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(credit: Getty Images | Martin Hospach)

The Federal Communications Commission today proposed new price regulations for so-called “business data services,” potentially bringing Comcast and other cable companies under a type of regulatory regime that already applied to phone companies such as AT&T and Verizon.

The price rules won’t extend to home Internet or the typical broadband service that companies buy to get their employees online. Instead, this form of data connectivity—also called “special access”—is sometimes thought of as the Internet equivalent of a barrel of oil.

Even if you don’t know what a barrel of oil costs, its price affects how much you pay for gas. Similarly, special access prices can affect what ordinary consumers pay for mobile broadband. Wireless carriers buy special access to supply bandwidth for their cellular data networks, so the prices charged can indirectly affect the monthly bills paid by smartphone users.

The low end of the Chromebook market is well-served, partly because Chromebooks do best in the cash-strapped education market and because the simplicity (and limitations) of ChromeOS are a better fit for budget hardware. For people who want something high-end, there’s always the $999 Chromebook Pixel, but that leaves a big space in between for people who want to make something that looks and feels nice but doesn’t cost a ton.

Certainly, there have been efforts. The Toshiba Chromebook 2 had a gorgeous 1080p IPS screen but a relatively weak Intel CPU. Dell’s Chromebook 13 is solidly mid-range, though the best features (including a 1080p screen, faster chips, and more RAM) are reserved for the higher-end models. And now there’s the HP Chromebook 13, which is merely a decent Chromebook at its $499 starting price but a full-on Chromebook Pixel competitor if you’re willing to pay more.

At $499, you get a 13.3-inch 1080p screen, a Skylake-based 1.5GHz Pentium 4405Y (which despite its name is a relative to the low-power Core M), 4GB of 1866MHz DDR3 RAM, and a 1080p screen, which isn’t bad for the price. A Core M-derived Pentium is still going to deliver stronger performance (particularly in the single-threaded CPU and the graphics departments) than the Atom-derived Celerons and Pentiums that ship in many low-end Chromebooks.

A remake of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is apparently in the works after the official Call of Duty Twitter account replied to a 16-month-old tweet with two emoji: pile of poo and jeans.

@ngusvanderslott

— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) April 27, 2016

In December 2014, Angus Varderslott announced that he would "literally shit [his] pants" with excitement if he ever learned of a Call of Duty 4 remaster. Call of Duty 4 was a landmark title. It was the first Call of Duty game set in the present day, after a series of World War II-themed titles, and it set the standard for "cinematic" first-person shooters. While these days the series is derided as being rather formulaic and linear, the first Modern Warfare title held genuine surprises, with an extraordinarily tense sniper mission in the ruins of Pripyat (the Ukrainian city abandoned after the Chernobyl disaster) and the death of one of the player characters in the aftermath of a nuclear strike.

The tweet reply suggests that Varderslott had better take a trip to the laundry.

Forza 6 Apex's weather effects weren't shown in motion beyond a mere trailer tease, so we're curious whether rain detail will impact 4K performance. (credit: Microsoft/Turn 10)

After its late-February tease, Microsoft Studios and Turn 10 are finally ready to unleash the Forza Motorsport racing series on PCs—and as we reported at the game's reveal event, it's coming in an unusual way. Forza Motorsport 6 Apex will launch exclusively on Windows 10 PCs on Thursday, May 5, in the form of a free "open beta" downloadable from the Windows Store. Based on our early Apex impressions, PC players are essentially getting a limited trial version of last year's Xbox One racer as opposed to a particularly new experience.

Having seen Forza 6 Apex in the flesh, we know the game will be a huge conversation starter for PC gamers for many reasons. For one, if high-end PC owners can replicate the 4K-resolution, 60-frames-per-second performance that we saw on Turn 10's monstrous test rig, they'll be in for the most incredible public demo of DirectX 12 technology yet released. Forza 6 Apex's real-time demo looked incredible, as that silky-smooth refresh rate faced zero stutters while rendering giant textures and gorgeous lighting effects.

Nighttime racing in 4K.

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On the other hand, it remains to be seen exactly how well Apex will scale on weaker PCs; Turn 10 currently recommends at least a 3.7Ghz i3 processor and 2GB of VRAM. Also, since the game is tied to the beleaguered Universal Windows Platform (UWP), users may once more face issues like the inability to disable v-sync and a forced borderless, full-screen mode.

Senator Ted Cruz. (credit: Gage Skidmore)

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) clearly needs to fire whoever buys domain names for him.

The Republican presidential contender, having already lost the obvious TedCruz.com—settling for TedCruz.org—missed out Wednesday on the predictable URL to incorporate his new running mate, Carly Fiorina. The former CEO of Hewlett-Packard herself ran as a GOP presidential candidate but dropped out earlier this year after failing to gain much traction with Republican voters.

According to Politico, GOP consultant Matt Mackowiak “made the snap decision” to buy CruzFiorina.com as news of Cruz’ vice presidential pick broke. For his part, Cruz settled on CruzCarly.com. Mackowiak re-directed his domain to a donation page for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

The Nexus 9.

Yesterday we got news of two new Nexus devices, and today we're losing a Nexus device. It looks like the Nexus 9 is dead. The tablet has been unceremoniously removed from the Google Store—the product page now just redirects to the generic Nexus listing page, and the "tablets" link in the navigation bar now points to the Pixel C only. RIP, Nexus 9.

The HTC-built Nexus 9 had a rough life. The Nvidia Tegra-powered tablet launched in November 2014 to a very poor reception. The supposedly "premium" tablet had a squishy back, the backlight leaked, sometimes the buttons didn't work, and the device was generally not worth its $400 price tag. It hit the bargain bin almost immediately, with HTC selling it for half price a day after launch. As an Android tablet, its apps were neglected by developers and Google, and it was resigned to a life of running stretched-out phone apps forever. It even failed as a Nexus device, taking a whopping two months to be updated to Android 5.1.

The Nexus 9 was replaced by the better-but-still-not-good Pixel C, which improved on the N9 with a metal body and removable keyboard, but it was still a tough sell at $499 with unfinished software. Now Google's troubled tablet can be laid to rest.