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Posted At : February 23, 2009 11:02 AM | Posted By : D McKee
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Regulation,Technology
While New Jersey regulators have kept their cool on the iPod/iTouch card-counting application -- which one game-protection guru calls "a toy" -- their Nevada counterparts lost no time in going off half-cocked ... especially Gov. Jim Gibbons' first appointee to the Nevada Gaming Control Board, Randall Sayre. (Remember, it was Mr. Sayre who was the ultimate beneficiary of Midnight Jim's witching-hour -- and unconstitutional -- swearing-in, conducted under false pretenses so that Gibbons could void certain of his predecessor's 11th hour appointments.)
Having gone way out on a ledge with this one, Sayre shows no inclination to be talked down, at least not yet. The "cheating device" in question is debunked in today's LVA, too. A larger civil liberties issue remains to be addressed: What if casino security goons descend upon some "suspicious" iPhone user, conduct a warantless search and find the card-counting program resident upon his phone, but not actually in use. Given Las Vegas Metro's documented propensity to act as a taxpayer-funded extension of casino security, the poor fool might find himself staring down the barrel of a felony rap and hard time.
Thanks to shoot-first, think-later NGCB blundering, every Nevada casino customer who's in possession of an iPhone is now a "person of interest." Meanwhile, background investigations of new players in the industry are either bungled (James Packer), skimped (Goldman Sachs) or skipped outright (the new board of Tropicana Entertainment). Great work, guys.
No thought required. Apparently the prerequisites for publishing a newspaper do not include actually reading it. Always good for a laugh, the head honcho of the Las Vegas Review-Journal has suddenly discovered the bullet-train proposal for an Anaheim-to-Las Vegas route. Or, as he puts it, "the mystery train nobody knew they wanted."
The only person to whom it's a mystery is the chap in the Amish beard who, if he deigned to read what his reporters write, would know that the Anaheim route is one of two competing proposals. The other is a half-assed notion to run a line from Vegas to -- wait for it -- Victorville. The latter is being shopped around by political fixer Sig Rogich, the man who brought you Jim Gibbons. 'Nuff said.
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The biggest complaint toward NV-CA high-speed rail, aside from California not wanting to fund the end on their stateline and not really being able to afford it (federal funds, help!) is that nobody wants to pay to find a vein (or bore through a new one) through the hills surrounding LA. The stupid DesertXpress promoted by the company that brought us the ill-fated Monorail (and again promoting itself as a taxpayer-free, all-private solve-all) wanted to drop people off in some large park and ride in the California high-desert with no mass transit, meaning you still had to drive a car into LA. Those not parked in LA, and those who don't drive, and those who do drive but live in Vegas and wanted to leave the car at home, would be screwed. Idiotic.
I see a simple solution: Bullet train to Palmdale, CA. They built a new train station out there serving Amtrak lines, and LA Metrolink (the most important connection for Las Vegas), and someday that California High-Speed Rail whose funds were approved in 2008 but of course might never exist. Palmdale is on the edge of Metrolink and is outside of the hill range. It's an attractive compromise for a SoCal to Vegas train. So of course, no politician has suggested using it.
Sorry if I've ranted about this on S&G before. It's a touchy issue for me as a non-driver who is all up with mass transit.