The wording is a bit bad, but presumably it's a means of combating sex tourism. In terms of illicit, I would suggest that you're odds of getting a jury to convict on any offence sexual or otherwise that isn't actually illegal in the US is somewhere between slim and none, so whether that's what they intended or not that's the likely de facto definition of illicit.
Or they read content produced by others, but don't tweet. It's what I do, I doubt I've even hit 10 tweets, but I'm on twitter at least two or three times a week.
I think the issue at hand is actually the fact that while twitter can easily measure the number of users it has, Si Dawson can't.
For the purposes of the companies valuation, the number of "active users" is not the number of users who actually post, it's the number of users who will see revenue generating ads. If someone logs onto twitter every day for an hour but has never posted anything, they're still seeing ads and still generating revenue.
As far as I'm aware there's no possible way for any party external to twitter to determine whether a given user logs in to read content or doesn't, only whether they've posted anything which, while important in that content drives views is not the relevant revenue metric.
It doesn't surprise me at all that about half of twitter users might read content far more often than they post it. I check twitter quite often, but I've only posted about a half a dozen times.
Actually the fact that you can pay tax with US dollars, or for that matter any dollars in the appropriate country is actually a very key part of their value. Every company that is subject to US taxes needs US dollars(and only US dollars) to pay those taxes, as do any individuals subject to the same. This means that the more economic activity that these companies or individuals generate, the higher their demand for US dollars and therefore the higher the value of said US dollars assuming constant supply. BitCoin doesn't have this built in demand, no one on earth "needs" BitCoins for anything. Everything you can possibly buy with BitCoins you can buy with another non deflationary currency and there are obviously things you can't ever buy or pay for with BitCoins.
In terms of gas I meant petrol, but it doesn't really matter which because despite your assertion that utilities are different, they're really not. They accept the currencies that make sense for them. Since they both need to pay taxes in US dollars that means US dollars. In a lot of ways a utility is actually much more likely to accept BitCoins than a petrol station as the utility needs to accept internet payments and already has significant infrastructure in place that could support BitCoin transactions. Your average petrol station would have to set up 5-10 grand worth of infrastructure just to be able to process BitCoins in a meaningful way, that's not even counting the fact that for a face to face transaction the fact that you'll know for sure you have the money in 2 hours is largely meaningless as the guy who didn't pay you is long gone by then. It's possible that this could happen, but it's kind of a chicken and an egg situation, the utility of BitCoins drives adoption and adoption drives utility, but there's no core driver for either.
What he means is actually rather simple, though he didn't phrase it very well.
When you have a traditional currency like US Dollars, you have a built in demand for said currency. You must pay US taxes in US dollars and so every entity subject to US taxes requires at least some US dollars. In the case of something like BitCoin there's no built in demand for it. Even places like SilkRoad still eventually have to turn BitCoin back into currency they can actually buy something with, and at the moment the only real reason that anyone can do that is because there's a lot of idiots thinking BitCoin will make them rich. When the supply of BitCoins reaches a level where there aren't enough around anymore folks will stop buying them speculatively and the future of the currency will depend on whether you can pay for gas or your electric bill with them. Since these companies don't need BitCoins, they're unlikely to accept them.
If you work on the premise that BitCoin is a viable currency then yes you're right, the level of deflation is insignificant. If you instead look at the future when the level of deflation will not be insignificant and then decide BitCoin is not a viable currency it matters very much.
He had a million different opportunities to do the right thing, starting with not changing all the passwords so that no one had access in the first place. He had a god complex and cost the taxpayers significant amount of money because he thought his entire level of management were too incompetent to be trusted with his baby. Fortunately he'll never work again, we don't need more idiots like this.
No, he decided that his direct supervisor couldn't be trusted with passwords and he'd only give them to the mayor because he was convinced that he was the only competent person in the entire city. There were no bad choices here there was do what you're required to or act like a self entitled dickhead.
The basic problem is that unless you're in the school of education no university professor is ever required to receive any training in or show any aptitude for actually teaching. In some cases the professors enthusiasm and expertise can overcome this, but it's not an ideal situation, really educators should be required to actually know how to educate, but that's not how the incentives for universities are set up and since the classes where this stuff does the most damage are generally the introductory classes where a lot of students aren't majoring in the subject and issues can be blamed on the transition from high school to university it doesn't get addressed. I can't imagine how many people are sidetracked from their goals or potential because of some poorly taught introductory course. I realise part of the point is to cull people before they can apply to the major, but wouldn't it be nice to actually cull people who can't do the work as opposed to just culling people who can't teach themselves in a place where students are paying thousands of dollars to be taught by others?
The other issue you have in Gen Chem and a lot of other first tier classes is that the professor they have teaching it is usually actually a high level specialist in some esoteric aspect of the discipline. In higher level courses, the fact that most university professors couldn't teach themselves out of a wet paper bag is at least somewhat mitigated by their passion and knowledge of the subject. In entry level courses a tonne of professors seem to view even having to teach the course as an inconvenience and barely know more about the parts of the field which aren't their specialty than the students.
I took a Calc II course where on one of the exams you passed with a 16% and the highest score was barely above 60, at least some of the blame for that should fall on the professor not just on "Ooh, there's no one watching me I can ditch class and not do my homework". My personal score was attributable mostly to the latter, but the classes I did have some profs who would skip half the steps and one who would do a full board's worth of work and then say "Oh I've messed up, I'll leave it to you to work out where" in the example teaching us how to do it in the first place.
I had a GTX-260 which had two power draws and weighed about a tonne, my new card is a 660, and uses only one additional cable and probably weighs less than half what the old one did. Obviously if you buy the overclocked top of the line ones power draw isn't reducing all that much, but the upper mid range cards are now much more efficient than their equivalents from a few years back.
Glen Greenwald has continually made what are essentially libellous accusations and caused a great deal of difficulty in terms of international relations both within the West and between Western and non Western nations. Now if he actually had and was releasing evidence to back up his claims that would be all fine and dandy, but he doesn't. He makes all these grandiose claims and then releases nothing of any substance to back them up, and he's had all the evidence he's ever going to get since the very beginning so there's no need for him to do this.
Whatever you might think of Edward Snowden, Greenwald is a self serving narcissist who is far more concerned with milking this story for his own personal aggrandizement than he is in actually contributing to the discussion about the proper use of surveillance. He should release what he actually has immediately and stop editorializing.
People keep saying this, but they really don't understand the scope of what healthcare.gov actually is.
This system integrates every health insurance company, in every state. Each health care company will be using a different, internally developed proprietary system, potentially more than one, each state will have different laws which affect the manner in which healthcare can be offered. It then attempts to present all that data to the consumer in a meaningful and comparable way. The fact that it works at all is a miracle.
Or maybe cyclists need to realise that they're much more vulnerable and stop doing bullshit like "salmoning", running stop signs and red lights, randomly deciding their a pedestrian now and riding over the cross walk and then a vehicle a minute later. I've seen so many cyclists on the road who seem to have a death wish. If you drove that way in a car you'd have your license taken away, but cyclists just keep on going.
That's was my entire point though, how do you handle the fact that encryption, at last of the format lavabit used, is all or nothing. The government has a good reason to look at Snowden's e-mails but cannot look at Snowden's e-mails without either cooperation from lavabit or the ability to look at everyone's e-mails. Large parts of slashdot have been up in arms about companies like Yahoo or Google complying with FISA warrants, but the alternative is this.
Except that it was never actually designed that way. It was designed to protect you from self incrimination, but that's not precisely what this is, nor is it looking like an issue of letting 1000 criminals go free rather than imprison one wrongly.
The issue we're facing at the moment is one where if we follow this to it's conclusion we are saying it's better to let every criminal go free than let one man's privacy be invaded because a legally enforceable warrant found nothing. The investigation of Snowden's emails was entirely legitimate, leaving aside whether whistleblowing should have to be an affirmative defense, he's been in contact with foreign governments on numerous occasions, determining what precisely he told them is something that is a legitimate course of enquiry. A legal warrant was issued for a legitimate purpose to a third party storing data for someone, that data isn't protected by the fifth amendment, only by the fourth which is covered by the warrant. On top of that it wasn't Snowden who actually encrypted the content it was a third party(lavabit).
TL;DR this is a fuck load more complex than "but the 5th amendment", not least because the 5th in no way applies.
Reason One is that most technical folks already knew that this was possible, we've been discussing it for years and just laughing it off with "but there's too much data", which is still nominally true.
The second reason is that we're still waiting on the smoking gun. We've got some stuff that needs some real conversation, but mostly we've got potential for malfeasance with not a lot of evidence and a drip feed from the Guardian. Supposedly soon we're going to get some big shocking reveal, but whether it'll actually amount to anything who knows. We know they can spy on us, we know that they do spy on us with FISA warrants and we know they're probably not as careful as you might like about who they sweep up when they're tracking foreign entities. We don't have any evidence of widespread or systematic abuse, we don't even have any evidence of any specific instances of abuse. We don't even really know how much they're actually capable of getting and whether they can get it retrospectively. All this is worth having a conversation about, but it's not a smoking gun.
Mostly though, Greenwald and the Guardian has just been milking this damned thing for so long without anything really concrete that everyone's just sick to death of it. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure whether Snowden ever even had any access to anything interesting at all and the fact that his political views are significantly right of centre isn't really helping his case any.
They can always ask, Lavabit refused, so they came back with a warrant.
The problem in reality is that society has an interest in ensuring that criminals are caught and prosecuted. It also has an interest in ensuring that impacts to privacy are minimized. It's a fairly difficult balance to strike at the best of times, but encryption, as it stands anyway, is kind of an all or nothing deal.
It's patently absurd to give the federal government the keys to the kingdom, but it's also patently absurd to say that criminals should get away with it because they used encryption. I don't have an answer, but "nuh uh I used encryption" sure as hell ain't it.
This is true, but the argument for Linux over Windows for gaming if you don't care about either free as in speech or free as in beer is pretty much the cost of a Windows license and since Windows 8 the retail license even here in Australia is only about $150 for professional. Sure the new UI stuff sucks, but if you learn some keyboard shortcuts you can pretty much ignore all the new stuff. Given that there's going to be some serious early adopter pain for this I just don't see the point.
How long? Forever at this point. They'll stick the app store on everything because the whole idea of it was for apps that can be run on all devices, but they can be run on all devices because the WinRT framework is a limited subset of over all windows functionality. There's little to nothing in it that's not tablet focused and even that's not a significant success.
Would Microsoft love 30% of every piece of software sold on Windows, sure they would, but locking down the desktop would kill Windows dead at this point and along with it the entire ecosystem of enterprise products that actually pay the bills at Microsoft.
Until and unless the vast majority of software moves into the Windows app store of its own accord, forcing things into the Windows app store simply won't happen, even Apple hasn't gone down that road and they could afford to have OSX disappear.
On Surface RT, that's true. On Surface Pro and Windows 8, it's not. It's not even entirely true on RT, though given that there's bugger all supported ARM software for Windows and RT doesn't have the non RT libraries on it, you'll have a hell of a time finding anything else to install on it.
Microsoft has an app store, and they've moved it onto their desktop OS. No one uses it and Microsoft don't seem to care, they have an app store because they have a phone and a tablet. Nothing of any significance is distributed through it and outside of the RT which given that there's no real market for ARM based windows software doesn't even really matter, nothing at all stops you from installing software from wherever the hell you want whenever you want.
Valve also doesn't give a crap about whether an OS is going to become controlled, they care whether they're going to be the ones who control it. Right now there's pretty much only one way to get the vast majority of games on Windows, and that's through Steam, even if you buy a physical copy you get activation through Steam.
Valve doesn't give a flying fuck about Linux, or freedom, or open source they care about their own profit margins. They seem SteamOS as a cheap way to build a console and get a piece of that market which is right now the majority of the gaming market. They are willing to open source it all because what they're exactly like Google. They want as many people consuming their services as they can.
This won't magically make Linux gaming, it'll still be virtually impossible to get games up and running on any given Linux distribution and publishers will still want DRM. What you'll get at the end of this is the ability to buy some games from Steam, on supported versions of Linux(essentially SteamOS only in all likelihood), with hardware that Steam supports. It might let you get rid of you Windows partition, but it won't make you free either as in beer or as in speech.
The main reason for all those technical faults is George Lucas, presuming that part of the 5 billion dollar deal was that he won't get within a hundred miles of filming then they probably can't possibly do any worse.
Well actually the penalty for a casino cheating is to have their gaming license revoked, at least in civilised countries where they don't just kill you for cheating the casino. Having your gaming license revoked shuts down your casino, potentially for ever. Even a new owner may not be able to get a license so even the property itself isn't necessarily worth anything to you.
Given how much revenue a casino generates, that's one hell of a fine.
Slashdot Mirror
The wording is a bit bad, but presumably it's a means of combating sex tourism. In terms of illicit, I would suggest that you're odds of getting a jury to convict on any offence sexual or otherwise that isn't actually illegal in the US is somewhere between slim and none, so whether that's what they intended or not that's the likely de facto definition of illicit.
Or they read content produced by others, but don't tweet. It's what I do, I doubt I've even hit 10 tweets, but I'm on twitter at least two or three times a week.
I think the issue at hand is actually the fact that while twitter can easily measure the number of users it has, Si Dawson can't.
For the purposes of the companies valuation, the number of "active users" is not the number of users who actually post, it's the number of users who will see revenue generating ads. If someone logs onto twitter every day for an hour but has never posted anything, they're still seeing ads and still generating revenue.
As far as I'm aware there's no possible way for any party external to twitter to determine whether a given user logs in to read content or doesn't, only whether they've posted anything which, while important in that content drives views is not the relevant revenue metric.
It doesn't surprise me at all that about half of twitter users might read content far more often than they post it. I check twitter quite often, but I've only posted about a half a dozen times.
Actually the fact that you can pay tax with US dollars, or for that matter any dollars in the appropriate country is actually a very key part of their value. Every company that is subject to US taxes needs US dollars(and only US dollars) to pay those taxes, as do any individuals subject to the same. This means that the more economic activity that these companies or individuals generate, the higher their demand for US dollars and therefore the higher the value of said US dollars assuming constant supply. BitCoin doesn't have this built in demand, no one on earth "needs" BitCoins for anything. Everything you can possibly buy with BitCoins you can buy with another non deflationary currency and there are obviously things you can't ever buy or pay for with BitCoins.
In terms of gas I meant petrol, but it doesn't really matter which because despite your assertion that utilities are different, they're really not. They accept the currencies that make sense for them. Since they both need to pay taxes in US dollars that means US dollars. In a lot of ways a utility is actually much more likely to accept BitCoins than a petrol station as the utility needs to accept internet payments and already has significant infrastructure in place that could support BitCoin transactions. Your average petrol station would have to set up 5-10 grand worth of infrastructure just to be able to process BitCoins in a meaningful way, that's not even counting the fact that for a face to face transaction the fact that you'll know for sure you have the money in 2 hours is largely meaningless as the guy who didn't pay you is long gone by then. It's possible that this could happen, but it's kind of a chicken and an egg situation, the utility of BitCoins drives adoption and adoption drives utility, but there's no core driver for either.
What he means is actually rather simple, though he didn't phrase it very well.
When you have a traditional currency like US Dollars, you have a built in demand for said currency. You must pay US taxes in US dollars and so every entity subject to US taxes requires at least some US dollars. In the case of something like BitCoin there's no built in demand for it. Even places like SilkRoad still eventually have to turn BitCoin back into currency they can actually buy something with, and at the moment the only real reason that anyone can do that is because there's a lot of idiots thinking BitCoin will make them rich. When the supply of BitCoins reaches a level where there aren't enough around anymore folks will stop buying them speculatively and the future of the currency will depend on whether you can pay for gas or your electric bill with them. Since these companies don't need BitCoins, they're unlikely to accept them.
Well it is and it isn't.
If you work on the premise that BitCoin is a viable currency then yes you're right, the level of deflation is insignificant. If you instead look at the future when the level of deflation will not be insignificant and then decide BitCoin is not a viable currency it matters very much.
He had a million different opportunities to do the right thing, starting with not changing all the passwords so that no one had access in the first place. He had a god complex and cost the taxpayers significant amount of money because he thought his entire level of management were too incompetent to be trusted with his baby. Fortunately he'll never work again, we don't need more idiots like this.
No, he decided that his direct supervisor couldn't be trusted with passwords and he'd only give them to the mayor because he was convinced that he was the only competent person in the entire city. There were no bad choices here there was do what you're required to or act like a self entitled dickhead.
The basic problem is that unless you're in the school of education no university professor is ever required to receive any training in or show any aptitude for actually teaching. In some cases the professors enthusiasm and expertise can overcome this, but it's not an ideal situation, really educators should be required to actually know how to educate, but that's not how the incentives for universities are set up and since the classes where this stuff does the most damage are generally the introductory classes where a lot of students aren't majoring in the subject and issues can be blamed on the transition from high school to university it doesn't get addressed. I can't imagine how many people are sidetracked from their goals or potential because of some poorly taught introductory course. I realise part of the point is to cull people before they can apply to the major, but wouldn't it be nice to actually cull people who can't do the work as opposed to just culling people who can't teach themselves in a place where students are paying thousands of dollars to be taught by others?
The other issue you have in Gen Chem and a lot of other first tier classes is that the professor they have teaching it is usually actually a high level specialist in some esoteric aspect of the discipline. In higher level courses, the fact that most university professors couldn't teach themselves out of a wet paper bag is at least somewhat mitigated by their passion and knowledge of the subject. In entry level courses a tonne of professors seem to view even having to teach the course as an inconvenience and barely know more about the parts of the field which aren't their specialty than the students.
I took a Calc II course where on one of the exams you passed with a 16% and the highest score was barely above 60, at least some of the blame for that should fall on the professor not just on "Ooh, there's no one watching me I can ditch class and not do my homework". My personal score was attributable mostly to the latter, but the classes I did have some profs who would skip half the steps and one who would do a full board's worth of work and then say "Oh I've messed up, I'll leave it to you to work out where" in the example teaching us how to do it in the first place.
I had a GTX-260 which had two power draws and weighed about a tonne, my new card is a 660, and uses only one additional cable and probably weighs less than half what the old one did. Obviously if you buy the overclocked top of the line ones power draw isn't reducing all that much, but the upper mid range cards are now much more efficient than their equivalents from a few years back.
Glen Greenwald has continually made what are essentially libellous accusations and caused a great deal of difficulty in terms of international relations both within the West and between Western and non Western nations. Now if he actually had and was releasing evidence to back up his claims that would be all fine and dandy, but he doesn't. He makes all these grandiose claims and then releases nothing of any substance to back them up, and he's had all the evidence he's ever going to get since the very beginning so there's no need for him to do this.
Whatever you might think of Edward Snowden, Greenwald is a self serving narcissist who is far more concerned with milking this story for his own personal aggrandizement than he is in actually contributing to the discussion about the proper use of surveillance. He should release what he actually has immediately and stop editorializing.
US internet is expensive because regular users have to subsidize heavy users. It's also why you get particularly slow internet service.
People keep saying this, but they really don't understand the scope of what healthcare.gov actually is.
This system integrates every health insurance company, in every state. Each health care company will be using a different, internally developed proprietary system, potentially more than one, each state will have different laws which affect the manner in which healthcare can be offered. It then attempts to present all that data to the consumer in a meaningful and comparable way. The fact that it works at all is a miracle.
Or maybe cyclists need to realise that they're much more vulnerable and stop doing bullshit like "salmoning", running stop signs and red lights, randomly deciding their a pedestrian now and riding over the cross walk and then a vehicle a minute later. I've seen so many cyclists on the road who seem to have a death wish. If you drove that way in a car you'd have your license taken away, but cyclists just keep on going.
That's was my entire point though, how do you handle the fact that encryption, at last of the format lavabit used, is all or nothing. The government has a good reason to look at Snowden's e-mails but cannot look at Snowden's e-mails without either cooperation from lavabit or the ability to look at everyone's e-mails. Large parts of slashdot have been up in arms about companies like Yahoo or Google complying with FISA warrants, but the alternative is this.
Except that it was never actually designed that way. It was designed to protect you from self incrimination, but that's not precisely what this is, nor is it looking like an issue of letting 1000 criminals go free rather than imprison one wrongly.
The issue we're facing at the moment is one where if we follow this to it's conclusion we are saying it's better to let every criminal go free than let one man's privacy be invaded because a legally enforceable warrant found nothing. The investigation of Snowden's emails was entirely legitimate, leaving aside whether whistleblowing should have to be an affirmative defense, he's been in contact with foreign governments on numerous occasions, determining what precisely he told them is something that is a legitimate course of enquiry. A legal warrant was issued for a legitimate purpose to a third party storing data for someone, that data isn't protected by the fifth amendment, only by the fourth which is covered by the warrant. On top of that it wasn't Snowden who actually encrypted the content it was a third party(lavabit).
TL;DR this is a fuck load more complex than "but the 5th amendment", not least because the 5th in no way applies.
Reason One is that most technical folks already knew that this was possible, we've been discussing it for years and just laughing it off with "but there's too much data", which is still nominally true.
The second reason is that we're still waiting on the smoking gun. We've got some stuff that needs some real conversation, but mostly we've got potential for malfeasance with not a lot of evidence and a drip feed from the Guardian. Supposedly soon we're going to get some big shocking reveal, but whether it'll actually amount to anything who knows. We know they can spy on us, we know that they do spy on us with FISA warrants and we know they're probably not as careful as you might like about who they sweep up when they're tracking foreign entities. We don't have any evidence of widespread or systematic abuse, we don't even have any evidence of any specific instances of abuse. We don't even really know how much they're actually capable of getting and whether they can get it retrospectively. All this is worth having a conversation about, but it's not a smoking gun.
Mostly though, Greenwald and the Guardian has just been milking this damned thing for so long without anything really concrete that everyone's just sick to death of it. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure whether Snowden ever even had any access to anything interesting at all and the fact that his political views are significantly right of centre isn't really helping his case any.
They can always ask, Lavabit refused, so they came back with a warrant.
The problem in reality is that society has an interest in ensuring that criminals are caught and prosecuted. It also has an interest in ensuring that impacts to privacy are minimized. It's a fairly difficult balance to strike at the best of times, but encryption, as it stands anyway, is kind of an all or nothing deal.
It's patently absurd to give the federal government the keys to the kingdom, but it's also patently absurd to say that criminals should get away with it because they used encryption. I don't have an answer, but "nuh uh I used encryption" sure as hell ain't it.
This is true, but the argument for Linux over Windows for gaming if you don't care about either free as in speech or free as in beer is pretty much the cost of a Windows license and since Windows 8 the retail license even here in Australia is only about $150 for professional. Sure the new UI stuff sucks, but if you learn some keyboard shortcuts you can pretty much ignore all the new stuff. Given that there's going to be some serious early adopter pain for this I just don't see the point.
How long? Forever at this point. They'll stick the app store on everything because the whole idea of it was for apps that can be run on all devices, but they can be run on all devices because the WinRT framework is a limited subset of over all windows functionality. There's little to nothing in it that's not tablet focused and even that's not a significant success.
Would Microsoft love 30% of every piece of software sold on Windows, sure they would, but locking down the desktop would kill Windows dead at this point and along with it the entire ecosystem of enterprise products that actually pay the bills at Microsoft.
Until and unless the vast majority of software moves into the Windows app store of its own accord, forcing things into the Windows app store simply won't happen, even Apple hasn't gone down that road and they could afford to have OSX disappear.
On Surface RT, that's true. On Surface Pro and Windows 8, it's not. It's not even entirely true on RT, though given that there's bugger all supported ARM software for Windows and RT doesn't have the non RT libraries on it, you'll have a hell of a time finding anything else to install on it.
Microsoft has an app store, and they've moved it onto their desktop OS. No one uses it and Microsoft don't seem to care, they have an app store because they have a phone and a tablet. Nothing of any significance is distributed through it and outside of the RT which given that there's no real market for ARM based windows software doesn't even really matter, nothing at all stops you from installing software from wherever the hell you want whenever you want.
Valve also doesn't give a crap about whether an OS is going to become controlled, they care whether they're going to be the ones who control it. Right now there's pretty much only one way to get the vast majority of games on Windows, and that's through Steam, even if you buy a physical copy you get activation through Steam.
Valve doesn't give a flying fuck about Linux, or freedom, or open source they care about their own profit margins. They seem SteamOS as a cheap way to build a console and get a piece of that market which is right now the majority of the gaming market. They are willing to open source it all because what they're exactly like Google. They want as many people consuming their services as they can.
This won't magically make Linux gaming, it'll still be virtually impossible to get games up and running on any given Linux distribution and publishers will still want DRM. What you'll get at the end of this is the ability to buy some games from Steam, on supported versions of Linux(essentially SteamOS only in all likelihood), with hardware that Steam supports. It might let you get rid of you Windows partition, but it won't make you free either as in beer or as in speech.
The main reason for all those technical faults is George Lucas, presuming that part of the 5 billion dollar deal was that he won't get within a hundred miles of filming then they probably can't possibly do any worse.
Well actually the penalty for a casino cheating is to have their gaming license revoked, at least in civilised countries where they don't just kill you for cheating the casino. Having your gaming license revoked shuts down your casino, potentially for ever. Even a new owner may not be able to get a license so even the property itself isn't necessarily worth anything to you.
Given how much revenue a casino generates, that's one hell of a fine.