Yes, congratulations, you understand that when things are over budget the costs have increased. I never claimed that there was a magic solution to make things cost less. I said completing the science is important, and canceling it causes too much harm.
If the near-term budget is all you care about, then cancel the project. If the economic gains which result from the discoveries, but won't occur for 5-50 years are important, then you damned well better make sure the project is completed, despite the cost increase. The US can't do that.
The goal is to control costs. As long as you don't fire all the scientists or cancel the project outright, the project will still happen and the discoveries will be made. There's no magic in that.
The US is in a very bad position with respect to "Big Science". The problem basically is that any congress can't tie the hands of any future congress, and the consequence of this for science is that every single project faces cancellation, every single year. This has led to the cancellation many projects, a prominent example being the Superconducting Supercollider.
Science has a much longer-term view than congress. Congress, at most, has a view that lasts 2 years (to the next election), and practically it's much less than that. The US needs to devise a scheme to keep these projects going through hard times, and through fickle congressional actions. A constitutional amendment is unlikely, but how about some creative financing, of the "trust fund" variety? When things run over budget, bring in auditors, fire some people, but at all costs, make sure the science happens.
I'm at CERN, where the funding comes from member states as a fraction of their GDP. As a consequence, CERN has an extremely stable budget compared to US labs. If a project runs over-budget, the lab can simply delay the project. They also have a large permanent staff, so when new ideas come up, they can very quickly move to answer scientific questions, without building entirely new facilities. The expertise already exists here.
Canceling a project has disastrous consequences. Not only do you lose the science that would be gained, you may also lose the scientists, and technology developed along the way. It really is selling out future generations, and sacrificing technological advancement on a long timescale. It's very hard to see what will happen 50 years in the future, but I don't think human colonies on Mars are out of the question, perhaps spurred by the discoveries of the Mars Science Laboratory. Basic research has always paid off in the long run.
The US will lose out on the discoveries that will be made by the LHC. The US could have done it with the SSC a decade ago. How many more times does this have to happen before the US realizes it's a bad idea to cancel projects, and fixes the problem?
All of this is just new paint on a rusty Yugo. The fundamental flaw is:
Credit cards are an authorization based system and NOT a transaction-based system. If you hold the right credentials (secret pieces of information) you are authorized to perform any transaction you want, at any time. Did you know merchants you transacted with a year ago still have authorization to perform transactions later, without your consent?
I want a transaction-based system in which I can perform transactions, and no information is stored anywhere about anything except for the transaction itself. It is then easy to verify transactions, because the only ones that get initiated are ones with my card, when I am present, and I can choose to agree or not agree to the transaction at the time it occurs. (Just like cash)
I do not ever want to give anyone authorization to perform transactions against my account. I want to give them a specific amount of money, at a specific time, and that's it.
CVV2 does actually help because merchants are not ever allowed to store the CVV2 info.
Every person I know carries around a digital camera in their pocket. The number is printed on the credit card. CVV2 is treated as secret by certain parties, but fraudsters are certainly not going to play by those rules. As such, CVV2 is like the "orange alert" system. "Hey look! We're doing something!" It may mitigate some fraud occurring high in the CC processing chain, but I doubt that's not where most of the fraud was coming from in the first place.
There is no solution that would allow for the non logging of transactions that would also allow for accountability.
Open your wallet and look for the funny colored pieces of paper. It also does not have accountability, and has worked fantastically for thousands of years.
Accountability is something I can live without, and would occur at other points in the system (i.e. bank transfers, paycheck deposits, etc). Accountability with merchants is needed only if the system is so insecure that a merchant can actually perform a fraudulent transaction. A merchant cannot take physical cash from my wallet from afar.
An encryption scheme with the same properties as cash (and no accountability) can be easily created.
Credit card companies and banks make money from fraud. You (as a customer) pay for insurance that they use to cover the fraud. They have no incentive to change. Changing will just cost them money and won't affect their bottom line.
At least, that's been the situation for decades. However the consequences of handing billions to criminals is starting to have an effect. The criminals have billions in assets, and can leverage those for bigger and bigger forms of fraud, and they are.
I don't really want to hear any more of this crap about how they're going to "segment" my secret pieces of information behind a firewall. The whole system is a house of cards, built on "secret pieces of information" and heuristics about the kinds of transactions fraudsters perform. Once someone has stolen all the relevant secret pieces of information, all bets are off and the system has failed. These "secret" pieces of information are not hard to obtain, and adding more secret pieces of information (i.e. CVV2) is absolutely not a solution. I want end-to-end encryption and transactions which don't need to be perpetually stored in a database alongside my secret pieces of information.
In short, I want electronic, encrypted cash. When my wallet is stolen and not worry that I will lose any more than the cash actually in the wallet. I don't want to have any more transactions denied because I traveled to a foreign country.
But most importantly, I want to take those billions out of the hands of criminals.
well in the experiment in question 50% of the matter 'disappeared' or in other words was converted to energy. a standard fission reactor is converting ounces of matter into energy.
Wrong. 50% of the atoms in the original experiment became invisible to the camera they were using to observe the cloud, because some of them formed molecules, and some others gained some energy from the collapse and left the field of view of the camera. Donley et al did not discover cold fusion, and atoms don't just "disappear". In order to be moving fast enough to not be seen they had to go from nano-Kelvin to milli-Kelvin. We're talking miniscule amounts of energy here.
(yes, I am an author of TFA)
Except that pulseaudio constantly hangs and I have to kill it. For me it's more reliable to not use it, and let alsa's dmix do the mixing. This is the 5th or so iteration of this idea, and it still sucks (esd, nas, jack, arts,...). Why do people keep reinventing this wheel?
To the point, how do you mute a single app? I can't find a command that does that...
Re:Boycotts and Electronic Cash
on
Zero Day Threat
·
· Score: 1
Swiss banks only offer Visa/MC (as far as I've found). But American Express isn't a solution because from a security and fraud perspective, they're identical to Visa/MC.
Re:Boycotts and Electronic Cash
on
Zero Day Threat
·
· Score: 1
With few exceptions (renting a car or hotel room) why is it "very hard" to avoid Visa and MasterCard? Greenbacks work just fine for 99% of your day to day activities.
I live in Switzerland, and travel a lot. You mentioned car rentals and hotel rooms, this is a monthly expense for me. Airplane tickets, mail order anything, DVD rental, etc. It's a lot.
Boycotts and Electronic Cash
on
Zero Day Threat
·
· Score: 1
I've been seriously contemplating boycotting both Visa and MasterCard recently, for all the reasons mentioned above. They are entrenched, have no interest in security (because the consumer pays for insurance anyway). And they're unavoidable (making them essentially a duopoly). I've tried to buy things without Visa or MasterCard and it makes life very hard. This is perhaps the best indication that there's a problem...that I can't avoid sending money to these companies (a situation every monopolist loves). Furthermore, the system is based around authorization. That is, you don't give people money with these transaction systems, you give them authorization to withdraw money on demand, without confirmation from you! This is just stupid.
Through all this, we're funding organized (and disorganized) crime at a level that makes me want to cry. Organized crime will come around, once they have enough financial influence, and make our lives hell. I hope we don't have to wait for that to happen before people/governments take action. These criminals have already made email unusable. What's next?
It's long past time. You, with all those crypto skills. Invent electronic cash. Make it secure. Make me able to give money to anyone, with both parties verifying the transaction. Make it independent of identity. Make it open and publish the specs for a prototype device (or software). Market the hell out of it. Do it 20 years ago. If that's not possible, do it now.
cross-section: particle interaction rates are measured using "cross section". Imagine a billiard ball colliding with another a billiard ball. The cross section is just it's area seen from one side: pi r^2. But quantum particles are not hard solid spheres and can pass through each other, resulting in cross sections much smaller. The unit here is the "barn" = 10^-28 m^2. The total p p cross section is about a milli-barn. Higgs is about a pico-barn. Z bosons are about a nano-barn.
luminosity: inverse of a cross section. This is how we measure the amount of data. It is the "intensity" of the beam. (luminosity)*(cross section) = number of (expected) collisions. The LHC is expected to collect about 1 inverse femtobarn in the first year of operation, and 300 total.
elastic scattering: p p -> p p. Used to measure luminosity. (TOTEM's primary function)
diffractive scattering: p p -> p p + X. This has been proposed as a high precision but low rate way to detect the X=Higgs. In this scenario, TOTEM sees the final p p and X ends up inside the CMS detector. (TOTEM's other primary function)
pseudorapidity: a measure of angle: \eta = -ln \tan \theta/2. At \eta=\infinity, \theta=0 and at \eta=0, \theta=90 degrees. Pseudorapidity has nicer properties under Lorentz Transformations than angle.
Roman Pot: a particle detector device which is lowered into the beam line to detect particles traveling very close to the beam. It detects protons scattered by very small angles.
There's a reason a Ph.D. takes 4-6 years. Gotta learn all this.
P.S. TOTEM is one of the minor experiments. Now go read about CMS and ATLAS.:)
Disclaimer: I am an American theoretical physicist at CERN.
I agree, I'm just bothered by the fact that the other forms of media didn't suffer a similar ban, tabloids can bring on witch hunts more easily than the internet.
With respect to this particular article, I agree. The ban should be universal and prosecutable. i.e. if J.Random posts the name of the accused, then the accused should be able to sue for defamation. (or some similar recourse)
I assume you mean if some public official is taken to court.
No, I mean when anyone is taken to court. Imagine a police/justice department with a racist bent which was systematically targeting people of one race just to harass them. Or, imagine a politically motivated court which charged public officials with crimes, just to drag them into court when an important vote was being taken in congress. The public needs to be able to figure out that their justice department is corrupt, in these cases, and take action.
I don't think it's possible to prevent people from discovering the name of the accused. (I mean, they can always attend hearings) But I think a ban on spreading rumors in public forums/news/tv/internet would be workable.
I've always thought withholding names of the accused was a damn good idea. An innocent person should not have his life, reputation, or finances ruined, and the fact of the matter is, an accusation (even if false) can be damning for life.
However, this runs counter to the "openness" requirement of democracies: that the public should be able to discover what their public officials are doing. In this case, court cases must be a matter of public record so that transparency of the judicial branch can be maintained. You wouldn't want the judges/DA's/police doing secret prosecutions.
So, does some happy medium exist? Can we withhold the names of the accused in print/internet and maintain judicial transparency? This could fall under defamation or slander laws if the person is later found innocent. There are mechanisms in place to recover costs for innocent people, but none to recover the damage done to reputations.
Yeah I realized a bit late that the article picked was from 1998 and is about the i740. Somehow when I first read it I saw 2008. A better article is this one about Larabee. Intel has never been any kind of competition for NVidia. However with Larabee they are stepping squarely into NVidia's territory. Reiterating my original comment, NVidia can leverage their patents in this area against Larabee to get access to x86 patents.
A third player in the chip market would be fantastic for consumers. I hope that's the way it goes.
Nvidia certainly has lots of patents on the tech to make 3D chips. Intel is now entering the 3D chip market. NVidia can leverage their 3D patent portfolio to get the relevant licenses from Intel on x86. They can probably do the same thing with AMD/ATI. I'm not sure what cross-licensing agreements existed between ATI and NVidia, nor what became of them after the merger...
Reasonable question, I'll let people more eloquent than I answer:
"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." - Noam Chomsky
"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom
it gives its assimilated conformists." - Abbie Hoffman
"First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I was not
a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I
wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up,
because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there
was no one left to speak up for me."
- Martin Niemoller, 1945
( WW1 war hero & U Boat Captain, WW2 pastor who spent 7 years in Nazi prisons).
It has nothing to do with sharing. The US committed to a project, dumped several billion into it, and then cancelled it. That's just stupid. A better solution would have been to extend the time frame of one or more projects, so that all projects could be accomplished, and we don't lose all that expertise and already-spent dollars.
And for the record, the ISS cost more than a factor of 10 more than initially estimated. The cost overruns of the SSC (at the time) were miniscule in comparison.
The three physical (mass eigenstate) neutrinos [nu_1, nu_2, nu_3] are mixtures of the three interaction states [nu_e, nu_mu, n_tau] and are related by a rotation matrix R called the MNS matrix. It's just a matrix rotation.
Today we do believe we understand the "solar neutrino problem" in terms of mixing of the three states. For the solar neutrinos, in fact mixing due to matter is dominant (rather than mixing due to the masses). There are numerous neutrino experiments going on today, but so far they have only been sensitive to the two mass differences (which are now pinned down quite precisely). We still don't know the absolute mass scale. Several experiments have set upper limits however. They are all in the 1 eV range and come from cosmology, or direct searches in tritium beta decay. The next major experiment to determine the absolute value of the mass is KATRIN. Some other upcoming experiments are Double CHOOZ, Daya Bay, T2K (Tokai to Kamioka), and in the US, MINOS.
There are anomalies in the existing data, however. I don't think finding the mass will be the last word on this subject.
While religious nuts are an easy scapegoat, that's not the problem. As I understand it, it comes down to the fact that no congress can bind any future congress. So no congress can set budget policy in any future year. They can make recommendations (and do), but this isn't guaranteed.
I don't think this problem is insurmountable. I would think that the creation of a certain kind of "scientific trust fund" could enable the use of a pot of money over a long time span.
Wrong, the higgs mass is absolutely not a prediction of string theory. Any higgs mass can be accommodated in principle. Every measurement rules out branches of string theory. But a heavy higgs would rule out a wide class of favorite string models.
There are three neutrinos corresponding to electron, muon, and tau, and all three of them weigh less than 1 eV. Furthermore, they all mix with each other, so there are three states, but each is a mixture of electron, muon, and tau-type neutrinos.
The W and Z bosons weigh 80 GeV and 90 GeV respectively. The top quark weighs 172 GeV. The theory would be consistent with a higgs of any mass below about 200 GeV. We have searched in many experiments at lower energies, and the lower bound is about 114 GeV, coming from the LEP experiment.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, congratulations, you understand that when things are over budget the costs have increased. I never claimed that there was a magic solution to make things cost less. I said completing the science is important, and canceling it causes too much harm.
If the near-term budget is all you care about, then cancel the project. If the economic gains which result from the discoveries, but won't occur for 5-50 years are important, then you damned well better make sure the project is completed, despite the cost increase. The US can't do that.
The goal is to control costs. As long as you don't fire all the scientists or cancel the project outright, the project will still happen and the discoveries will be made. There's no magic in that.
The US is in a very bad position with respect to "Big Science". The problem basically is that any congress can't tie the hands of any future congress, and the consequence of this for science is that every single project faces cancellation, every single year. This has led to the cancellation many projects, a prominent example being the Superconducting Supercollider.
Science has a much longer-term view than congress. Congress, at most, has a view that lasts 2 years (to the next election), and practically it's much less than that. The US needs to devise a scheme to keep these projects going through hard times, and through fickle congressional actions. A constitutional amendment is unlikely, but how about some creative financing, of the "trust fund" variety? When things run over budget, bring in auditors, fire some people, but at all costs, make sure the science happens.
I'm at CERN, where the funding comes from member states as a fraction of their GDP. As a consequence, CERN has an extremely stable budget compared to US labs. If a project runs over-budget, the lab can simply delay the project. They also have a large permanent staff, so when new ideas come up, they can very quickly move to answer scientific questions, without building entirely new facilities. The expertise already exists here.
Canceling a project has disastrous consequences. Not only do you lose the science that would be gained, you may also lose the scientists, and technology developed along the way. It really is selling out future generations, and sacrificing technological advancement on a long timescale. It's very hard to see what will happen 50 years in the future, but I don't think human colonies on Mars are out of the question, perhaps spurred by the discoveries of the Mars Science Laboratory. Basic research has always paid off in the long run.
The US will lose out on the discoveries that will be made by the LHC. The US could have done it with the SSC a decade ago. How many more times does this have to happen before the US realizes it's a bad idea to cancel projects, and fixes the problem?
Credit cards are an authorization based system and NOT a transaction-based system. If you hold the right credentials (secret pieces of information) you are authorized to perform any transaction you want, at any time. Did you know merchants you transacted with a year ago still have authorization to perform transactions later, without your consent?
I want a transaction-based system in which I can perform transactions, and no information is stored anywhere about anything except for the transaction itself. It is then easy to verify transactions, because the only ones that get initiated are ones with my card, when I am present, and I can choose to agree or not agree to the transaction at the time it occurs. (Just like cash)
I do not ever want to give anyone authorization to perform transactions against my account. I want to give them a specific amount of money, at a specific time, and that's it.
Every person I know carries around a digital camera in their pocket. The number is printed on the credit card. CVV2 is treated as secret by certain parties, but fraudsters are certainly not going to play by those rules. As such, CVV2 is like the "orange alert" system. "Hey look! We're doing something!" It may mitigate some fraud occurring high in the CC processing chain, but I doubt that's not where most of the fraud was coming from in the first place.
Open your wallet and look for the funny colored pieces of paper. It also does not have accountability, and has worked fantastically for thousands of years.
Accountability is something I can live without, and would occur at other points in the system (i.e. bank transfers, paycheck deposits, etc). Accountability with merchants is needed only if the system is so insecure that a merchant can actually perform a fraudulent transaction. A merchant cannot take physical cash from my wallet from afar.
An encryption scheme with the same properties as cash (and no accountability) can be easily created.
You misunderstand the system.
Credit card companies and banks make money from fraud. You (as a customer) pay for insurance that they use to cover the fraud. They have no incentive to change. Changing will just cost them money and won't affect their bottom line.
At least, that's been the situation for decades. However the consequences of handing billions to criminals is starting to have an effect. The criminals have billions in assets, and can leverage those for bigger and bigger forms of fraud, and they are.
I don't really want to hear any more of this crap about how they're going to "segment" my secret pieces of information behind a firewall. The whole system is a house of cards, built on "secret pieces of information" and heuristics about the kinds of transactions fraudsters perform. Once someone has stolen all the relevant secret pieces of information, all bets are off and the system has failed. These "secret" pieces of information are not hard to obtain, and adding more secret pieces of information (i.e. CVV2) is absolutely not a solution. I want end-to-end encryption and transactions which don't need to be perpetually stored in a database alongside my secret pieces of information.
In short, I want electronic, encrypted cash. When my wallet is stolen and not worry that I will lose any more than the cash actually in the wallet. I don't want to have any more transactions denied because I traveled to a foreign country.
But most importantly, I want to take those billions out of the hands of criminals.
Wrong. 50% of the atoms in the original experiment became invisible to the camera they were using to observe the cloud, because some of them formed molecules, and some others gained some energy from the collapse and left the field of view of the camera. Donley et al did not discover cold fusion, and atoms don't just "disappear". In order to be moving fast enough to not be seen they had to go from nano-Kelvin to milli-Kelvin. We're talking miniscule amounts of energy here. (yes, I am an author of TFA)
Except that pulseaudio constantly hangs and I have to kill it. For me it's more reliable to not use it, and let alsa's dmix do the mixing. This is the 5th or so iteration of this idea, and it still sucks (esd, nas, jack, arts, ...). Why do people keep reinventing this wheel?
To the point, how do you mute a single app? I can't find a command that does that...
Swiss banks only offer Visa/MC (as far as I've found). But American Express isn't a solution because from a security and fraud perspective, they're identical to Visa/MC.
I live in Switzerland, and travel a lot. You mentioned car rentals and hotel rooms, this is a monthly expense for me. Airplane tickets, mail order anything, DVD rental, etc. It's a lot.
I've been seriously contemplating boycotting both Visa and MasterCard recently, for all the reasons mentioned above. They are entrenched, have no interest in security (because the consumer pays for insurance anyway). And they're unavoidable (making them essentially a duopoly). I've tried to buy things without Visa or MasterCard and it makes life very hard. This is perhaps the best indication that there's a problem...that I can't avoid sending money to these companies (a situation every monopolist loves). Furthermore, the system is based around authorization. That is, you don't give people money with these transaction systems, you give them authorization to withdraw money on demand, without confirmation from you! This is just stupid.
Through all this, we're funding organized (and disorganized) crime at a level that makes me want to cry. Organized crime will come around, once they have enough financial influence, and make our lives hell. I hope we don't have to wait for that to happen before people/governments take action. These criminals have already made email unusable. What's next?
It's long past time. You, with all those crypto skills. Invent electronic cash. Make it secure. Make me able to give money to anyone, with both parties verifying the transaction. Make it independent of identity. Make it open and publish the specs for a prototype device (or software). Market the hell out of it. Do it 20 years ago. If that's not possible, do it now.
Yes, email me privately: bob at my slashdot handle dot org. Everyone is working on the Grid...what countrie(s) do you have citizenship?
yes.
There's a reason a Ph.D. takes 4-6 years. Gotta learn all this.
P.S. TOTEM is one of the minor experiments. Now go read about CMS and ATLAS. :)
Disclaimer: I am an American theoretical physicist at CERN.
With respect to this particular article, I agree. The ban should be universal and prosecutable. i.e. if J.Random posts the name of the accused, then the accused should be able to sue for defamation. (or some similar recourse)
No, I mean when anyone is taken to court. Imagine a police/justice department with a racist bent which was systematically targeting people of one race just to harass them. Or, imagine a politically motivated court which charged public officials with crimes, just to drag them into court when an important vote was being taken in congress. The public needs to be able to figure out that their justice department is corrupt, in these cases, and take action.
I don't think it's possible to prevent people from discovering the name of the accused. (I mean, they can always attend hearings) But I think a ban on spreading rumors in public forums/news/tv/internet would be workable.
I've always thought withholding names of the accused was a damn good idea. An innocent person should not have his life, reputation, or finances ruined, and the fact of the matter is, an accusation (even if false) can be damning for life.
However, this runs counter to the "openness" requirement of democracies: that the public should be able to discover what their public officials are doing. In this case, court cases must be a matter of public record so that transparency of the judicial branch can be maintained. You wouldn't want the judges/DA's/police doing secret prosecutions.
So, does some happy medium exist? Can we withhold the names of the accused in print/internet and maintain judicial transparency? This could fall under defamation or slander laws if the person is later found innocent. There are mechanisms in place to recover costs for innocent people, but none to recover the damage done to reputations.
Yeah I realized a bit late that the article picked was from 1998 and is about the i740. Somehow when I first read it I saw 2008. A better article is this one about Larabee. Intel has never been any kind of competition for NVidia. However with Larabee they are stepping squarely into NVidia's territory. Reiterating my original comment, NVidia can leverage their patents in this area against Larabee to get access to x86 patents.
A third player in the chip market would be fantastic for consumers. I hope that's the way it goes.
Nvidia certainly has lots of patents on the tech to make 3D chips. Intel is now entering the 3D chip market. NVidia can leverage their 3D patent portfolio to get the relevant licenses from Intel on x86. They can probably do the same thing with AMD/ATI. I'm not sure what cross-licensing agreements existed between ATI and NVidia, nor what became of them after the merger...
Reasonable question, I'll let people more eloquent than I answer:
"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." - Noam Chomsky
"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." - Abbie Hoffman
"First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I was not a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me." - Martin Niemoller, 1945 ( WW1 war hero & U Boat Captain, WW2 pastor who spent 7 years in Nazi prisons).
It has nothing to do with sharing. The US committed to a project, dumped several billion into it, and then cancelled it. That's just stupid. A better solution would have been to extend the time frame of one or more projects, so that all projects could be accomplished, and we don't lose all that expertise and already-spent dollars.
And for the record, the ISS cost more than a factor of 10 more than initially estimated. The cost overruns of the SSC (at the time) were miniscule in comparison.
The three physical (mass eigenstate) neutrinos [nu_1, nu_2, nu_3] are mixtures of the three interaction states [nu_e, nu_mu, n_tau] and are related by a rotation matrix R called the MNS matrix. It's just a matrix rotation.
Today we do believe we understand the "solar neutrino problem" in terms of mixing of the three states. For the solar neutrinos, in fact mixing due to matter is dominant (rather than mixing due to the masses). There are numerous neutrino experiments going on today, but so far they have only been sensitive to the two mass differences (which are now pinned down quite precisely). We still don't know the absolute mass scale. Several experiments have set upper limits however. They are all in the 1 eV range and come from cosmology, or direct searches in tritium beta decay. The next major experiment to determine the absolute value of the mass is KATRIN. Some other upcoming experiments are Double CHOOZ, Daya Bay, T2K (Tokai to Kamioka), and in the US, MINOS.
There are anomalies in the existing data, however. I don't think finding the mass will be the last word on this subject.
While religious nuts are an easy scapegoat, that's not the problem. As I understand it, it comes down to the fact that no congress can bind any future congress. So no congress can set budget policy in any future year. They can make recommendations (and do), but this isn't guaranteed.
I don't think this problem is insurmountable. I would think that the creation of a certain kind of "scientific trust fund" could enable the use of a pot of money over a long time span.
Wrong, the higgs mass is absolutely not a prediction of string theory. Any higgs mass can be accommodated in principle. Every measurement rules out branches of string theory. But a heavy higgs would rule out a wide class of favorite string models.
Sorry, your post contains several errors.
There are three neutrinos corresponding to electron, muon, and tau, and all three of them weigh less than 1 eV. Furthermore, they all mix with each other, so there are three states, but each is a mixture of electron, muon, and tau-type neutrinos.
The W and Z bosons weigh 80 GeV and 90 GeV respectively. The top quark weighs 172 GeV. The theory would be consistent with a higgs of any mass below about 200 GeV. We have searched in many experiments at lower energies, and the lower bound is about 114 GeV, coming from the LEP experiment.