How many games have 16 players playing cooperatively?

The author obviously doesn't own a Wii or hasn't bothered to check the number of games with local coop released today versus the number of games with local coop released 10 years ago. The average number of local coop games released per year seems about constant to me. Off the top of my head, this year on the PS3 alone we saw Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Rock Band 3, Army of Two: The 40th Day, and a bunch of other cheap PSN games like Scott Pilgrim. Last year we saw the release of Borderlands and Resident Evil 5, both games that were practically made for local coop.

For instance, you could try just doing this with 5 computers over a period of 6-12 months and see what the costs are relative to the Dell computers. Immediately trying to do this with 1000+ computers is a terrible, terrible idea.

This is not true, most corporations keep countless outdated computers and generally won't purchase new hardware until old hardware breaks or a large number of users need an upgrade. Government is in the same boat most of the time, but since funding is often a matter of "use it or lose it" they can sometimes upgrade more quickly, meaning users get computers when they need them rather than whenever the boss says that it's okay.

In general, generic corporate PCs are way too old.

The point of a demo is to convince people to purchase your game. If you force people to also purchase the demo, then they'll likely not bother purchasing anything.

The only effect this can have is a decrease in revenue for EA followed by some long-winded rants about "piracy is decreasing our revenue" when in actuality it's EA releasing poor-quality games and making boneheaded decisions like this one that are causing them to lose revenue.

LHC physicist checking in - yes, that will make the collisions 7 TeV. Note that there are no collisions yet, we're still doing work to make sure that the beams are stable and focused properly. Once we have collisions, we'll run at this energy for about a year and a half before shutting down for a year to perform maintenance.

The LHC never produced 14 TeV collisions, the highest collision it will perform this year is 7 TeV. It is designed to produce 14 TeV collisions, and it will hopefully do that after we finish taking data at 7 TeV. It is true, however, that cosmic ray collisions completely kill the "LHC will destroy the world" bullshit.

It's electromagnetic radiation that you're talking about, in other words light. You are in fact talking about photons. Radiation from cell phones = photons = light.

Because the two machines operate at different collision energies. The Higgs cross section is going to be different at each collider due to this energy difference, so when you go to measure this cross section you're going to get different results.

You can perform a meta-analysis, whereby you make a "best measurement" at different colliders and energies in order to better understand the measurements. However, that's not what you're proposing; you're proposing that they combine data in order to get a result in the first place, which you can't do.

If gravity is truly not fundamental and works as described by the paper, then you can kiss the antigravity machine goodbye!

None of the computers are optimized until you bring them to Geek Squad.

They cleaned up the desktop icons, but they didn't remove any of the programs that created those desktop icons in the first place. The junk is still there, but now the user doesn't see it. How is that good?

Students can get Retail Windows 7 (not just upgrade) for $30 for the ISO or I think $35 if you want them to ship you the box.

Computers don't come with stock OEM windows anymore, the only way to get that is to buy the software and install it yourself.

What are you even talking about? I just got my oil changed at a Jiffy Lube last month and they didn't try to push anything else on me. It was $20 out the door with a $12 rebate that I just received last week.

The author mentioned that Palm's new OS is a huge hit, but why was there no mention of Android in the same paragraph? It has stormed the cell phone market across several carriers and has brought a new "hybrid" model of software that is partially open source to the table. How is this not a bigger deal than Palm's OS? Palm has been making mobile operating systems and placing them on phones for years; this is hardly new.

There are countless backup generators and numerous failsafes that will safely redirect the beam into one of the many beam dumps, which are basically big blocks of concrete.

The worst that can happen: all of the failsafes fail, backup generators fail, and the LHC damages itself, requiring several years of repairs. That's the biggest disaster that the LHC could possibly ever produce. Keep in mind, it's already 100 meters underground, a length through which the particle beam couldn't penetrate even if it somehow scattered straight upward.