The Large Hadron Collider - the gigantic underground double-barrelled particle cannon assembled by top boffins deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border - is to start up again "around the 20th" of this month. Not only is the LHC tremendously cool (quite literally) in its own right, it's also the focus of a global hypercomputing grid of tremendous potency, giving us an excuse to go and visit it this week.

Executives from Tudou—one of two companies left fighting it out to be the YouTube of China—were in San Francisco earlier this week to meet with investors and do a little schmoozing.

I met up with CEO Gary Wang and COO Sam Lai, who already raised some $85 million from Granite Global Ventures and General Catalyst Partners, and they swore they weren’t here trying to raise more cash. That's a bit of a shock. Last we wrote about Tudou and its arch-competitor YouKu, they were burning through hundreds of millions between them trying to find what YouTube still hasn’t: A way for online advertising to pay for video’s outrageous broadband costs.

At times I had to pinch myself at Adobe Systems' Max conference last month In Los Angeles, California. Was this an Adobe, or a Microsoft event?

First there were the case studies, like the MLB.com - Major League Baseball - web video, originally seen at Microsoft's Mix 2007 when it used Silverlight, and now at Adobe Max as a Flash example. Then, the New York Times reader, originally shown at Mix 2007 as a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) showcase. Finally, an Adobe AIR application demonstrating the Flash 10 Text Layout Framework.

The Jobsian cult is hard at work on a "world-mode" iPhone capable of tapping both CDMA and GSM/UMTS wireless networks, according to the fanboi rumor mill.

Citing a report from investment research firm OTR Global - which cites unnamed sources in the Taiwanese handset supply chain - Apple Insider says this dual-standard Jobsian status symbol will arrive on Verizon's stateside CDMA network in the third quarter of 2010.

For the last few days, some jailbroken iPhone users have found their home screen background a little different than they remembered. A hacker, going by the name "ikee," created a worm that changes the home screen background on jailbroken iPhones whose owners failed to change the default password after installing SSH. Simply jailbreaking your iPhone will not make you vulnerable to this sort of hack. The iPhone OS, in general, is also immune to this hack. Still confused? Let's back up a bit.

It was a week later than El Reg expected, but the behavior was the same. After the stock market closed on Friday and everyone was heading home for the weekend, server and operating system maker Sun Microsystems snuck out its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2010. Revenues fell 25 per cent to $2.24bn.

Sale have been hammered by the uncertainty surrounding the fate of Sun's products as the $7.4bn acquisition of Sun by Oracle is held up by European antitrust regulators, but through deep cost cutting, Sun was able to report a mere $120m loss in the quarter, a far cry better than the $1.68bn loss it booked in the year-ago quarter.

Here is this week's events guide. You can download the entire event calendar in iCal format or import it into your Google Calendar. You can also import individual events using the link beside each entry. This events guide is a weekly feature here on ReadWriteWeb. We publish it every weekend, as good a time as any to review your conference plans.

Know of an event taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us.

I'd probably feel slightly smug, if I didn't feel so sick.

Smug that after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency, the news has delivered the perfect example to support my view.

Unfortunately it's hard to feel smug – hard to feel anything but sadness and nausea – when thirteen innocent people are dead.

I'm talking, of course, about Thursday's Fort Hood shootings. Better informed and more sensitive commentators than I have written about the massacre itself and what it means for the US army, and in particular for the thousands of Muslim soldiers currently fighting – and dying – for this country.

Just five days ago Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said mobile subscriptions, among other scammy offers, would be removed from Zynga's popular Facebook and MySpace games. "We have also removed all mobile ads until we see any that offer clear user value," he said.

So we were surprised yesterday to see a screen shot clearly showing a mobile subscription ad in a post on InsideSocialGames about the launch of a new Zynga game, FishVille.

From disliking on Facebook, to the launch of the Motorola Droid, to the debut of Twitter Lists, it's been an exciting week in the social media and tech space.

Here's our pick of the top 10 stories this week, from the serious to the bizarre.

1. HOW TO: Use Twitter Lists – TwitterTwitter has launched Lists, a new way to organize people you follow on Twitter. Josh Catone tells us how to get the most of the new feature.

Yesterday I detailed my quest to find the throngs of Droid fans who had woken up at the crack of dawn to grab a place in line before Verizon unleashed the phone to the masses. Yet despite reports of lines elsewhere, I failed — the Verizon store in Palo Alto was a ghost town, as was the Best Buy down the street. Some commenters took my story and similar reports as an indication that the Droid's launch had bombed, doomed to play out the same fate of the numerous supposed ‘iPhone killers' before it. It looks like they may be wrong — that store sold over 70 Droids yesterday, according to one of its employees.

If you're a fan of the free OS X software offered at MacHeist, you'll want to scoot over there to grab some free software before their software giveaway expires.

MacHeist is offering a bundle of six applications: ShoveBox, WriteRoom, Twitterific, Tinygrab, Hordes of Orcs, and Mariner Write. The first five are free right from the start and the final application Mariner Write—a Word alternative for Macs—will be free once they give away 500,000 of the nanoBundles.

We've heard a few reports of sync issues with the new Apple TV 3.0 software over the past few days, and apparently the chatter on the Apple support boards was on the mark: Apple has shipped 3.0.1, which is supposed to fix problems where 3.0 units would unexpectedly dump all their loaded content. You can get all the details from Apple's tech note.

Since it's a giant pain to resync gigabytes of media over the network link, it's nice to see this fixed promptly.... but considering that the Apple TV 3.0 update was billed as a major improvement to Apple's 'hobby,' this bug is not going to make any fans out of Apple TV foes.

Last month, Apple rejected the Someecards iPhone app because it contained satirical comedy about public figures. After attempting to make their case and getting stonewalled, Someecards eventually gave into Apple and removed the offending cards which made fun of Hitler and Roman Polanski, among others. Apple swiftly approved the app and all was well.

Apparently, Apple contacted Someecards a couple days ago because of some new content in the app — Someecards pushes new cards into the app just as it does on its site...

Windows XP: If your Windows XP installation is acting up, sometimes a fix is as simple as tweaking a registry key. Rather than muck about in your registry looking for it, use XP Quick Fix Plus to patch things up.

XP Quick Fix Plus is a tiny portable application that presents 40 quick fixes arranged in a push-button chart. Press the button for the problem you're having like CDs not autoplaying, file associations grayed out, the boot.ini tab missing in MSCONFIG, or any of the other 40 common problems, and XP Quick Fix Plus will patch the registry key for the problem you're having and get things back in working order.

Several readers have urged me to try the Gokivo Navigator for the iPhone [iTunes link], so today is the day. The app is U.S. $4.99, but that only provides you with GPS navigation for 30 days. After that, the app costs $4.99 monthly or you can purchase a year of service for $39.99. That's quite a bit less that the AT&T nav solution [iTunes link], and makes the Gokivo app quite competitive. The app includes a Traffic Tracking Center, text to speech so street names are announced as you drive, and it has iPod controls so you don't have to leave the app to change your music.

Earlier this week the domain name industry was rocked by a shill bidding scandal at SnapNames. The company made the right early moves by admitting the problem and promising refunds, plus interest, to customers. Now, though, they are forcing customers to release them from liability to get the refund. We think this this is a mistake.

SnapNames acquires expiring domain names from registries and then auctions them off to interested buyers. When everything goes well people are happy. SnapNames gets a good return on investment, and the domains go to the buyer who values them the highest.

Ars recaps the most important Apple stories from the week gone by, including a review of the Magic Mouse, port-scanning jailbroken iPhones, and the odd case of Atom support in builds of Mac OS X 10.6.2.

We gave you the lowdown on how well Apple's new Magic Mouse works, told you about a Dutch teen that used port scanning to find vulnerable jailbroken iPhones, showed how less-than-honest iPhone developers claim to have developed others' apps, and how Apple may or may not be dropping support for Atom processors. If you missed any of that, here's a look at top Apple-related stories this week.