Casinos

i do relies that gambling is a touchy subject for some, i understand that some americans are VERY christian and are offended by this (i've seen this on the telly many a time)

but trying to provoke a negative response by posting

is provoking a flame war, this can be for a negative response, first off this is totally off topic and second it is you stiring shite (shite is not a bad word, the 4 letter version of it is!)

I hear some of these newer gambling machines come with a reality distortion field.

Well, it MUST be true then!

Novis isn't American, I think she is German. So wrong answer again.

Desmond,

As I understand it, the skill element at Zyngo is what causes it not to fall under the gambling ban. So, as you say, the value added at step 2 qualifies it as a game of skill. The difficulty level that the game is set at (the score to beat) does correlate to a statistical percentage that, on average, people will beat it. So you set the payout so that the house will win overall, but at an amount that isn't so stingy that people just run off to a more generous house. Business-wise, that's no different than a gambling casino. The difference is that the games themselves aren't considered gambling.

I don't want to drag him into this unless he wants in, but Aargle Z_____, the creator of Zyngo, is very open about the game, and at least claims to work with the Lindens directly to make sure he is complying with the no-gambling policy on all the games he creates.

I'm not Desmond, but I feel compelled to point out we just had this discussion:
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Dun believe all you see on the telly. I mean, Vegas? Reno? Atlantic City? Indian Casinos?

Mari
(Who is not offended by casinos, but does find the little tinkling oises kinda annoyin)

I had a casino a few weeks back appear near my property. It had actual betting machines along with other games that are legal. The noise coming from the casino was horrible. I muted the owner to get rid of the sound but I noticed that I had horrible lag on my property. I never had a chance to figure out the lag issue because the casino, along with a town under construction by the same owner, disappeared overnight. The owner had spent quite a bit of time building. I assume LL found out about the gambling and cracked down immediately.

Well I'm off to my local church to play bingo!
Replace number 2 with wait and hope the market turns and you've just described SL land speculation. The real number 2 would be the game runs some form of number generation engine which influences the outcome.
Zyngo and its ilk are not likely to attract scrutiny under the UIGEA.

You could make the same argument against consumption of alcohol or tobacco. The argument it is really not persuasive to people who believe in the concept of free will and individual responsibility for one's actions. It's generally a transparent excuse for people to enforce their own personal subjective sense of morality on other people which is a practice which has been endemic to the evangelical conservative right in the United States and the Republican party which panders to that part of its demographic.

People who have obssessive compulsive disorders that make them susceptible to addictive behavior will only trade in one self-destructive vice for another. Treating the symptoms rather than the root cause will never resolve the issue.

Or just another way to say "if we can't figure out how to tax it, outlaw it."

Thanks Jeffrey,

Yeah, I don't claim to know the why and how, that was just my understanding. I'm not sure I even buy the "skill" argument myself. I'd have to pull up Aargle's notecards again to see what he says about it exactly.

I just know that for whatever reason, the Lindens don't consider Zyngo a violation of the gambling ban. They allow it on your land, they allow it in the classifieds, it's all over the place, and I've never heard of one being returned.

I'd argue that just because it's prevalent and hasn't been hit with the banhammer *yet*, that it's still a long shot from being "allowed by the Lindens."

Specifically, they're fighting more clear cut cases first, as far as I can tell.

The left and the Demorats are just as likely to ban behaviors they don't like. Neither of the two major parties likes freedom or liberty.

Maybe that's the motivation for the law. But really, gambling on the internet requires a great deal of faith in things you can't see. (Rather like religion, that.) I mean, in RL, you at least have a fair shot at seeing dealing from the bottom of the deck or marked cards... and RL casinos are all regulated--not because God hates gambling, but because the gambler otherwise has no way of seeing the magnets in the roulette wheel, the loaded dice at the craps table, and the PREE-maximizing algorithms in the slot machines. So, before worrying about taxing Internet gambling, the feds would have to worry about somehow regulating it so it was, actually, gambling, not just straight-out theft with the added advantage of an eagerly addicted victim population.

I would agree with you, that we shouldn't assume that something is okay just because a lot of it is going on.

But in this case, I don't think Aargle is making up his claim that the Lindens okayed Zyngo. He is pretty transparent about how the whole situation happened for him:



Personally, I believe him. It's up to each of us to set our threshold of trust, but in my opinion, based on this and a lot of other evidence, the machines seem legit.

Hillary Clinton is fully behind the ban on internet gambling because she feels that the State should be responsible for protecting people from spending their money as they see fit. Bill Frist, who introduced the UIGEA was a Republican. It's not a Left/Right issue. If I want to play a $10.00 tournament on the internet in the privacy of my own home at a site that is internationally regulated and on which people have gathered hundreds of thousands of hand histories to prove that the dealing algorithym is accurately dealing cards in a statistically correct fashion - a feat that could never be accomplished in a live environment, and which is, thus, considerably safer than any live environment, I am some sort of criminal.

On the other hand, if I stayed up until all hours of the night in a smokey poker room playing tournaments with buy-ins that are considerably more expensive than my on-line buy in and which may be beyond my budget against teams of players who work together to exploit others, sometimes with the tacit approval of the poker room, then I am being entirely responsible.

...mind boggles...

It does transcend the two political parties, generally the Right usues a moralistic approachto our vices while the Left seems to believe we can't take care of ourselves, and only they can do it properly. I wish they would both go away.

I'd question which Linden they went through if that's given. If that came from someone like Robin, I agree.