Las Vegas

11.22.09

Three Extreme High-Speed Rail Concepts for Las Vegas

Las Vegas developers hear proposals for new transportation methods to hook up visitors from LA

By Jeremy Hsu Posted 10.23.2009 at 11:15 am 8 Comments

Cars to Trains: Who needs roads? AVT

Slot machine junkies and poker sharks could soon ride one of three futuristic high speed trains from Los Angeles to casino mecca Las Vegas. But that's assuming developers get on board with a tubular rail, a maglev transporter for cars, or an air-cushioned train.

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READ MORE ABOUT > Las Vegas, maglev, rail, solatrek, Sunlight Bullet Expressway, trains, transportation, tubular rail

Theme Building: Leisure-Time Robots

Robots to shuffle your cards, play you in a game of billiards and sink puts from the green

By Andrew Rosenblum Posted 06.10.2009 at 6:52 pm 1 Comment

Vegas card dealers make it look easy, but sliding a uniform number of cards to a set number of players turns out to be a tough robotics challenge. As a robotics teacher in Australia, Damien Kee had seen a lot of automated card dealers that were too slow or were unable to reliably control whether cards landed face-up or -down. Using parts from LEGO programmable robotics kits, Kee wrote software that instructs connected components to deal two cards to four locations.

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READ MORE ABOUT > billiards, card games, how 2.0. theme building, july 2009, Las Vegas, pool, robots

Money Wired

What happens when a gambling town falls hard for the computer network? Hacker crooks. Megajackpot slots. Cutting-edge surveillance software. And that's just the start.

By Dan Koeppel Posted 10.29.2002 at 3:50 pm 0 Comments

Kathleen Budz had been at the slots in the New York-New York casino for only a couple of hours when the big money came along. The Chicago grandmother was seated at one of four chattering Wheel of Fortune games in the Big Apple-themed casino—a rococo affair with a mock Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, and Coney Island roller coaster.

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READ MORE ABOUT > computer network, gambling, Las Vegas, money wired, slot machines, software, surveillance