Surprise surprise!

Woke up this morning and, still half in my sleep induced fog, stumbled upon this :

Ottawa targets gaming

WTF?!?!?

Are you kidding me? I guess this had to be expected from the Harper administration. It's not, after all, the first thing that they try to copy from the "oh so purrty Land of the Free/home of the brave". I have to say that I'm quite pissed right now (isn't anger the second stage of grief? I guess my "denial" phase was pretty short uh?).

Ok first, if this comes to pass it will be ugly. I don't think it will prevent people from playing poker online, after all there's still lots of americans playing on pokerstars and FullTilt. It will just make it harder and complicated to deposit and withdraw money from these sites (I don't buy that the ISPs will block traffic to gambling sites). This in turns, will make the pond dryer.

The idea that they are doing this to "protect people from bad fraudulous offshore and indian companies" is ridiculous. Making online gambling illegal will not stop degenerates from throwing money around. Actually I would even argue that online gamgling sites and the micro-stakes they allow you to play are a good thing for degenerates! You can get your "fix" while risking quite less than in traditional Brick & Mortar establishments. Anyway I disgress.

I will definitly follow this quite closely and hope for the best. Right now, my main hope lies in the fact that a lot of the targeted sites are administered on Amerindians reserves. Since the Oka crisis (quite a while ago... I feel old suddendly), the Canadian govt has always been reluctant to mess with the natives. I hope this helps tips the scale in our favor....

See, I guess I'm already at stage 3 of grief : bargaining