The Supreme Court ended its term Monday with a high-profile ruling that violent video games are protected by the First Amendment, but a bigger technology decision could be looming. The court agreed to hear a case next term about when the government can put GPS devices on people's cars — which could produce one of the court's biggest privacy rulings in years. The GPS issue is important in its own right — the government can learn a lot ...

The big reveal has been revealed: Pottermore is ... an interactive thingy. A website, with assorted digital services. Harry Potter fans can enter and be sorted by the Hat and wanded by Ollivander. We can look at new images from the books As for the rest of it ... I'll admit it, it makes me a little melancholy, just as the Wizarding World of Harry Potter made me melancholy. There are two things that separate ...

Every fall the professors at Beloit College publish their Mindset List, a dictionary of all the deeply ingrained cultural references that will make no sense to the bright-eyed students of the incoming class. It's a kind of time travel, to remind us how far we've come. This year's freshmen were typically born in 1991. That means, the authors explain, they have never used a card catalog to find a book; salsa has always outsold ketchup; women have always outnumbered men ...

It seemed like a celebrity stunt: a Broadway classic revived in concert form for a few nights and featuring a cast of, eww, television stars. Neil Patrick Harris may be suited for blithe hosting chores on the Tony Awards, and the Emmy show and the Spike TV Video Games Awards and the TV Land Awards and the World Magic Awards, but he's no Raul Esparza. Whatever ballast and uplift Jon Cryer and Christina Hendricks may lend ...

1972 It begins: Pong is invented 1978 Space Invaders blips its way into arcades everywhere 1977 The Atari 2600 game system sells millions of units and brings arcade action home 1980 Pac-Man released 1982 First hit song based on a video game, Pac-Man Fever: "I got a pocket full of quarters ..." 1981 First all-video game magazine: Electronic Games 1982 Video games first appear on the cover of TIME 1982 Tron, the first movie about video games, tanks at the ...

Almost 10 years ago, Osama bin Laden ghosted away from the Afghan battlefields. Since then, it is as if the doomsday sheikh had slipped into a twilight zone where the only proof that he was alive was the chilling voice on a spool of tape, the occasional video image — and a string of terrorist outrages and wars lengthening around the globe that claim inspiration from him and his cause. At 11:35 p.m. on May 1, ...

The last time Syrians took on their ruling Ba'athist regime it was 1982. The protesters then were Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood. Hafez al-Assad was president. And there was no such thing as a camera phone. Assad mercilessly crushed the revolt in the city of Hama, killing perhaps 10,000 , and according to local lore, turning one mass grave into a car park, such being his contempt for those who dared defy him. In 2011, Hafez's son and ...

A week after Nintendo's Wii debuted in November, the Wall Street Journal reported that the gaming console was leaving some users as sore as the gym often does. Unlike traditional hand-held video games, where users sit on the couch exercising little more than their thumbs, the Wii features digital sensors that let users virtually play the game. In Wii Sports, a game that comes with the console, users mimic the ...

The uprisings sweeping the Arab world haven't only toppled dictatorships. Gone, too, are the old stereotypes of Arab women as passive, voiceless victims. Over the past few months, the world has seen them marching in Tunisia, shouting slogans in Bahrain and Yemen, braving tear gas in Egypt, and blogging and strategizing in cyberspace. Egyptian activist Asmaa Mahfouz, 26, became known as "The Leader of the Revolution" after she posted an online video call to arms, telling young ...

Public antipathy toward the police runs so deep in Russia that it would seem impossible for the reputation of those paid to protect and serve to get any worse. Reports of graft, assault, fraud and even murder committed by Russian police creep across the news wires almost daily, and according to a recent survey by the Moscow-based Levada Center polling agency, 40% of Russians say they do not trust police, while 28% say they actually fear the cops. But ...