wondering about installing Linux on it for quite some time. I was wondering: wouldn't it be simpler to use virtualization (no problems with the hardware, ease in sharing data between Linux/OS-X no need to partition the disk and so on)? What am I missing?