Author: madfinn

Local poker games shut down in Connecticut

The Connecticut State Attorney General’s office has been on the warpath to shut down local poker games held at restaurants and bars.

While those games are technically illegal they’ve been allowed to go on for years provided that the business owner is not taking a piece of the pot.

So why the crackdown now? Is the increased popularity of poker games finally reached some sort of a moral fault line and the legislators are feeling like they are obliged to stop all this immorality corrupting fine upstanding citizens of Connecticut?

Nope. It’s all about money.

It turns out the Mohegan Tribe, which operates the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut, has been pretty upset about “illegal” gambling and any efforts to legalize local poker games. They’re, in fact, so upset they’ve threatened the Connecticut State that they’ll stop paying the state’s share of the casino’s revenues, worth roughly $400M annually, should the state ever legalize poker playing in the state.

No poker in the state of Connecticut, unless it’s in one of the native american run casinos, it seems.

-TPP

Made a $250 donation to Kerry? Blacklisted from industry events

Time Magazine is reporting The White House has excluded at least 4 of the two dozen US delegates for this week’s The Inter-American Telecommunication Commission meeting in Guatemala City, because they have made campaign donations to the Kerry Campaign. Individuals barred from entering the meeting by The White House include people from Nokia and Qualcomm, arguably the two most important companies in the telecommunications industry in the US.

It’s unclear from the article under which authority The White House has barred these people from entering the meeting. The White House spokesperson had the audacity to comment on the issue by saying The White House thinks people that made campaign donations to John Kerry “..would not represent the administration favorably”. I guess telecommunications industry innovation and standards are now a partisan effort as well. What next? The Republican GSM spec?

Looks like Nokia’s and Qualcomm’s competitors’ campaign donations to George W. Bush are REALLY paying off now.

-TPP

Spin City

Senator Bill Frist (R-TN) comments on the Democrats opposition of some of the judicial nominees by the Republicans with “…judges deserve respect, not retaliation…”.

The Republican House majority leader Tom Delay (R-TX), however, has been spewing hate against “liberal” judges for months, most recently against Judge Anthony Kennedy.

If you didn’t know better, you could take Mr. Frist’s comments as a swipe against Tom Delay. That would be most welcome, but that isn’t the case here. Instead Republicans are engaging in pandering of the most basic kind.

-TPP

Universal Translator or Visual Directory

A Flickr user created a cool Flickr hack that will enable you to search for a word and get photos representing that word come up in a mobile browser friendly way.

The obvious use is helping to communicate with someone, whose language you don’t speak: “Ein dieses foto, bitte”. The results, however, can be somewhat unexpected at times.

The same effect can be achieved with Google’s Mobile image search feature, of course.

Both are great examples of what sort of innovative ideas API access to public data unleashes. At the same time one of our fine senators is trying to keep public data out of the public hands at the behest of his handlers (AccuWeather from Pennsylvania). The mind boggles.

-TPP

Immigrants Against Immigration 2005

Mr. Schwarzenegger, a first generation immigrant in the United States, has spoken, again, for stricter immigration policies. While what he said could be interpreted as blatant bigotry, it appears he meant to advocate for stricter border controls to curb illegal immigration.

Let’s see how many more times he manages to shoot himself in the foot with his mom and apple pie speeches.

-TPP

Republicans – God’s Chosen People – according to Republicans

Senator Bill Frist (R-TN) is joining prominent Christian conservatives in an April 24th telecast and use the telecast to declare Democrats as acting “against people of faith” for their efforts to block some of the more conservative judicial nominees.

Given that the Pope also was a great friend of the Republicans and George W. Bush especially [1], well, according to the Republicans and George W. Bush, this political move is sure to guarantee God himself will vote for Republicans for now and forever.

We heathens will be doomed to eternal political minority, as well as an afterlife in hell. According to the Republicans.

-TPP

1. Apart from that little thing about the death penalty, of course

91% of people arrested during the Republican Convention in New York City found innocent

1,806 people were arrested sometimes with distinct gestapo style tactics in New York City during the Republican party convention last year.

1,670 of those cases have so far been decided. In 91% of the cases the charges were dropped or the people were found not guilty of the charges filed against them.

The New York Times article also reports edited video tapes were sometimes being used to present the prosecutor’s case. Unedited tapes clearly showed people to be not guilty. The police, of course, is saying the editing was accidental. Sure…

But, hey, they were only protecting the President against grave threats. Surely their actions were justified.

-TPP

What’s a “mature” video gamer to do among the adolescent jerks?

If you’re a video gaming addict over the mental age of 21 and you play a lot of multiplayer online games, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that the online gaming services are full of griefers, assholes, racist homophobes and other misfits. It seems that the anonymous nature of pretty much all such services encourages antisocial behavior.

It makes the online gaming experience pretty miserable for the rest of us. The gaming companies are doing what they can to mitigate the problem, but they really can’t control behavior especially when the services are being used by millions of people every day.

Fortunately there are solutions, and they’re all community based.

Instead of going and playing against the general masses, playing with and against other mature gamers works wonderfully well. There are several online communities for more mature gamers, one of which is Seasoned Gamers. I joined October 2004 and the change in the online gaming experience since then has been like day and night.

The group is made of over 500 people between the ages of 17 and 72 mainly from the United States, but there are a few Europeans and a strong Canadian representation in the group as well. The people are XBox owners and mainly play multiplayer online games on XBox Live.

There’s really nothing else common with any of us, except that we like to play video games, online. In fact, in every other aspect we’re probably an extremely diverse group of people. Do not attempt to discuss politics or religion in the group, you’ll get an earful from someone on the opposite side of the opinion spectrum.

As a somewhat of a online community geek, it’s interesting and fascinating to me how this particular community and communities like it have all successfully worked around an otherwise “unsolvable” problem. It truly demonstrates the power of a user driven community building. The online communities Microsoft has tried to build around XBox and XBox Live! are perfect examples of what’s wrong with online communities formed from the top down. They are cesspools of antisocial behavior, overt marketing by the community “owner” and generally tend to be useless. Yet the user driven communities thrive.

-TPP