“The state of Florida, already the butt of many jokes because of its penchant for news-making citizens, reviled governor and incompetent state government has taken another one on the chin with the news that a poorly-worded law intended to ban Internet cafes and slot machines has overreached and declares any electronic device capable of playing a ‘game of chance’ on the Internet to be illegal,” Electronista reports. “The law is being challenged in court by an Internet cafe owner who was forced to shut down her business following a scandal involving the lieutenant governor.”
“Over 1,000 Internet cafes in Florida were closed after passage of the bill,” Electronista reports. “The original purpose was to expand the traditional meaning of ‘slot machine’ (normally associated with a physical device usually found in casinos) to include computers connected to the Internet in such cafes, as they could be used as digital equivalents and used to play bingo and other slots-type games that are mostly illegal in Florida.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: You know those “unintended consequences” that we sometimes discuss when warning of new legislation? Thanks, Florida, for the excellent example.
C’mon, it’s Florida. What’d ya expect?
C’mon, it’s part of the U.S. What’d ya expect?
See: Obamacare fiasco.
See: Neo-Con-Job, aka Bush League administration fiascos to the nth degree. (A plague on BOTH your parties).
Flor-A-Duh, as I learned to call it while I lived there, has it’s problems. But then I can point to Texas, California, my own state of New York, Ohio, Mississippi, blahblahblah…
In this particular case I am inspired to chalk it up to the continued, profound technology ignorance of the masses. Then get politicians involved and lord help us all. 😯
Now [for ever] development countries start looking good.
Well, do your homework first. Example: There is much to admire about India. But there is a lot to loathe about India as well. Know what you’re getting into before you go trekking.
Please do not lump California in with florida.
I lumped MY state in with Florida. The point is that every state in the USA has some sort of incoherent lunacy going on right now. IOW: Hello! The USA is in total under the thrall of various forms of lunacy.
Here is a single word to trigger off the California issue rants: WATER.
You may be a self-proclaimed “Superior Being,” but you generally post inferior comments. Why must you tie everything to Obama, no matter how tenuous or ridiculous or fictitious the connection?
We understand your position regarding Obama. You have made it abundantly and nauseatingly clear for years. Enough.
Damn Yankees!!!
Rick Scott and the GOP are a bunch of crooks and idiots
Barack Obama and the Democrats are a bunch of crooks and idiots.
Republicans and Democrats and most politicians are a bunch of crooks and idiots.
My point, exactly.
Oh good. Around here it can get a bit rabid in one particular direction. IMHO forget about sanity from either end of the simple-minded 1 dimensional political spectrum. I prefer thinking in 3D.
If you want to see a bunch of politicians who are crooks and thieves and completely morally bankrupt, the state government in the Australian state of Queensland granted themselves a $57,000 (40%) pay increase whilst at the same time going to court to deny public servants a 2.3% increase. By the way, this is a conservative state government. The progressive opposition party (Labor) and all independent and cross bench parties have slammed this grab for cash and vowed to oppose the increase. But since the government party has such a thumping majority in the parliament and therefore any attempt to overturn the increase will be defeated, the ‘Plan B’ of the opposition parties will be to spend the pay increase on their electorates.
Remember the last time a democratically controlled state legislature tried to limit a woman’s health choices or deny her equal pay? Or hold a special session to do both? … Me neither. Remember this when someone tells you voting doesn’t matter and the two parties are the same…
Don’t you dare call abortion “woman’s health choices.” An unborn baby is being killed in the womb. If you think this is just fine at least have the honesty to admit what you are saying is okay.
In the future I expect historians to look back at the abortion apocalypse far less favorably than human slavery.
Not this sh*t again. Let’s review: MacDailyNews is about Macs, not abortion, not Obama, not freekazoid Floridians. If you want to go screaming at each other, I suggest Huffpo or Freeper.
“Don’t you dare call abortion ‘woman’s health choices.’ ”
Abortion IS a woman’s health choice.
DONE.
If men could get pregnant there would be abortion clinics in every 7-Eleven next to the Slurpie machine
:Abortion IS a woman’s health choice.”
Yes, a WRONG choice to end a HUMAN LIFE.
Simplistic and narrow-minded.
Dear twilightmoon. The next time you have a cold and treat it, you will have killed BILLIONS of living things.
All those bug smears on your windshield are more deaths on your hand.
Shame on you… just shame. If you just walk instead of drive and just stay sick, BILLIONS more living beings will remain living.
/s
PS, if aborting a fetus is murder, is a miscarriage then manslauter as well as use of a contraceptive (since it prevents a fertilized egg from implanting).??????
And if I get an unwed mother pregnant, should not I receive praise for bring a new life into the world???
Just some thoughts…. and /s to all. lol
Going OT…
twilightmoon: A fairly old George Carlin routine is making the rounds again and again that points out the hypocrisy of your apparent POV:
“Boy these conservatives are really something, aren’t they? They’re all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you’re born, you’re on your own! ….If you’re pre-born you’re fine. If you’re pre-school, you’re f*cked….”
I’m not going to link it here as it is veering WAY OT and it has plenty of profanity.
But OMG is it sick and twisted that we humans can’t support ALL of us from birth to death AS the social creatures we are.
FORCING birth on an unwanted child then ignoring, or even worse parasitizing that human throughout life is DEEPLY DEMENTED. That’s a sickness. NOT all ‘conservatives’ believe this horror of a philosophy. But the Neo-Cons damned well do! I’d rather quite a few of these outright evil people had themselves never been born..
Being human = being humane.
Why is that such a difficult concept? It’s obvious to me!
BOTH our stupid US political parties get my boot for FAILing to be humane or sane.
Did you REALLY, I mean REALLY, just say that abortion is worse than SLAVERY????
WTF?
MDN you have social obligation to forever ban this person from your site
If anyone thinks there aren’t necessary medical and health reasons for an abortion to ever take place, or you think a Government should be able to force someone to have a baby NO MATTER WHAT, but at the same time not be able to publicly fund contraception, then I wish and pray you all get on the same plane one day and it crashes.
Remember when ‘Lady Parts’ remained intact, but ‘Baby Parts’ do not?!
Those who dismiss Jim must not live in FL, I do. He is so full of crap his party is leaving him. He made a big deal about well-fair recipients having drug test. There is a logic to it, however he failed to say that he would benefit from it. His wife owns a lot of the drug test labs. He made local non-profit hospitals spend hundreds of thousands of dolors to prove they should not be privatized. He was CEO of the largest for-profit hospital groups. To be fair his Lt. Gov. had to resign over Internet cafes. One of the loopholes was charities could offer more cash, this was for church bingo etc. A few large cafes took advantage, had BS charities. A lot of her funding came from one of this BS cafes. I believe she took the fall for him.
Scott has had to reverse a lot of his early “victories” to be reelected. This has pissed off his out of state Tea Party backers. He has the lowest ratings for a FL gov. ever. He is now fighting his own party.
The idiots are the voters that elected the republicans into the governorship and the FL legislature especially considering the criminal past of Mr. Scott.
Which just goes to show you that even if you’re a thief , it doesn’t matter to the moral majority Christians as long as you are a republican, white and Christian you will always trump a democrat.
I don’t think the Fl voters will repeat their mistake in 2014 especially that those some of which were republicans were still waiting in line in 2012 to vote when it was announced Obama won re-election.
Did the idiot Democratic party big wigs again use the ‘Butterfly Ballot’ that the idiot Democratic Low Information populace couldn’t understand thus putting in a Republican governor???
I see you have fallen for mush gumball’s latest schtick.
So you think the FL voters will repeat the mistake of electing Charlie Crist? Only this time he’ll have a D next to his name.
This article is so biased and inaccurate it surprises me it came from Electonista (actually it appears to be inspired by a Huffington Post hit piece). The new law stems from criminal charges against 57 associated with the alleged charity Allied Veterans. No one really gave a crap that the old, poor and uneducated spent their days in these “cafes” (that look more like depressing dungeons) and lost money in “sweepstakes.” The criminal charges came from the fact that this “charity” was only giving up 2% of its $300 million in profits.
Criminal charges came down on many prominent people, including a former president of the local bar association and the local police union leader. Lt. Governor Jennifer Carroll’s involvement was tangential at best – she co-owned a public relations firm that had previously done work for Allied Veterans, and in 2011 she had agreed to appear in an ad for the “charity.” (Carroll is a Navy veteran) Carroll resigned because she knew damn well the liberal media and the Democrat party (same thing) would have a blast showing that ad. Instead of dragging down the governor and her party, she removed herself from the equation.
As far as the “reviled” governor, he currently has a 43% job approval rating which is not far off the approval numbers of the president. Yet strangely the media never refer to him as our “reviled president.”
I don’t think Florida’s state government is any more or less incompetent than the other 49 states. Florida has no state income tax, an economy improving faster than the rest of the country and a standard of living that rust belt hellholes and California can only envy.
The “internet cafes” were nothing more than thinly disguised gambling fronts and deserved to be shut down.
The allegation that the law bans all computers comes from a lawsuit from the internet café vultures who preyed on migrant workers in south Florida. The legal team who brought the suit won’t say who’s paying their fees (organized crime?). Consider the source.
The misunderstanding here comes from the idea that the law is being challenged by the owner of an Internet cafe as we know them — a cafe that makes Internet or computer access available to travelers or tourists, or other folks who need to get online.
The law is actually being challenged by the owner of an Internet *sweepstakes* cafe — essentially an unregulated casino where gamblers go in and sit at computers to try to win money playing games indistinguishable from slot machines or other electronic games you’d find in Vegas or Atlantic City. Not the same thing at all — and what’s more, this challenge isn’t likely to go anywhere.
As a Florida transplant, I enjoy a good Flori-duh joke as much as the next guy or gal. But Electronista — and, by extension, your post — grossly exaggerates what’s going on in this particular case. And there’s more than enough opportunity to make fun of Florida without stretching the facts: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/florida.html
It’s turning into a habit.
Last year, Florida banned out-of-state driver licences.