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Ten years ago this week—on June 29, 2007—many waited (in line or online) for the first iPhone’s formal release. Steve Jobs revealed what he promised would be a game-changing device months earlier, providing plenty of time for the lofty dreams, predictions, and excitement to build. The decade since has largely justified the hype. Apple’s now signature product has made a lasting mark not only on our communications, but on many unexpected walks of life. So this week as the iPhone turns 10, we’ll be examining its impact and revisiting the device that changed it all.

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The concept behind Sega Forever is a good one: bring a selection of classic Sega games to iOS and Android, and let people play them for free. Unfortunately, the execution has left something to be desired. Following the launch of Sega Forever last week, players have taken to the App Store and Google Play to complain about choppy frame rates, out-of-sync audio, and input lag, even on high-end devices like the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Google Pixel. Ars’ own testing yielded similarly poor results, with none of the games reaching the required 60FPS of the original Megadrive (Genesis) hardware.

Sega’s performance issues stem from the use of a new emulator based in Unity. Older mobile versions of retro Sega games were either direct ports—as in the case of Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic CD—or used a native emulator, instead of one passed through Unity. Players that already paid for one of the launch games—Sonic the Hedgehog, Phantasy Star II, Comix Zone, Kid Chameleon, and Altered Beast—also suffered from issues, including the inability to remove advertisements from the game.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Sega Networks’ chief marketing officer Mike Evans blamed “fragmentation” for the wobbly launch, and defended its use of Unity instead of an alternative emulation method.

Comedian George Carlin’s monologue, “Seven words you can never say on television,” opened the door for the American Civil Liberties Union to convince the US Supreme Court to nullify legislation outlawing “indecent” online speech.

Twenty years ago today the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision and unanimously overturned congressional legislation that made it unlawful to transmit “indecent” material on the Internet if that content could be viewed by minors. The justices ruled that the same censorship standards being applied to broadcast radio and television could not be applied to the Internet.

“The record demonstrates that the growth of the Internet has been and continues to be phenomenal,” the high court concluded. “As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that government regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it.”

(credit: Oyez Project )

The Supreme Court had decided a challenge brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, which argued that the section of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) at issue could criminalize too broad a swath of speech. The ACLU maintained that the CDA did not define what “indecent” meant and that the law would dumb-down the Internet in the same manner as the censorship requirements imposed on broadcasters that transmit over public spectrum. The ACLU won its case on June 26, 1997. The decision, in conjunction with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other surviving parts of the CDA, has provided one of the strongest legal tools for crafting today’s Internet as we know it.

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Source: Ars Technica – It was 20 years ago today when the Supreme Court unshackled the Internet

Video shot and edited by Jennifer Hahn (video link)

It’s fair to say that I’d been looking forward to getting behind the wheel of the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio for some time. The brand’s new flagship sedan is a $72,000, 505hp (377kW) rear-wheel drive statement of intent, a car that says to rivals at BMW and Mercedes and Cadillac that the Italians are back. It first caught our attention at the 2015 Frankfurt Motor Show, then again in Los Angeles. Last year, the Giulia Quadrifoglio teased us some more in New York 2016 and then once again this year when we awarded it Best New Luxury Car. But a build-up like that can be risky. Cars don’t always meet our expectations, and there’s little worse than the feeling when you fail to gel with a car you’ve been looking forward to driving.

A man on a TV show once said something along the lines of “you can’t consider yourself a true petrolhead until you’ve had an Alfa Romeo.” At the time, I wasn’t entirely sure what he was talking about. The Alfas that populated the roads during my early driving years in the 1990s were unremarkable and badly compromised. During the 2000s, they were pretty but almost exclusively front-driven. And the Giulietta rental car I crossed Europe in a few years back had the most amazingly uncomfortable driving seat I’d ever encountered.