Month: September 2017

Enlarge / Comcast executive David Cohen testifies during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the proposed merger of Time Warner Cable and Comcast, on May 8, 2014. (credit: Getty Images | Drew Angerer)

President Donald Trump said on the campaign trail that his administration would take a tough stance against mergers and consider breaking up Comcast and other conglomerates. But nearly a year into his presidency, it's now clear to Comcast's top government official that the Trump administration will instead allow more mergers than the administration of Barack Obama.

"Overall, this president and this administration is likely less hostile to horizontal growth or even vertical growth in the telecom space and elsewhere," Comcast Senior Executive Vice President David Cohen said in an interview, according to a Recode article today.

Horizontal mergers are deals between companies that make the same goods or services and compete against each other, like the Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger that was blocked by the Obama administration. (Cohen took the lead in pitching that deal to government regulators.) Vertical mergers join companies that operate at different levels of an industry's supply chain.

Enlarge / The game doesn't judge you for getting your hands dirty anymore.

That praise isn’t quite as effusive as it might sound. I've never gelled well with Dishonored’s joyless world. If there's a character you're not encouraged to torture or kill in a Dishonored game, it's because that character only exists to tell you how much worse off the steampunk world is elsewhere. Meanwhile, the assassination-centric plots are too focused on revenge to bother righting any of the endless societal wrongs.

In Death of the Outsider, somebody finally feels like doing something to fix... well, everything. That somebody is Billie Lurk, a major antagonist from the first game's DLC duology and major accomplice in Dishonored 2. After meeting up with her former mentor, Daud, the two hatch a plan to kill the one ultimately responsible for their planet's often supernatural ills.

Make a difference

True to its name, that “ultimate source of all evil” is the demigod of chaos called the Outsider. Since the Outsider is the one who usually bestows magical powers on people, Billie is denied most of the supernatural arsenal that other series protagonists have enjoyed. She does have a few tricks, however, and what her powers lack in quantity they make up for in quality and mechanical improvements.

Enlarge / Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor. (credit: Studio Canal)

For fans of the 1984 thriller The Terminator and its 1991 action sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the sequels have been a consistent disappointment. I'm hesitant to get my hopes up too much—although I didn't hate Terminator Genisys as much as others did, it certainly wasn't the movie that its trailer had me hoping it would be—but there's a new Terminator movie in the works. Against my better judgment, I'm already quietly excited about it.

A few things make this movie different from the execrable Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, the just-plain-boring Terminator Salvation, and the aforementioned Genisys, and all of them are cause for optimism.

First, the original and best Sarah Connor, Linda Hamilton, is returning to the role. Hamilton's Connor transformed from a carefree big-haired waitress into a toned and trained killing machine of her own; her big-screen replacement in Genisys, Emilia Clarke, didn't have an ounce of her tough screen presence.

McLaren

Way back in the mists of time—OK, it was 2013—Polyphony Digital's Kazunori Yamauchi challenged the automotive world to think outside the box for Gran Turismo 6. Kaz wanted some unique concept cars for the game, and a bunch of car companies (as well as a few design studios and even Nike) signed on to the project, called Vision GT.

I must confess, I thought the idea dead and buried what with GT6 being four years old and yesterday's news. The Vision GT website hasn't been updated since 2015, and there are plenty of placeholders for concepts that never materialized (including one from Tesla that I'd love to see). But it seems the project is still alive, and in the lead-up to the next installment of the franchise—allegedly due this October—McLaren has created the Ultimate Vision Gran Turismo.