Arvisp writes "According to a blog post by former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, Apple plans to produce nearly 10 million tablets in the still-unannounced product's first year. If Lee's blog post is to be believed, Apple plans to sell nearly twice as many tablets as it did iPhones in the product's first year."

feldhaus writes "The BBC reports that the first beams for over one year have been successfully sent around the complete circumference of the Large Hadron Collider. Engineers do not yet have a stable circulating beam but they hope to by 0600 GMT on Saturday."

CNETNate writes "You'll laugh, but mostly you'll cry. Some of the questions Google gets asked to deliver results for is beyond worrying. 'Can you put peroxide in your ear?', 'Why would a pregnancy test be negative?', and 'Why can't I own a Canadian?' being just a selection of the truly baffling — and disturbing — questions Google is regularly forced to answer."

hemantm writes "A routine security update for a Microsoft Windows component installed on tens of millions of computers has quietly installed an extra add-on for an untold number of users surfing the Web with Mozilla's Firefox Web browser."

Several sources are reporting that work on The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf, a console port of the popular PC game, has officially been suspended. CD Projekt, makers of the original game, were working with WideScreen Games on the new version. WideScreen says that CD Projekt missed a significant payment for their role in the development, leading them to stop work on the game. They are emphatic that development won't continue until CD Projekt makes good on the debt, but CD Projekt says, "All payments were done on time according to milestone plan. ... Truth is that payments were later than originally planned but this was solely due to delays in production. The delays were growing in the project due to WSG [continuing] to miss the deadlines." The game's future is uncertain.

The Escapist chatted with Valve's Robin Walker about how the Team Fortress 2 team has been listening to feedback and continually updating the game to fix problems and add to the gameplay experience. Walker mentions that ideas for new classes are "floating around," and that a new mode of play will be introduced soon. "'Players have driven our entire approach to designing achievements, the way we tie unlockables to those achievements and the design of those new weapons themselves. The choices we made within the Medic and Heavy updates were very much the result of the ways that players have used that combination of classes within the game. The addition of the payload game mode came from players requesting an old Team Fortress Classic map called Hunted, and describing what they did and didn't like in that map.' ... The Scout is the next class slated for the special treatment, and Walker expects the update will be available early this year. Additionally, the team is juggling a number of side projects at the moment, including finally bringing a year's worth of the downloadable content and upgrades to the Xbox 360 version of the game. A new Payload map is in the works, more community maps are on the way and the team will soon unveil a very different new game mode."

Riding with Robots writes "Today the robotic Saturn probe Cassini will make its closest buzz ever over the surface of the enigmatic ice moon Enceladus, whose surprising giant water geysers hint at a hidden ocean of liquid water. The spacecraft will fly right through the tops of the geyser plumes in order to sample the material that originated beneath the surface. NASA is offering a video, interactive guide and image gallery in advance of the event."