Welcome to Smuggle Me

Placing bets over the Internet was effectively criminalized by the federal government yesterday, as lawmakers work to eliminate an activity enjoyed by as many as 23 million Americans who wagered an estimated $6 billion last year.

Today, Bush signed into law a bill that lays a major blow to online gambling as we know it. Here’s more details on the new bill.

Attached to a port-security bill signed by President Bush yesterday was the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which prohibits online gamblers from using credit cards, checks and electronic fund transfers to place and settle bets. The law puts enforcement on the shoulders of banks and other U.S. financial institutions, some of which fought the legislation.

I’m so grateful that Bush and our government put this into effect. There are way too many children that are becoming addicted to online gambling. It’s a sad epidemic that is still going to continue in some other way, but at least this new bill will hopefully prevent many people from wasting their money gambling.

Don’t get me wrong. I love to play poker with friends. I know all the poker rules out there. My wife and I love to play against each other (she always beats me). However, anyone that wastes there money gambling is walking a fine line of addiction. I live in Las Vegas so I know all about it. Yes, I know that many people can control themselves and only spend a few dollars. However, for every story of people controlling themselves there are stories of broken families, lost savings, and addiction that tears people apart.

I think this bill is a great step in the right direction to preventing children from participating in gambling online.

UPDATE: This is the list for 2006 Rare McDonald’s Monopoly pieces. Here’s a link to the 2007 Rare McDonald’s Monopoly pieces.

UPDATE 2: Here’s a link to the 2008 Rare McDonald’s Monopoly Pieces

While in Dallas at the Educause Conference, I decided to run down to McDonald’s to get a little something to eat. I upgraded my 10 piece chicken nugget combo meal to a chocolate shake. Well, that means I got the medium chocolate shake and much to my surprise I had the McDonald’s Monopoly pieces on it. I guess that shows how much I go to McDonald’s that I didn’t even know that their Monopoly promotion is going on.

Well, a while ago my friend ruined the Monopoly game for me because he informed me that really you just need to find the rare piece for each color and then you can find the rest of the pieces. For example, Boardwalk is the rare piece you need to win the big bucks from McDonalds. So, if you find Boardwalk you’ve as good as won. Finding a Park Place will be simple since there are thousands and thousands of them out there. However, there is only one boardwalk in all the world (or is McDonald’s Monopoly only played in the US?)

Well, I decided that someone has probably figured out which of the Monopoly pieces were the rare ones that would let you win. Indeed there is a site that has all the info on McDonald’s Monopoly pieces. I’ve copied them below for your convenience (rare in bold):
#3601 - Mediterranean Avenue
#3602 - Baltic Avenue Rare
Common Purple $50 5,000
#3603 - Oriental Avenue
#3604 - Vermont Avenue
#3605 - Connecticut Avenue Common
Rare
Common Blue Gray $500 500
#3606 - St Charles Place
#3607 - States Avenue
#3608 - Virginia Avenue Common
Common
Rare Maroon $1,000 250
#3609 - St James Place
#3610 - Tennessee Avenue
#3611 - New York Avenue Common
Rare
Common Orange $1,500 100
#3612 - Kentucky Avenue
#3613 - Indiana Avenue
#3614 - Illinois Avenue Rare
Common
Common Red $5,000 50
#3615 - Atlantic Avenue
#3616 - Ventnor Avenue
#3617 - Marvin Gardens Common
Rare
Common Yellow $10,000 10
#3618 - Pacific Avenue
#3619 - North Carolina Avenue
#3620 - Pennsylvania Avenue Common
Common
Rare Green $50,000 2
#3621 - Park Place
#3622 - Boardwalk Common
Rare Blue $1,000,000
($50,000 per year for 20 years) 1
#3623 - Reading Railroad
#3624 - Pennsylvania Railroad
#3625 - B&O Railroad
#3626 - Short Line Common
Common
Common
Rare White $5,000,000
($250,000 per year for 20 years) 1

Payperpost is starting another puzzle piece game. I missed the last one, but hopefully I won’t miss this one. I think it will be fun to search all the PPP blogs to see who has what puzzle piece. Fun stuff!!

Here’s the piece I have for everyone to enjoy.

This puzzle contains a sneak peak at a super secret PayPerPost program code named Blue Monster. I like to call it payperpostbluemonster.

I’d love to hear from those that found this piece in my comments.

This past week I’ve been attending a conference called Educause 2006 in Dallas. The first general session speaker was Vinton G. Cerf the Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. I must admit that when I saw that someone from Google was planning on speaking at the conference I was quite excited.

Well, I must admit that overall I was quite disappointed by the experience. I would have expected more. Yes, I do have a high standard.

Despite my personal distaste for his speech, he did say one thing that I found very interesting and enlightening.

He talked about how it is necessary for us to think about not only the data that we are storing, but also how we are going to be able to view that data as technology evolves. Sure, that’s nothing new. He gave a nice example of how we would be able to read a Powerpoint 2003 file with Powerpoint 3003 software. I don’t think backwards compatibility is going to last that far out.

His solution was something I hadn’t realized. He suggested that web applications need to be created to read this old file types. How simple is that? No wonder Google has such a thrust in making web applications. Google will be a very serious player if down the road, they are the ones that own the web applications that are able to read these archived files. Pretty neat.

The sad part is that Microsot amongst others are probably not as interested in making their applications easily readable in some web format. Why would they be interested? That cuts into their bottom line. It should be really interesting to see how this evolves over time.