Congress has no direct power to approve or disapprove any merger, but endorsements, particularly if they come from black and Hispanic leaders, can send a subtle but important message to regulators that the deal is in the public interest and should be cleared.
.. Lawmakers cited a variety of reasons as to why Comcast’s elaborate pitch failed to gain traction this time: The miserable customer service ratings the company earns, for instance, made politicians leery of helping it out.
.. “There are limits as to how effective even the best advocate can be with a losing case,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, who was critical of the deal from the start, “as this merger would have further enhanced this company’s incentive, its means and its history of abuse of market power.”
.. Comcast, at least until this deal, had a near-legendary reputation in Washington for leveraging its connections. In 2013, President Obamastopped by Mr. Cohen’s Philadelphia home for a fund-raiser, and Mr. Roberts was envied for having played golf with President Obama that same year in Martha’s Vineyard.
The FCC chair’s Internet pivot
On Thursday, Wheeler is expected to present to the commission a set of rules that would treat broadband providers like utilities, effectively denying them the right to charge companies a premium for faster access to consumers and holding them accountable for any attempt to secretly impede the flow of data. When the commission finally approves them — a vote is scheduled for late February — it will mark the most significant rewrite of the rules of the road for the Internet in more than a dozen years and affect the competitive playing field for generations to come.
.. “It was pretty clear that he kind of had his mind made up and wasn’t really on our side,” Paul Sieminski, general counsel at Automattic, which runs the popular WordPress.com platform, said of one of Wheeler’s meetings in California.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/tom-wheeler-net-neutrality-114785.html#ixzz3QbwyDRHa
What it’s like living with lag in real life
Each Rift came equipped with built-in displays in front of each eye and Raspberry Pi set to delay input by 1/3rd of a second (and in some cases, up to three). Noise cancelling headphones helped to create a virtual reality that was completely delayed for the user; generating hilarious (and ridiculous) results, which beg the question: If you wouldn’t accept lag offline, why deal with it online?