There's also the fact that (since the IRS doesn't actually write the tax code, merely implement it), providing it to the public, in a format designed to be as agnostic and machine-readable as possible, would be the closest thing to 'simplifying' that anybody without control of the tax code itself could actually do... The messy business of mapping real-world phenomena to specific boxes on the worksheet would still occupy an army of tax lawyers, for a relatively small number of people and firms; but for those whose situation is either simpler or complex in historically-well-understood ways, automation is the next best thing to simplification.
Shooting cops tends to be...unproductive in the medium term. Their initial performance is likely to be underwhelming; but after that, you'll be lucky if they just empty a dozen magazines into your corpse, since that will at least keep you out of SuperMax Forever Fun Time.
Don't let the fact that an armed man and his buddies just forced you off the road, in the dark, convey any kind of misleading impression about the voluntariness of what you are about to do the sensible thing and agree to....
At risk of feeding the trolls, do you realize the category error you are making?
When I'm interacting with a given entity, state or private, yeah I definitely do expect to be able to do so through a website they provide or (if such is relevant to the situation) an API they provide for other front-ends and clients.
Having to hire an 'authorized e-file provider' in order to send a tax return to the IRS is like having to hire a third party to send in this post on my behalf. There isn't anything stopping me from doing so, if my requirements are esoteric in some way; but hell yeah I expect to be able to deal directly with the IRS when I have business with them (especially if I'm one of the numerous Americans whose tax return is basically the 1040-EZ that they already have all the data in).
If tax accountants, tax attorneys, and prep services wish to market their services, that's all well and good; but the idea that the IRS should be forbidden to provide trivial 20th century customer service lest it step on their dainty toes? Nonsense.
Nothing about that notion implies that there should be One Website For The People, Comrade!
Oh, believe me, the only vestiges of politeness I preserved in that situation were for the poor sucker who had dutifully been typing her records in for years, and stood to lose them if they couldn't be migrated. Quicken... they can go to the special hell.
A word of caution, though. For reasons that, no doubt, have to do with fundamental difficulties in computer science, the rapid changes in the storage of integers and trivial floats; rather than being money-grubbing shitweasels, vendors of standalone accounting/tax-prep packages have a... spotty... record when it comes to compatibility of older files with newer clients.
I recently had the pleasure of migrating some antique version of Quicken to the present. The "Well, just open the old file with the new software" procedure simply wasn't supported, they'd changed formats and killed compatibility with their own older format. "Export" from the old one and "import" to the new one resulted in some alarming munging where somebody's penny-ante garden club ended up having assets in the range of $20 million, and $1.3 billion in liabilities.... This seemed improbable.
The officially-recommended(but not supported, or guaranteed to produce accurate results) solution was to take the oldest file, install an intermediate version a few years newer than that file, open the file with the intermediate version, allow it to convert, check the results manually, do the same with a second intermediate version, and then finally take the output from the second intermediate version and import it into the current version.
If you don't get to keep (in some non-fucked format) all the output and intermediate data, I'd trust an accounting package's data files only as long as I'd trust whatever mechanism (VM, whatever) I had cobbled together to keep that version of the accounting package running.
You are going about the secure data destruction business all wrong... Once the computer is toast, anything between you and the platters is just 'collateral damage'. A rifle, angle grinder, or cutting torch will go right through an iMac without much difficulty.
Been doing it for years with government provided software.
Mind you it doesn't say 'cloud' every 5 words, but it submits it all online and even auto fills in a lot of your data from government databases.
Not sure how long it has been available for but many many years without incident.
Oh and its free.
Thankfully, Intuit, Inc. (by a totally crazy coincidence also the maker of TurboTax(tm), a market-leading tax software solution) has been fighting to save us from communism...
So here in the Land of the Free, the IRS probably has the information it needs anyway (for fraud detection, and because Joe Worker's employer already reports it); but we can't let them destroy the free market, and capitalism itself, by making the process any easier. Instead, you just hand over your money and personal information to an 'Authorized e-File Provider' and be glad that you live in the bestest ever country on earth.
We will be rolling out a similar system for health insurance soon.
And on their newly redesigned, 'performance' model? Sure, they currently use Nvidia for polygon pushing on their lower end devices, for the higher-res situations where Intel won't cut it; but do you think that they dropped Nvidia from their 'pro' model, despite the flack from CUDA-dependent visual effects/video workflow nuts, for nothing?
"Mantle", at least according to the press puffery, is aimed at being an alternative to OpenGL/Direct3d, akin to 3DFX's old "Glide"; but for AMD gear.
CUDA vs. OpenCL seems to be an example of the ongoing battle between an entrenched and supported; but costly, proprietary implementation, vs. a somewhat patchy solution that isn't as mature; but has basically everybody except Nvidia rooting for it.
"Mantle", like 'Glide' before it, seems to be the eternal story of the cyclical move between high-performance/low-complexity(but low compatibility) minimally abstracted approaches, and highly complex, highly abstracted; but highly portable/compatible approaches. At present, since AMD is doing the GPU silicon for both consoles and a nontrivial percentage of PCs, it makes a fair amount of sense for them to offer a 'Hey, close to the metal!' solution that takes some of the heat off their drivers, makes performance on their hardware better, and so forth. If, five years from now, people are swearing at 'Mantle Wrappers' and trying to find the one magic incantation that actually causes them to emit non-broken OpenGL, though, history will say 'I told you so'.
IBM is announcing that their hardware is "Open", in the sense that it has PCIe slots, and Nvidia is announcing that they'd be happy to sell hardware to the sort of price-insensitive customers who will be buying Power8 gear?
Nvidia has never much liked OpenCL. And why would they? They currently hold the high ground in GPU computing, with a proprietary API that only they can implement. I'd assume that they have some sort of 'OpenCL contingency plan', just in case the market shifts, or they ever want to sell a GPU to Apple ever again; but as of right now, supporting OpenCL would just be a "Sure, please, commodify me, I'd love that!" move.
Isn't it lucky that anti-ship missiles capable of speeds and maneuvers as great or greater, and equipped with explosive warheads and hostile intent aren't reasonably commonly available?
"It's also a common way of getting drugs through airports. Think about that next time you're sniffing cocaine or injecting heroin..."
Conveniently, given that both drugs are taken up reasonably readily by mucous membranes, if you are snorting it, the barrier between the drug packet and the courier's ass probably didn't break in transit. A Suppository Surprise! of tens to hundreds of grams of cocaine would not be the sort of thing that goes unnoticed. Best case, the courier would seek/get treatment in time, and get busted, worst case, they'd just massively overdose and die in a rather suspicious and unpleasant incident for all involved.
It isn't really a 'gun' as we usually think of them, being closer to something NERF would make than something Browning would recognize; but if I had access to some punchy toxin (research-grade botulism, for instance. Conveniently, it's a totally legitimate compound for certain types of lab work and there's a minimally-scary black market for it, because Botox(tm) is under patent for use in cosmetic and medical procedures, and the price reflects that; but if you can score some (usually much more concentrated) research-grade stuff and dilute it, you can offer cut-price Botox treatment. Usually the patient doesn't even die!) and wanted to put some into a deserving individual unobtrustively and from a distance, an all-plastic (possibly rubber/elastomeric seals) pneumatic dart launcher might be just the ticket....
Of course, a pair of dark glasses, and a disguise for my older-than-recorded-history blowpipe would do the job just as well...
Did you miss that thing were they took control of the airplanes and then used them as missiles? You assume the terrorist wants to survive the attack...
Which is the sort of attack that only works once (since information flow didn't really occur between the planes hijacked at the same time, I'm counting that as 'once').
All through the 70s and 80s, hijacking was nearly continuous; but there was also a sort of etiquette about it. Some dude would pull a gun/threaten a bomb/etc., rant a bit, demand to be taken to $SOMEWHERE$, the plane would eventually have to land to refuel, there'd be a standoff, and it'd be considered a really botched operation if casualties were above 10%. Under such circumstances, why would anybody try anything dumb and heroic? Odds were extremely good that you'd be inconvenienced for a day or two, then some commando squad, depending on where you landed, would shoot the guy, and that would be that.
Now that the planes-as-missiles tactic is known, cockpit doors are trivially easy and cheap to reinforce, and passengers know that compliance is not a value-rational strategy. Under such circumstances, pulling off a successful hijack is much harder. Do you have enough guys, or enough very-nasty close combat weapons to survive or deter a zerg rush? Can you breach the cockpit door? If the pilot says "Fuck you, I'd rather crash right here than crash where you want me to!" and puts the plane into a deeply-unrecommended-by-Boeing dive, can you recover from that after you cut him and shove the body off the seat?
Aside from pure logistics (20-ish clean-cut Saudis with all their ducks in a row for entry to the US are harder to come by than substantially larger numbers of angry underemployed you adult men in ethniclashistan), it isn't really clear that "Al Qaeda", other than being a brand name that every two-bit Jihad franchise aspires to latch on to, actually represents a coherent conspiracy against American interests (unless you interpret 'American Interests' to be "We do whatever the fuck we want, whenever the fuck we want, wherever the fuck we want; because We Are God's Own Nation, so suck it down.").
They might nominally show up on an "Al Qaeda" headcount; but some militia seeking to impose islamic law in Mali, or destroy 'idolatry' in Timbuktu isn't the "Al Qaeda" that is going to be paying a visit to New York or Washington anytime soon.
"But the more worrisome aspect is to what a large degree they appear to be the creation of US policy that supposedly is aimed at improving, not eroding, our security."
Arguably, to the degree that it isn't purely misguided misjudgement of what can actually be achieved by air power and executions, US 'counter-terrorism' policy might, arguably, be said to look a lot like US 'anti-drug' policy: That is, it's concern over what makes it to the US (whether it be good drugs, or competent terrorists with actual leadership) is so overridingly great as to allow us to endorse all sorts of tactics that are ruinously painful and damaging to our 'allies' in supply regions. We don't really give a fuck if Mexico or Colombia become cesspools of narco-violence and corruption, as long as we bag the occasional drug lord. The fact that Yemen and Pakistan are teetering in part because we stir up so much goodwill doesn't really bother us as long as we get to frag yet another Al Qaeda #3 leadership figure...
If I was a boss at Al-Qaeda I'd be getting people to stuff things up their ass and sending them to airports all day long. The chaos that follows when sheeple figure out that the TSA cannot protect them would be priceless.
Why stick to airports and explosives? Remember how long the 'Beltway Sniper' had that area freaking the hell out, all over some sort of cryptic, dubiously well planned and almost entirely unfunded, scheme to shoot some people because something or other? Two guys, a cheap gun(stolen in their case; but equivalent gear is widely legal, it was just one of the zillion civilianized AR-15s and variants), and a shitty car, basically zero money, and the place was shitting itself for a couple of weeks.
If 'terrorists' were actually a threat, as opposed to a theatrical-but-statistically-insignificant risk, (bolstered, with considerable dishonesty, by the people who classify assorted Afghani and Iraqi and whatnot militants fighting either us or one another as 'terrorists'), every decent-size metropolitan area would have somebody driving around bagging civilians at random most of the time, and you'd have to sweep under the bleachers for IEDs before every little-league game, lest the adoring parents get spattered all the way to 3rd base.
The morals of the story are that (A)There just aren't that many terrorists, and most of them are kind of dumb or interested in things other than the continental US; and (B) The TSA (in addition to being largely feckless) is a magnificent example of 'gearing up to fight the last war'. Even if the TSA were scary, and they aren't (except to non-terrorists), why bother hitting a plane, again? Be like a terrorist hipster: Hijacking is so, mainstream, man. I'm listening to this obscure post 9/11 group called 'unsecured rail lines near population centers', you probably haven't heard of them...
So far, I think they've all been relative noobs without access to a halfway competent surgeon.
Especially if your time to detonation is short (which means a number of usually-vital organs can be trimmed down or removed), there's a fair bit of volume inside a human torso, and one can cultivate a layer of adipose tissue to help conceal any oddities. However, unless you have (at a minimum) a competent med student or vet or something, doing surgery without the patient bleeding out or going into shock isn't trivial.
I understand the apprehension caused by firearms that can't currently be detected, but I don't quite understand what he's trying to accomplish in enacting a law that can't be enforced
I suspect that it's partially grandstanding, and partially to provide a convenient charge to stick on somebody if you do find a gun on them where you really don't want one (say, the metal detector shows nothing, but they fail a pat down, or were dumb enough to have been shooting recently enough that a dog picks up residue, or a cop just doesn't like their face.
It's not unlike the restrictions on knife-carrying in a number of states, and numerous municipalities: You look like some sort of custodian, maintenance, screwdriver techie, etc. guy? Nobody blinks you you have some pretty mean tools on hand (even in some hypersensitive 'zero-tolerance' school, you think that the kitchen staff don't have a big knife or two on hand, unless budget cuts have entirely reduced them to just reheating frozen comestible modular units?). You look like some sort of undesirable? The cops would be so sad if they didn't have something to charge you with after patting you down.
I'm sure they'll gladly *take* your money from anywhere in the world but good luck being paid out without proving you are a NJ resident or being physically present in NJ. You can count on them policing that end of the system hard since they get to keep forfeit winnings.
For sufficiently large payouts, that might be worth it; but it would probably be a bad strategy for low stakes wins:
On average, even without changing the rules, the house wins. That's how the game is set up. Especially for online games, where 'floor space' is trivially cheap server time, every additional sucker in the door is, on average, more money for them. If it becomes known that they bait-and-switch out of state players, how many out of state players will come through the door?
It will also create the strong (and justified) impression that they could be doing more to keep out-of-state players away; but aren't. Then the moral crusaders, DA looking to run for office, etc. will be on their backs again.
For sufficiently large wins, it can be justified as a routine "Well, of course our level of diligence for very large transactions is greater, that's just common sense!", and high-rollers probably don't slum it in an online New Jersey casino, in any case; but why spook the people playing nickle slots? On average you win, and everything stays a lot quieter if nobody comes away feeling ripped off.
Is it just me or does this look pretty silly? One proxy inside their virtual fence and it's utterly pointless and useless?
Just remember that the objective of the system is to satisfy a statutory requirement. Can whoever is responsible for this 'virtual fence' system testify in court/legislative session that they are 'aggressively using industry-standard IP geolocation technology to ensure that New Jersey electronic gaming is conducted in accordance with the law'? Probably so, even without anything arising to the level of perjury. After that, why try harder? If there are lucrative, or sufficiently whiny, customers too close to the border for IP geolocation to work, maybe the ROI/flack avoidance value of working with ISPs to whitelist a few edge-case customers will be worth it; but leave crowing about having shut down somebody's trivial proxy site to the Attorney General or the DA, they get off on that kind of feel-good nonsense, and it's one less thing for you to do.
It's like doing CISPA compliance. Do you think that the people who do that are utter morons who actually think that they can keep horny adolescents away from smut? Hardly. But they need a system that complies with that mandate, without breaking the budget or soaking up lots of admin time, and in it goes.
Slashdot Mirror
There's also the fact that (since the IRS doesn't actually write the tax code, merely implement it), providing it to the public, in a format designed to be as agnostic and machine-readable as possible, would be the closest thing to 'simplifying' that anybody without control of the tax code itself could actually do... The messy business of mapping real-world phenomena to specific boxes on the worksheet would still occupy an army of tax lawyers, for a relatively small number of people and firms; but for those whose situation is either simpler or complex in historically-well-understood ways, automation is the next best thing to simplification.
Over my dead body feds.
Shooting cops tends to be...unproductive in the medium term. Their initial performance is likely to be underwhelming; but after that, you'll be lucky if they just empty a dozen magazines into your corpse, since that will at least keep you out of SuperMax Forever Fun Time.
Don't let the fact that an armed man and his buddies just forced you off the road, in the dark, convey any kind of misleading impression about the voluntariness of what you are about to do the sensible thing and agree to....
At risk of feeding the trolls, do you realize the category error you are making?
When I'm interacting with a given entity, state or private, yeah I definitely do expect to be able to do so through a website they provide or (if such is relevant to the situation) an API they provide for other front-ends and clients.
Having to hire an 'authorized e-file provider' in order to send a tax return to the IRS is like having to hire a third party to send in this post on my behalf. There isn't anything stopping me from doing so, if my requirements are esoteric in some way; but hell yeah I expect to be able to deal directly with the IRS when I have business with them (especially if I'm one of the numerous Americans whose tax return is basically the 1040-EZ that they already have all the data in).
If tax accountants, tax attorneys, and prep services wish to market their services, that's all well and good; but the idea that the IRS should be forbidden to provide trivial 20th century customer service lest it step on their dainty toes? Nonsense.
Nothing about that notion implies that there should be One Website For The People, Comrade!
Oh, believe me, the only vestiges of politeness I preserved in that situation were for the poor sucker who had dutifully been typing her records in for years, and stood to lose them if they couldn't be migrated. Quicken... they can go to the special hell.
A word of caution, though. For reasons that, no doubt, have to do with fundamental difficulties in computer science, the rapid changes in the storage of integers and trivial floats; rather than being money-grubbing shitweasels, vendors of standalone accounting/tax-prep packages have a... spotty... record when it comes to compatibility of older files with newer clients.
I recently had the pleasure of migrating some antique version of Quicken to the present. The "Well, just open the old file with the new software" procedure simply wasn't supported, they'd changed formats and killed compatibility with their own older format. "Export" from the old one and "import" to the new one resulted in some alarming munging where somebody's penny-ante garden club ended up having assets in the range of $20 million, and $1.3 billion in liabilities.... This seemed improbable.
The officially-recommended(but not supported, or guaranteed to produce accurate results) solution was to take the oldest file, install an intermediate version a few years newer than that file, open the file with the intermediate version, allow it to convert, check the results manually, do the same with a second intermediate version, and then finally take the output from the second intermediate version and import it into the current version.
If you don't get to keep (in some non-fucked format) all the output and intermediate data, I'd trust an accounting package's data files only as long as I'd trust whatever mechanism (VM, whatever) I had cobbled together to keep that version of the accounting package running.
You are going about the secure data destruction business all wrong... Once the computer is toast, anything between you and the platters is just 'collateral damage'. A rifle, angle grinder, or cutting torch will go right through an iMac without much difficulty.
Been doing it for years with government provided software.
Mind you it doesn't say 'cloud' every 5 words, but it submits it all online and even auto fills in a lot of your data from government databases. Not sure how long it has been available for but many many years without incident.
Oh and its free.
Thankfully, Intuit, Inc. (by a totally crazy coincidence also the maker of TurboTax(tm), a market-leading tax software solution) has been fighting to save us from communism...
So here in the Land of the Free, the IRS probably has the information it needs anyway (for fraud detection, and because Joe Worker's employer already reports it); but we can't let them destroy the free market, and capitalism itself, by making the process any easier. Instead, you just hand over your money and personal information to an 'Authorized e-File Provider' and be glad that you live in the bestest ever country on earth.
We will be rolling out a similar system for health insurance soon.
As it happens, you won't need too... There happens to be a rather conveniently placed obesity cluster elsewhere in the world...
Some scrawny Yemeni peasant probably wouldn't work out; but you'd have options.
And on their newly redesigned, 'performance' model? Sure, they currently use Nvidia for polygon pushing on their lower end devices, for the higher-res situations where Intel won't cut it; but do you think that they dropped Nvidia from their 'pro' model, despite the flack from CUDA-dependent visual effects/video workflow nuts, for nothing?
"Mantle", at least according to the press puffery, is aimed at being an alternative to OpenGL/Direct3d, akin to 3DFX's old "Glide"; but for AMD gear.
CUDA vs. OpenCL seems to be an example of the ongoing battle between an entrenched and supported; but costly, proprietary implementation, vs. a somewhat patchy solution that isn't as mature; but has basically everybody except Nvidia rooting for it.
"Mantle", like 'Glide' before it, seems to be the eternal story of the cyclical move between high-performance/low-complexity(but low compatibility) minimally abstracted approaches, and highly complex, highly abstracted; but highly portable/compatible approaches. At present, since AMD is doing the GPU silicon for both consoles and a nontrivial percentage of PCs, it makes a fair amount of sense for them to offer a 'Hey, close to the metal!' solution that takes some of the heat off their drivers, makes performance on their hardware better, and so forth. If, five years from now, people are swearing at 'Mantle Wrappers' and trying to find the one magic incantation that actually causes them to emit non-broken OpenGL, though, history will say 'I told you so'.
IBM is announcing that their hardware is "Open", in the sense that it has PCIe slots, and Nvidia is announcing that they'd be happy to sell hardware to the sort of price-insensitive customers who will be buying Power8 gear?
I'm shocked.
Nvidia has sidetracked OpenCL for CUDA?
Nvidia has never much liked OpenCL. And why would they? They currently hold the high ground in GPU computing, with a proprietary API that only they can implement. I'd assume that they have some sort of 'OpenCL contingency plan', just in case the market shifts, or they ever want to sell a GPU to Apple ever again; but as of right now, supporting OpenCL would just be a "Sure, please, commodify me, I'd love that!" move.
Isn't it lucky that anti-ship missiles capable of speeds and maneuvers as great or greater, and equipped with explosive warheads and hostile intent aren't reasonably commonly available?
That sure would ruin our day...
"It's also a common way of getting drugs through airports. Think about that next time you're sniffing cocaine or injecting heroin..."
Conveniently, given that both drugs are taken up reasonably readily by mucous membranes, if you are snorting it, the barrier between the drug packet and the courier's ass probably didn't break in transit. A Suppository Surprise! of tens to hundreds of grams of cocaine would not be the sort of thing that goes unnoticed. Best case, the courier would seek/get treatment in time, and get busted, worst case, they'd just massively overdose and die in a rather suspicious and unpleasant incident for all involved.
It isn't really a 'gun' as we usually think of them, being closer to something NERF would make than something Browning would recognize; but if I had access to some punchy toxin (research-grade botulism, for instance. Conveniently, it's a totally legitimate compound for certain types of lab work and there's a minimally-scary black market for it, because Botox(tm) is under patent for use in cosmetic and medical procedures, and the price reflects that; but if you can score some (usually much more concentrated) research-grade stuff and dilute it, you can offer cut-price Botox treatment. Usually the patient doesn't even die!) and wanted to put some into a deserving individual unobtrustively and from a distance, an all-plastic (possibly rubber/elastomeric seals) pneumatic dart launcher might be just the ticket....
Of course, a pair of dark glasses, and a disguise for my older-than-recorded-history blowpipe would do the job just as well...
Did you miss that thing were they took control of the airplanes and then used them as missiles? You assume the terrorist wants to survive the attack...
Which is the sort of attack that only works once (since information flow didn't really occur between the planes hijacked at the same time, I'm counting that as 'once').
All through the 70s and 80s, hijacking was nearly continuous; but there was also a sort of etiquette about it. Some dude would pull a gun/threaten a bomb/etc., rant a bit, demand to be taken to $SOMEWHERE$, the plane would eventually have to land to refuel, there'd be a standoff, and it'd be considered a really botched operation if casualties were above 10%. Under such circumstances, why would anybody try anything dumb and heroic? Odds were extremely good that you'd be inconvenienced for a day or two, then some commando squad, depending on where you landed, would shoot the guy, and that would be that.
Now that the planes-as-missiles tactic is known, cockpit doors are trivially easy and cheap to reinforce, and passengers know that compliance is not a value-rational strategy. Under such circumstances, pulling off a successful hijack is much harder. Do you have enough guys, or enough very-nasty close combat weapons to survive or deter a zerg rush? Can you breach the cockpit door? If the pilot says "Fuck you, I'd rather crash right here than crash where you want me to!" and puts the plane into a deeply-unrecommended-by-Boeing dive, can you recover from that after you cut him and shove the body off the seat?
Aside from pure logistics (20-ish clean-cut Saudis with all their ducks in a row for entry to the US are harder to come by than substantially larger numbers of angry underemployed you adult men in ethniclashistan), it isn't really clear that "Al Qaeda", other than being a brand name that every two-bit Jihad franchise aspires to latch on to, actually represents a coherent conspiracy against American interests (unless you interpret 'American Interests' to be "We do whatever the fuck we want, whenever the fuck we want, wherever the fuck we want; because We Are God's Own Nation, so suck it down.").
They might nominally show up on an "Al Qaeda" headcount; but some militia seeking to impose islamic law in Mali, or destroy 'idolatry' in Timbuktu isn't the "Al Qaeda" that is going to be paying a visit to New York or Washington anytime soon.
"But the more worrisome aspect is to what a large degree they appear to be the creation of US policy that supposedly is aimed at improving, not eroding, our security."
Arguably, to the degree that it isn't purely misguided misjudgement of what can actually be achieved by air power and executions, US 'counter-terrorism' policy might, arguably, be said to look a lot like US 'anti-drug' policy: That is, it's concern over what makes it to the US (whether it be good drugs, or competent terrorists with actual leadership) is so overridingly great as to allow us to endorse all sorts of tactics that are ruinously painful and damaging to our 'allies' in supply regions. We don't really give a fuck if Mexico or Colombia become cesspools of narco-violence and corruption, as long as we bag the occasional drug lord. The fact that Yemen and Pakistan are teetering in part because we stir up so much goodwill doesn't really bother us as long as we get to frag yet another Al Qaeda #3 leadership figure...
If I was a boss at Al-Qaeda I'd be getting people to stuff things up their ass and sending them to airports all day long. The chaos that follows when sheeple figure out that the TSA cannot protect them would be priceless.
Why stick to airports and explosives? Remember how long the 'Beltway Sniper' had that area freaking the hell out, all over some sort of cryptic, dubiously well planned and almost entirely unfunded, scheme to shoot some people because something or other? Two guys, a cheap gun(stolen in their case; but equivalent gear is widely legal, it was just one of the zillion civilianized AR-15s and variants), and a shitty car, basically zero money, and the place was shitting itself for a couple of weeks.
If 'terrorists' were actually a threat, as opposed to a theatrical-but-statistically-insignificant risk, (bolstered, with considerable dishonesty, by the people who classify assorted Afghani and Iraqi and whatnot militants fighting either us or one another as 'terrorists'), every decent-size metropolitan area would have somebody driving around bagging civilians at random most of the time, and you'd have to sweep under the bleachers for IEDs before every little-league game, lest the adoring parents get spattered all the way to 3rd base.
The morals of the story are that (A)There just aren't that many terrorists, and most of them are kind of dumb or interested in things other than the continental US; and (B) The TSA (in addition to being largely feckless) is a magnificent example of 'gearing up to fight the last war'. Even if the TSA were scary, and they aren't (except to non-terrorists), why bother hitting a plane, again? Be like a terrorist hipster: Hijacking is so, mainstream, man. I'm listening to this obscure post 9/11 group called 'unsecured rail lines near population centers', you probably haven't heard of them...
So far, I think they've all been relative noobs without access to a halfway competent surgeon.
Especially if your time to detonation is short (which means a number of usually-vital organs can be trimmed down or removed), there's a fair bit of volume inside a human torso, and one can cultivate a layer of adipose tissue to help conceal any oddities. However, unless you have (at a minimum) a competent med student or vet or something, doing surgery without the patient bleeding out or going into shock isn't trivial.
I understand the apprehension caused by firearms that can't currently be detected, but I don't quite understand what he's trying to accomplish in enacting a law that can't be enforced
I suspect that it's partially grandstanding, and partially to provide a convenient charge to stick on somebody if you do find a gun on them where you really don't want one (say, the metal detector shows nothing, but they fail a pat down, or were dumb enough to have been shooting recently enough that a dog picks up residue, or a cop just doesn't like their face.
It's not unlike the restrictions on knife-carrying in a number of states, and numerous municipalities: You look like some sort of custodian, maintenance, screwdriver techie, etc. guy? Nobody blinks you you have some pretty mean tools on hand (even in some hypersensitive 'zero-tolerance' school, you think that the kitchen staff don't have a big knife or two on hand, unless budget cuts have entirely reduced them to just reheating frozen comestible modular units?). You look like some sort of undesirable? The cops would be so sad if they didn't have something to charge you with after patting you down.
I'm guessing that somebody at Raytheon is going to be having a particularly merry Christmas...
I'm sure they'll gladly *take* your money from anywhere in the world but good luck being paid out without proving you are a NJ resident or being physically present in NJ. You can count on them policing that end of the system hard since they get to keep forfeit winnings.
For sufficiently large payouts, that might be worth it; but it would probably be a bad strategy for low stakes wins:
On average, even without changing the rules, the house wins. That's how the game is set up. Especially for online games, where 'floor space' is trivially cheap server time, every additional sucker in the door is, on average, more money for them. If it becomes known that they bait-and-switch out of state players, how many out of state players will come through the door?
It will also create the strong (and justified) impression that they could be doing more to keep out-of-state players away; but aren't. Then the moral crusaders, DA looking to run for office, etc. will be on their backs again.
For sufficiently large wins, it can be justified as a routine "Well, of course our level of diligence for very large transactions is greater, that's just common sense!", and high-rollers probably don't slum it in an online New Jersey casino, in any case; but why spook the people playing nickle slots? On average you win, and everything stays a lot quieter if nobody comes away feeling ripped off.
A computer scientist? Wow. Where they a strong-AI believer, or just a very compelling lesson in why good software is only the beginning of 'security'?
Is it just me or does this look pretty silly? One proxy inside their virtual fence and it's utterly pointless and useless?
Just remember that the objective of the system is to satisfy a statutory requirement. Can whoever is responsible for this 'virtual fence' system testify in court/legislative session that they are 'aggressively using industry-standard IP geolocation technology to ensure that New Jersey electronic gaming is conducted in accordance with the law'? Probably so, even without anything arising to the level of perjury. After that, why try harder? If there are lucrative, or sufficiently whiny, customers too close to the border for IP geolocation to work, maybe the ROI/flack avoidance value of working with ISPs to whitelist a few edge-case customers will be worth it; but leave crowing about having shut down somebody's trivial proxy site to the Attorney General or the DA, they get off on that kind of feel-good nonsense, and it's one less thing for you to do.
It's like doing CISPA compliance. Do you think that the people who do that are utter morons who actually think that they can keep horny adolescents away from smut? Hardly. But they need a system that complies with that mandate, without breaking the budget or soaking up lots of admin time, and in it goes.