There's something very wrong with the driver selection if deleting the software version actually accomplishes anything.. Software should be the fallback if the hardware doesn't exist (or isn't capable, on a function-by-function basis), not the other way around. Deleting the software drivers should, at best, throw missing library errors at you.
Not that I know anything about the Linux OGL implementation specifically.. that's just how it should work in general under any implementation. If its using software when hardware is available, its doing it wrong.
when someone comes to you recommending a high-end consumer system, comment that "Look, those are great - I have one at home hosting my film collection - but they lack the admin and backup options we need in our environment. I know those features aren't cheap in upfront costs but the TCO is far lower once you take support and resilience into account."
Shouldn't there be some synergy in there somewhere? But I'll assume that the TCO claim would have remained unsubstantiated in a real environment and give you a half point for that!
I love how both summaries include "and other purposes." I'm sure its standard language, but its amusing nonetheless on bills intended to prevent tacking "other things" on bills.
No the problem would be getting it passed. The people who would be voting on it would be the same people who expressly make use of the current system! The only way you'd get something like that passed is by having a large enough public protest that the politicians are forced to listen whether they like it or not.
As for defining a stated purpose, sure things are unclear. But that's why congress/senate/etc have discussions and debates. We just add one more aspect to it -- not just "is this good/bad?" but also "is it relevant?"
And if that fails, there are legal bodies (SCOTUS primarily) with the power to reject laws that they deem inappropriate even after passing all of the other stages. Of course, someone generally has to challenge said law before they'll do that, but if the law isn't being applied anyway then there's no need to reject it (even if its dumb.)
That's only a viable option whenin markets with meaningful competition. Which in most jurisdictions, is just not there in the isp market. Without competition, the only remaining control options are regulation or crossing your fingers for corporate benevolence (pretty likely, right?)... Or well, just giving up your net+phone+tv... And if you're willing to do that then power to you, but there's not enough people willing/able to make that sacrifice for the isps to care. Government definitely fishes things up a lot.. but I'd rather a well-meaning half measure than an intentional fuckover..
you would likely be billed $110 and $200, respectively
There's a second, more subtle problem here. In many cases, you wouldn't get the option of the $100 pill. The hospital will intentionally give you the more expensive treatment due to coercion, kickbacks or other under-handed tactics by the pharmaceuticals.
Similarly, no pharma company will likely ever release a $10 pill that did the same job as one of their own $100 pills. Most of the cost of pharmaceuticals is fixed (the R&D costs -- they're probably exaggerated, but still going to be huge compared to the unit cost.) Making a pill for $0.03 and selling it for $100 is always going to be more economic than making a pill for $0.01 and selling it for $10.
The pharma companies (well, the US medical system in general really) have repeatedly proven themselves devious, greedy and anti-consumer. But until there's another option for creating effective drugs (or a multinational government crackdown to beat the evil out of the existing companies, though I'm not holding my breath on that one..) we're stuck in a "well its better than nothing" scenario and just have to live with it.
4, that want to play at the same time you want to 5, that are able to play at the same time as you (network congestion, peak time usage charges etc)
These two don't vary among the shared-screen, LAN, and online cases
It differs significantly: LAN you have a pool of maybe a few friends. Online you have a pool of hundreds or thousands of potential players. I can load up an online game at any time of day or night and find someone to play with/against. It might not be as fun as playing with a friend directly, but its almost always available.
there is no reason not to implement lan play
(OK I'm responding to the GP here, but I don't feel like double-posting:P.) There's a huge reason to not implement LAN play -- it requires that you distribute the server code. Depending on the type of game this may or may not be a huge deal (games with offline single player would have to do this anyway for example,) and you can argue whether this is a good (in the moral sense) reason, but its a pretty big one nonetheless -- companies don't like giving away a single bit more than they absolutely need to.. and even less so if it simultaneously involves giving up potential data mining opportunities.
Hate to say it, but the online world is part of "the real world" these days. Especially for anyone currently in their teens (or earlier). Remember people who were born in the mid-90s are now in their late teens -- these people have never known a time when "the internet" didn't exist.
So, given that internet communication is just as engrained in their lives as any other form of communication, it shouldn't be hard to understand that being belittled on Facebook is just as damaging as being belittled in the real world. Maybe more-so since its there for the world to see, and all the world is looking these days (metaphorically speaking.)
Words can be hurtful, regardless of the medium they're transmitted over.
Not really. A single programmer can usually do as good if not better a job than a team of programmers, for example. It just takes her a lot longer (the slow part.)
However, it generally won't take him as long as the multiplied rate of the team because she won't have nearly as much of the coordination overhead. So its still "cheap" (in comparison, which might not necessarily be cheap in absolute numbers.)
Plus, this quip also tends to apply to everything in life, not just software. You can find much more clear-cut examples in other areas where the time scale between "slow" and "fast" is more obvious.
Something like shipping for example. Basic mail is relatively cheap, but also relatively slow, but you can pay more to get faster service if you have more money than time. (In this case, the quality metric becomes hard to compare -- nobody wants to lose their mail regardless of how they send it.. but if you really want to play that metric as well, you can pay even more for shipping insurance and extra-detailed tracking and whatnot as well.)
Emily: Discussing CD sales is pointless because nobody uses CDs anymore!
RMS: You should be using free software!
Sure, while technically using free software instead of closed alternatives would have been better, its a completely irrelevant point in the context of Emily's post (never mind the fact that free alternatives to some of the software she used simply didn't exist at the time she needed them, or had so few peers comparatively as to be useless.)
Probably 20-50 years after the US repeals its counterpart in the DMCA. Such legislation was imparted to us by the US and its unlikely to be revoked without the blessing of the US. And even then, laws tend to take a lot longer to repeal than to implement in the first place.
Usually dead laws just get ignored into obscurity until some enterprising crackpot with too much legal knowledge decides to resurrect a law that hasn't been put in practice in 50 years and it gets stricken down by the judge at that point because nobody cares anymore. Dumblaws.com is a nice big repository of examples.
C-11 (and probably the DMCA itself for that matter) is of course a bit different in that it was intentionally designed to be unenforceable from the outset, rather than just becoming unenforceable due to changing social requirements. This is a relatively new breed of law -- a law that criminalizes the vast majority of the population in a mostly invisible way.
This potentially allows certain parties to have legal clout over most individuals at their discretion, without the accompanying responsibility to actually enforce it (since that's impossible.)
Work for the RIAA and happen to take a dislike to your neighbor? Well chances are he or someone in his household has downloaded a song illegally at some point in their lives -- just slap him with a $100k fine (or even jail time) and let the rest work itself out.
Sure. They could stop trying to prevent people from repairing broken devices. Its simply a money grab to force consumers to purchase a new unit rather than continuing to use the old one after the screen cracks or the battery wears out or any of the other dozen things that can go wrong in a device that is (or at least should be) easily repairable by anyone with a little bit of know-how.
They can make their claim for the artistic merits of not having seams in the casing, but there's no justification other than pure greed for gluing down the internal components.
Yep, changing scales can make definitions a little blurry!
So to clarify, I was referring only to fundamental particles and the rest energy I'm talking about is precisely the energy that can't be explained by the known forces (strong, weak, EM, gravity.)
Taking my comment a little more personally than was intended I think. No two individuals are likely to have exactly the same life experiences and philosophies, but special-casing out each of 300 million people would make for a heck of a long post!
I used the term "so-called" intentionally. 1% is not some magic cut-off line of evilness. Its a generic buzzword for people (whether they're technically in the 1% income bracket or not) who are willing to throw everything, from their fellow man to the security of their nation and the future of their grandchildren, under the bus in the name of short-term profit.
In fact, your personal anecdote goes to prove my point (as much as a single anecdote can prove any generalized statement) that living your "year of poverty" has given you a more grounded view of those of us who aren't in the top-tier income brackets. Precisely the experience I suggest more monied people should be put through, hopefully gaining the same life lessons that you got out of it.
The problem is that people have very unreasonable expectations about their standard of living.
I can't disagree with that, but thanks to mass advertising and other such propaganda, such "unreasonable expectations" are the norm for society. Stupid to be sure, but reality nonetheless.
is only funding it at about 1/10th where it needs to be
True, and I'm not going to try and claim it would be easy to just install universal healthcare in the US (just ask Obama!) There's a lot more wrong with the US healthcare system than the lack of a single social program, no matter how large you end up making it, and all of those pieces are important in their own way. Mostly in the form of a complete relative price scale drop across the entire medical industry from hospital fees to pharmaceuticals to medical school fees, etc in order to bring that $1mill/person you suggested down to a more reasonable level.
Of course, expecting such a large change is probably even further into the wishful thinking category than hoping everyone will suddenly realize that a credit card is not a savings account.
But claiming its impossible is a bit silly, given that the US is one of the few (maybe only?) industrialized countries without some form of universal healthcare. Obamacare, for all of its faults, is at least a step in the right direction.
If the US wanted to pursue antitrust litigation, they would file against the company, not any specific executive (though I suppose it would help to have one on hand as a witness.)
Fine the company $x millions and if they don't pony up (or don't change their ways), block their imports at the border. No executives are technically needed. Just some willpower on the side of the DoJ.
But since jewelry-class diamonds are fundamentally useless, there's really not a whole lot to be gained by opening up competition in that market. A few celebrities complaining that their giant rings aren't as valuable anymore and save guys a couple hundred bucks the occasional time they propose to a girl. Whoop-de-doo. DoJ has more useful and important things to do.
Same thing could be said about the capitalist pigs in the US. China might be more overtly hostile to their citizens than the US is, but greed and corruption are universal.
Once again, I'd have to appeal to the scale. Its pretty impractical in this day and age to expect someone.. never mind everyone.. to keep $50,000 stashed away and untouched (or even have $50,000 in the first place) in addition to any retirement savings they have, kids' college funds, mortgage payments, student loan payments, etc that are all but required to have a reasonable standard of living in the modern US.
Of course in some respects, that's what insurance is for. Which might work out OK if the HMOs would actually take care of you when you needed them rather than fighting you tooth and nail. But even then, it requires you to have insurance in the first place, and not everybody can afford that (or is lucky enough to have an employer that provides it for them.)
Personally I'm happy to pay a couple extra percent on my taxes to know that I'll be taken care of when I need it, regardless of my financial state at the time or how costly my required procedure turns out to be. It buys peace of mind even if I never end up needing it, and that's not worth nothing to me either.
- Rest energy. This is the stuff made possible by the Higgs. Its also a constant for all practical purposes for each particle. No matter what reference frame you're in, a particle's rest mass will always exist.
- Kinetic energy. This is the energy due to the movement of the particles (and particles are always moving in some manner, even if its just a really tiny vibration.) This energy DOES change with your frame of reference. In particular, it will be zero if you happen to be in the same frame of reference as the particle you're measuring (and any energy you measure in that frame must therefore be the particle's rest energy, providing you can sufficiently eliminate external interferences.)
Photons have no rest energy and thus no Higgs interaction, but they DO have kinetic energy, which has nothing to do with the Higgs.
countering the Higgs Field to produce anti-gravity is mathematically possible
I'm not so sure about that. I believe the best you can do is zero, even mathematically.
the amount of energy required is somewhat in excess of all of the energy in the Universe
Quite a bit in excess. Infinitely in excess to be precise. You can get as close as you want to the speed of light given enough energy, but you can never reach it (with a massive particle) no matter how hard you try.
No. They've determined the existence of "something" that's new. So far it matches the Higgs predictions, but there's still more work to be done before they can confirm its the Higgs. Right now all they can confirm is that its new.
It would change a lot of things if it turned out to be say, a selectron. Or the lightest of an entirely new particle generation (prompting a search for the other three corresponding particles in the family.) Or hell, maybe something entirely new and unexpected.
There's a pretty good chance that its a Higgs given how well the energies and decays match up with theory, but there are still other theorized properties of the Higgs to be tested before a full confirmation can be made.
you simply do whatever it is that the theory predicts
Errr.. that's exactly what they DID do.
The miles of tunnel and huge expensive equipment is needed because the theory predicts that its needed.
You're right that the immense energies and miniscule timescales involved mean that practical applications are not likely to be forthcoming any time soon.
But hey if in 200 years they've managed to create a practically-sized energy source that can produce a few TeV, then perhaps real applications for all of these GeV-scale particles might become available.. even if its just "seeing what happens" when you irradiate a cow liver with top quarks (analogous to some of the early tests with neutron guns when the first nuclear reactors were built and nobody knew much about their effects.)
couldn't the manipulation of the Higgs field result in negative mass?
No. The Higgs function is a Mexican-hat shape, with the bottom of the "rim" being zero mass. You can go up either side, but you will result in a positive mass either way.
Could it not be true that particles with negative mass move above lightspeed?
Doubtful. If anti-mass was ever discovered, I expect it would work relatively corresponding to positive and negative electric charges -- equal but opposite. In which case you could consider the speed of light to be an asymptote with "normal" mass climbing the energy curve from one side and "negative" mass climbing the energy curve from the other side -- but neither actually having the ability to reach the (infinite) top of the curve.
Of course, I've not seen any math or theorizing on that, I'm just making it up based on logical deduction from what I know of normal matter physics combined with some general conceptions of how these things tend to work out in the end.
If FTL turns out to be possible, I suspect it will come from some completely new physical processes that we haven't even glimpsed yet. The speed of light seems to be an absolute no matter where you look in all of our existing knowledge (QED in particular has been tested to an insane level of accuracy,) leading me to doubt that small tweaks to SM or GR are going to break the barrier.
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There's something very wrong with the driver selection if deleting the software version actually accomplishes anything.. Software should be the fallback if the hardware doesn't exist (or isn't capable, on a function-by-function basis), not the other way around. Deleting the software drivers should, at best, throw missing library errors at you.
Not that I know anything about the Linux OGL implementation specifically.. that's just how it should work in general under any implementation. If its using software when hardware is available, its doing it wrong.
when someone comes to you recommending a high-end consumer system, comment that "Look, those are great - I have one at home hosting my film collection - but they lack the admin and backup options we need in our environment. I know those features aren't cheap in upfront costs but the TCO is far lower once you take support and resilience into account."
Shouldn't there be some synergy in there somewhere? But I'll assume that the TCO claim would have remained unsubstantiated in a real environment and give you a half point for that!
I love how both summaries include "and other purposes." I'm sure its standard language, but its amusing nonetheless on bills intended to prevent tacking "other things" on bills.
No the problem would be getting it passed. The people who would be voting on it would be the same people who expressly make use of the current system! The only way you'd get something like that passed is by having a large enough public protest that the politicians are forced to listen whether they like it or not.
As for defining a stated purpose, sure things are unclear. But that's why congress/senate/etc have discussions and debates. We just add one more aspect to it -- not just "is this good/bad?" but also "is it relevant?"
And if that fails, there are legal bodies (SCOTUS primarily) with the power to reject laws that they deem inappropriate even after passing all of the other stages. Of course, someone generally has to challenge said law before they'll do that, but if the law isn't being applied anyway then there's no need to reject it (even if its dumb.)
Set your password to "fuck off".
Cop: "What's your password?"
You: "Fuck off"
Cop: "Perjury is a crime you know. What's your password?"
You: "Seriously, fuck off"
Etc.
let the market work
That's only a viable option whenin markets with meaningful competition. Which in most jurisdictions, is just not there in the isp market.
Without competition, the only remaining control options are regulation or crossing your fingers for corporate benevolence (pretty likely, right?)... Or well, just giving up your net+phone+tv... And if you're willing to do that then power to you, but there's not enough people willing/able to make that sacrifice for the isps to care.
Government definitely fishes things up a lot.. but I'd rather a well-meaning half measure than an intentional fuckover..
you would likely be billed $110 and $200, respectively
There's a second, more subtle problem here. In many cases, you wouldn't get the option of the $100 pill. The hospital will intentionally give you the more expensive treatment due to coercion, kickbacks or other under-handed tactics by the pharmaceuticals.
Similarly, no pharma company will likely ever release a $10 pill that did the same job as one of their own $100 pills. Most of the cost of pharmaceuticals is fixed (the R&D costs -- they're probably exaggerated, but still going to be huge compared to the unit cost.) Making a pill for $0.03 and selling it for $100 is always going to be more economic than making a pill for $0.01 and selling it for $10.
The pharma companies (well, the US medical system in general really) have repeatedly proven themselves devious, greedy and anti-consumer. But until there's another option for creating effective drugs (or a multinational government crackdown to beat the evil out of the existing companies, though I'm not holding my breath on that one..) we're stuck in a "well its better than nothing" scenario and just have to live with it.
4, that want to play at the same time you want to
5, that are able to play at the same time as you (network congestion, peak time usage charges etc)
These two don't vary among the shared-screen, LAN, and online cases
It differs significantly: LAN you have a pool of maybe a few friends. Online you have a pool of hundreds or thousands of potential players. I can load up an online game at any time of day or night and find someone to play with/against. It might not be as fun as playing with a friend directly, but its almost always available.
there is no reason not to implement lan play
(OK I'm responding to the GP here, but I don't feel like double-posting:P.) There's a huge reason to not implement LAN play -- it requires that you distribute the server code. Depending on the type of game this may or may not be a huge deal (games with offline single player would have to do this anyway for example,) and you can argue whether this is a good (in the moral sense) reason, but its a pretty big one nonetheless -- companies don't like giving away a single bit more than they absolutely need to.. and even less so if it simultaneously involves giving up potential data mining opportunities.
Hate to say it, but the online world is part of "the real world" these days. Especially for anyone currently in their teens (or earlier). Remember people who were born in the mid-90s are now in their late teens -- these people have never known a time when "the internet" didn't exist.
So, given that internet communication is just as engrained in their lives as any other form of communication, it shouldn't be hard to understand that being belittled on Facebook is just as damaging as being belittled in the real world. Maybe more-so since its there for the world to see, and all the world is looking these days (metaphorically speaking.)
Words can be hurtful, regardless of the medium they're transmitted over.
Not really. A single programmer can usually do as good if not better a job than a team of programmers, for example. It just takes her a lot longer (the slow part.)
However, it generally won't take him as long as the multiplied rate of the team because she won't have nearly as much of the coordination overhead. So its still "cheap" (in comparison, which might not necessarily be cheap in absolute numbers.)
Plus, this quip also tends to apply to everything in life, not just software. You can find much more clear-cut examples in other areas where the time scale between "slow" and "fast" is more obvious.
Something like shipping for example. Basic mail is relatively cheap, but also relatively slow, but you can pay more to get faster service if you have more money than time. (In this case, the quality metric becomes hard to compare -- nobody wants to lose their mail regardless of how they send it.. but if you really want to play that metric as well, you can pay even more for shipping insurance and extra-detailed tracking and whatnot as well.)
Something slow and expensive, most likely.
Emily: Discussing CD sales is pointless because nobody uses CDs anymore!
RMS: You should be using free software!
Sure, while technically using free software instead of closed alternatives would have been better, its a completely irrelevant point in the context of Emily's post (never mind the fact that free alternatives to some of the software she used simply didn't exist at the time she needed them, or had so few peers comparatively as to be useless.)
Probably 20-50 years after the US repeals its counterpart in the DMCA. Such legislation was imparted to us by the US and its unlikely to be revoked without the blessing of the US. And even then, laws tend to take a lot longer to repeal than to implement in the first place.
Usually dead laws just get ignored into obscurity until some enterprising crackpot with too much legal knowledge decides to resurrect a law that hasn't been put in practice in 50 years and it gets stricken down by the judge at that point because nobody cares anymore. Dumblaws.com is a nice big repository of examples.
C-11 (and probably the DMCA itself for that matter) is of course a bit different in that it was intentionally designed to be unenforceable from the outset, rather than just becoming unenforceable due to changing social requirements. This is a relatively new breed of law -- a law that criminalizes the vast majority of the population in a mostly invisible way.
This potentially allows certain parties to have legal clout over most individuals at their discretion, without the accompanying responsibility to actually enforce it (since that's impossible.)
Work for the RIAA and happen to take a dislike to your neighbor? Well chances are he or someone in his household has downloaded a song illegally at some point in their lives -- just slap him with a $100k fine (or even jail time) and let the rest work itself out.
Scary stuff.
Sure. They could stop trying to prevent people from repairing broken devices. Its simply a money grab to force consumers to purchase a new unit rather than continuing to use the old one after the screen cracks or the battery wears out or any of the other dozen things that can go wrong in a device that is (or at least should be) easily repairable by anyone with a little bit of know-how.
They can make their claim for the artistic merits of not having seams in the casing, but there's no justification other than pure greed for gluing down the internal components.
Yep, changing scales can make definitions a little blurry!
So to clarify, I was referring only to fundamental particles and the rest energy I'm talking about is precisely the energy that can't be explained by the known forces (strong, weak, EM, gravity.)
Taking my comment a little more personally than was intended I think. No two individuals are likely to have exactly the same life experiences and philosophies, but special-casing out each of 300 million people would make for a heck of a long post!
I used the term "so-called" intentionally. 1% is not some magic cut-off line of evilness. Its a generic buzzword for people (whether they're technically in the 1% income bracket or not) who are willing to throw everything, from their fellow man to the security of their nation and the future of their grandchildren, under the bus in the name of short-term profit.
In fact, your personal anecdote goes to prove my point (as much as a single anecdote can prove any generalized statement) that living your "year of poverty" has given you a more grounded view of those of us who aren't in the top-tier income brackets. Precisely the experience I suggest more monied people should be put through, hopefully gaining the same life lessons that you got out of it.
The problem is that people have very unreasonable expectations about their standard of living.
I can't disagree with that, but thanks to mass advertising and other such propaganda, such "unreasonable expectations" are the norm for society. Stupid to be sure, but reality nonetheless.
is only funding it at about 1/10th where it needs to be
True, and I'm not going to try and claim it would be easy to just install universal healthcare in the US (just ask Obama!) There's a lot more wrong with the US healthcare system than the lack of a single social program, no matter how large you end up making it, and all of those pieces are important in their own way. Mostly in the form of a complete relative price scale drop across the entire medical industry from hospital fees to pharmaceuticals to medical school fees, etc in order to bring that $1mill/person you suggested down to a more reasonable level.
Of course, expecting such a large change is probably even further into the wishful thinking category than hoping everyone will suddenly realize that a credit card is not a savings account.
But claiming its impossible is a bit silly, given that the US is one of the few (maybe only?) industrialized countries without some form of universal healthcare. Obamacare, for all of its faults, is at least a step in the right direction.
If the US wanted to pursue antitrust litigation, they would file against the company, not any specific executive (though I suppose it would help to have one on hand as a witness.)
Fine the company $x millions and if they don't pony up (or don't change their ways), block their imports at the border. No executives are technically needed. Just some willpower on the side of the DoJ.
But since jewelry-class diamonds are fundamentally useless, there's really not a whole lot to be gained by opening up competition in that market. A few celebrities complaining that their giant rings aren't as valuable anymore and save guys a couple hundred bucks the occasional time they propose to a girl. Whoop-de-doo. DoJ has more useful and important things to do.
Same thing could be said about the capitalist pigs in the US. China might be more overtly hostile to their citizens than the US is, but greed and corruption are universal.
Once again, I'd have to appeal to the scale. Its pretty impractical in this day and age to expect someone.. never mind everyone.. to keep $50,000 stashed away and untouched (or even have $50,000 in the first place) in addition to any retirement savings they have, kids' college funds, mortgage payments, student loan payments, etc that are all but required to have a reasonable standard of living in the modern US.
Of course in some respects, that's what insurance is for. Which might work out OK if the HMOs would actually take care of you when you needed them rather than fighting you tooth and nail. But even then, it requires you to have insurance in the first place, and not everybody can afford that (or is lucky enough to have an employer that provides it for them.)
Personally I'm happy to pay a couple extra percent on my taxes to know that I'll be taken care of when I need it, regardless of my financial state at the time or how costly my required procedure turns out to be. It buys peace of mind even if I never end up needing it, and that's not worth nothing to me either.
They solve this by defining two types of energy:
- Rest energy. This is the stuff made possible by the Higgs. Its also a constant for all practical purposes for each particle. No matter what reference frame you're in, a particle's rest mass will always exist.
- Kinetic energy. This is the energy due to the movement of the particles (and particles are always moving in some manner, even if its just a really tiny vibration.) This energy DOES change with your frame of reference. In particular, it will be zero if you happen to be in the same frame of reference as the particle you're measuring (and any energy you measure in that frame must therefore be the particle's rest energy, providing you can sufficiently eliminate external interferences.)
Photons have no rest energy and thus no Higgs interaction, but they DO have kinetic energy, which has nothing to do with the Higgs.
countering the Higgs Field to produce anti-gravity is mathematically possible
I'm not so sure about that. I believe the best you can do is zero, even mathematically.
the amount of energy required is somewhat in excess of all of the energy in the Universe
Quite a bit in excess. Infinitely in excess to be precise. You can get as close as you want to the speed of light given enough energy, but you can never reach it (with a massive particle) no matter how hard you try.
No. They've determined the existence of "something" that's new. So far it matches the Higgs predictions, but there's still more work to be done before they can confirm its the Higgs. Right now all they can confirm is that its new.
It would change a lot of things if it turned out to be say, a selectron. Or the lightest of an entirely new particle generation (prompting a search for the other three corresponding particles in the family.) Or hell, maybe something entirely new and unexpected.
There's a pretty good chance that its a Higgs given how well the energies and decays match up with theory, but there are still other theorized properties of the Higgs to be tested before a full confirmation can be made.
you simply do whatever it is that the theory predicts
Errr.. that's exactly what they DID do.
The miles of tunnel and huge expensive equipment is needed because the theory predicts that its needed.
You're right that the immense energies and miniscule timescales involved mean that practical applications are not likely to be forthcoming any time soon.
But hey if in 200 years they've managed to create a practically-sized energy source that can produce a few TeV, then perhaps real applications for all of these GeV-scale particles might become available.. even if its just "seeing what happens" when you irradiate a cow liver with top quarks (analogous to some of the early tests with neutron guns when the first nuclear reactors were built and nobody knew much about their effects.)
couldn't the manipulation of the Higgs field result in negative mass?
No. The Higgs function is a Mexican-hat shape, with the bottom of the "rim" being zero mass. You can go up either side, but you will result in a positive mass either way.
Could it not be true that particles with negative mass move above lightspeed?
Doubtful. If anti-mass was ever discovered, I expect it would work relatively corresponding to positive and negative electric charges -- equal but opposite. In which case you could consider the speed of light to be an asymptote with "normal" mass climbing the energy curve from one side and "negative" mass climbing the energy curve from the other side -- but neither actually having the ability to reach the (infinite) top of the curve.
Of course, I've not seen any math or theorizing on that, I'm just making it up based on logical deduction from what I know of normal matter physics combined with some general conceptions of how these things tend to work out in the end.
If FTL turns out to be possible, I suspect it will come from some completely new physical processes that we haven't even glimpsed yet. The speed of light seems to be an absolute no matter where you look in all of our existing knowledge (QED in particular has been tested to an insane level of accuracy,) leading me to doubt that small tweaks to SM or GR are going to break the barrier.