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This casino http://3151766.thegoldcasino.com/ welcomes bots - several of their contests have had obvious bot competitors, but seemingly none have won contests. Many of the bots seem to be simple-minded slot machine yankers so far.

e-gold allows gambling too - the best (by far) casino (online) that takes e-gold is "The Gold Casino". They also accept other non-repudiable payments. Link which I get credit for if you sign up via.

Heh. Funny, and I like your sigfile, too! :)

Anyway, one way of avoiding problems with stock markets is to just roll your own market, like the gold casino did (with very-good results) a bit over a year ago.

Interestingly, their share prices have remained stable at around 100 grams, which was the original IPO price. TGC is said to regularly pay dividends, which have regularly risen as more players find the casino, but it's hard to know much about TGC.
JMR

here. The interesting thing about these guys is they allow you to "cash out" at any time - instantly. They have both multiplayer and "solitaire versions of poker.
You can play for fun or for real money.

Note: online casino play may be illegal in your jurisdiction.

The GoldCasino has been there for a long time. They used to have comm link problems from time to time, but over about the last 6 months or so seem to be pretty reliable - so maybe the current execs are right and Lackey is not?
MultiPlayer Poker at TGC is a great time consumer!

by systems like e-gold.com, e-bullion.com, pecunix.com etc.

These payment systems are worldwide, do not suffer the chargeback problem, and seem to be fine with gambling and adult sites. They are also not linked to any particular national currency so should appeal to more libertarian among us.

Example: Wanna gamble now with them?

I've never heard anyone complain of these slots being rigged:
The Gold Casino

At one time they said something about using a "mersenne twister" to generate their pseudo-randomness for all the games. Hosted in Sealand so unlikely any "gaming board" covers thier behavior...

There are, however, irrevocable internet currencies out there (I sell one, actually) and casinos... tend to gravitate toward Better Money, even if the news media ignore us (we don't spend much anything on ads, preferring to hire smarter nerds instead). I have seen this casino in operation over a few years, and they DO pay (instantly!) IF you win. (But it's a casino, so on average, you're gonna lose unless you're the house).

If anyone here wishes to try e-gold I'm willing to click you a SMALL quantity. Who knows? I once turned a half gram into a quarter ounce at the casino above, and I like their attitude a lot. (I pay all required Sealand taxes when I play! I tend to lose most times, but it's still fun.).

In truth, as others have commented, this is all about taxes, and when politicians couch it in terms of morality instead of their own raw greed, it's annoying -- but that's US politicians for ya! They're certainly not worried too much about REAL crime (the kind that involves actual victims, instead of willing participants).
JMR

...the US Constitution should contain a guarantee of privacy....

(NOTE: Mine is a minority view of the constitution which is not generally accepted by legal professionals, even though I'm obviously right and nobody likes debating me much anyway, especially law professors.)

You're correct to say that the Constitution does not mention any right to privacy, but that doesn't mean the right to privacy isn't there. The framers of the constitution (and especially the bill of rights) were concerned with the protection of rights (such as self-defense and free speech) which pre-existed any concept of government, and did not wish to be put in a position of trying to list every such right they were trying to protect.

The Ninth Amendment says: "The enumeration in the constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." IOW, 'We've listed some individual rights here, but it's not an exhaustive list, and if we forgot about any particular right (think "privacy" here) that's no big deal because we meant to include it.' I propose that this nation do one of the following:

1. Repeal the Ninth Amendment (ain't gonna happen, repealing it would require at least briefly paying attention to it, and legal 'professionals' have avoided that for DECADES).

2. (This is the tough one...) Start paying attention to the Ninth Amendment, which Thomas Jefferson called a "magnificent generality." Despite the beauty of the wording of the Ninth (or perhaps because of it!) this is very unlikely. In fact, I've been trying for years to start a debate, but those who would support repeal of the Ninth find ignoring it much more convenient than debating me.

It is disappointing, but perhaps not surprising, that Supreme
Court justices and other constitutional interpreters have typically
fled from the hard moral judgments called for by the Ninth
Amendment." -- Steven Macedo, _The New Right v. The
Constitution_ p. 7.

Amen. (Professor Macedo is a rare law-professor exception, who shares my broader view of the Ninth and writes good books.) The judgments called for are hard moral judgments with grey areas and lines to draw. Can you have a tax-and-spend drug-war and have a Ninth Amendment? Can you outlaw abortions (early or late-term) and have a Ninth Amendment? Can you outlaw prostitution and have a Ninth Amendment? Can you outlaw gambling and have a Ninth Amendment? Why do most law professors say that the Ninth Amendment isn't important? Is it up to them to deem what is and isn't worth thinking about in the constitution? Don't they sow the seeds of (even more) ignorance in the judiciary by not being honest about the Ninth and why it's there in the first place? (Well, obviously I think they do.)

Now, I look at what I've said above and think, "Voila, slam dunk argument for a Constitutional Ninth Amendment right to privacy -- and I'm not even relying on ten-dollar words like 'penumbra,' I'm using plain, ordinary English!" (Maybe that's what law professors disliked about me...) Anyway, IANAL, and despite my argument above making sense it's not the law of the land in the USA, so use it at your own risk.
JMR
These are my own opinions and have nothing to do with any employer. I am Chairman and CEO of the Ninth Amendment Foundation, which I'll probably someday use to make political trouble...

...Lends more credibility to the disposable credit card concept.

That's not the only concept that should be considered (and neither is e-gold, I'd just like to see better/deeper thinking on payment options here).

Western Union has objected to e-gold-selling market makers in the past, ostensibly because some interesting sites use the currency for gram-based gambling. Of course, Western Union is owned by First Data, a giant credit-card payment processor, which I'm sure would NEVER process payments related to plastic-using-gambling on the internet, since I'm convinced that they're the very model of moral decorum compared to venal exchange-providers using the filthy yellow metal as a currency. (smirk!)

I want folks to play with our system, especially Slashdot readers, so my usual offer to click a bit to any /. readers who create an e-gold account and send me the number applies, as does my usual "I don't care if you moderate this comment down because you think it's 'spam' because I'm self-interest personified," and "my opinions are mine alone" attitude(s). Thanks.
JMR

for "The Plant" by Stephen King (I'm blessed with some smart customers.)

I won't bore everyone with my rants about trying to contact Courtney Love.
*sigh* -- Even email saying "go away, and leave me alone!" would be nice.

I can even click /. readers who email me with an account number enough for
Stephen's tip, as long as the ol' e-gold promotional account holds up! :^) The
hard thing is to think in grams instead of dollars (where the Casino helps).
JMR

I will be at IA2000 again this in September, in New Orleans, once-again telling Adult providers about a payment system that will allow them to get paid and STAY paid, with NO CHARGEBACKS (my mantra for Miami's IA2000 last year).

Still, this article brings up an important reason why I haven't been too successful with the adult industry so far, IMO (it's certainly not for lack of trying!!!). They want to automagically charge people who didn't even visit their (stale, in many cases) sites this month, and with e-gold they'd have to work harder, and not all of them want to work very hard, since they've been used to this mint (er...goldmine?) of automatic-charging. Using a medium where their customers see what they'll pay every month might cause those customers to want them to do something every month. IMO, this rant probably doesn't apply to all pron-sites, YMMV, etc.

As usual, any /. reader who sends me an account number will get a spot of e-gold to try, it's useful for more than just adult stuff or really-cool gambling sites, especially if you folks'd take advantage of it.
JMR

Because e-gold is a different currency (actually, four currencies) denominated in grams, the expensive part of the whole process (and the part that feeds me!) is the exchange transaction from other currencies (here's a calculator). e-gold is still cheaper than credit cards, especially for large companies with clue-resistant management.

e-gold Ltd. is a bailee, and not a bank (in fact, e-gold Ltd. has never even had a bank account). A bailee merely stores things on behalf of customers (imagine those mini-storage warehouses springing up all over in the USA for a similar legal relationship example) and cannot make loans, etc. e-gold Ltd. concentrates on storing allocated, good-delivery bars of bullion metal.

OmniPay, which currently shares the e-gold.com site with e-gold Ltd., has plenty of bank accounts all over the planet in a variety of currencies, and is the principal market maker in the e-metal family of currencies. It's important to keep in mind that e-gold & OmniPay are 2 separate companies (soon to have two separate websites). OmniPay can send wires on your behalf, or send checks to any snailmail address, in exchange for your e-metal grams.

Anyway, getting grams of e-gold is getting easier all the time, and you can definitely use a credit card either with Western Union or other options, so go ahead and buy some ounces from us or buy a few grams from an Australian or buy some e-gold from a US citizen and there are others springing up all the time.

I predict with the new system(s)* both you and I will be very happy, e-gold stats on the present system have been great ever since The Gold Casino arrived on the scene, and now the casino just put up a "bet on the closing price of gold today" pool with no house take.
JMR

* "Real soon now." -- and it will definitely be more Tom, Dick, & Harry friendly.

Because e-gold is a different currency (actually, four currencies) denominated in grams, the expensive part of the whole process (and the part that feeds me!) is the exchange transaction from other currencies (here's a calculator). e-gold is still cheaper than credit cards, especially for large companies with clue-resistant management.

e-gold Ltd. is a bailee, and not a bank (in fact, e-gold Ltd. has never even had a bank account). A bailee merely stores things on behalf of customers (imagine those mini-storage warehouses springing up all over in the USA for a similar legal relationship example) and cannot make loans, etc. e-gold Ltd. concentrates on storing allocated, good-delivery bars of bullion metal.

OmniPay, which currently shares the e-gold.com site with e-gold Ltd., has plenty of bank accounts all over the planet in a variety of currencies, and is the principal market maker in the e-metal family of currencies. It's important to keep in mind that e-gold & OmniPay are 2 separate companies (soon to have two separate websites). OmniPay can send wires on your behalf, or send checks to any snailmail address, in exchange for your e-metal grams.

Anyway, getting grams of e-gold is getting easier all the time, and you can definitely use a credit card either with Western Union or other options, so go ahead and buy some ounces from us or buy a few grams from an Australian or buy some e-gold from a US citizen and there are others springing up all the time.

I predict with the new system(s)* both you and I will be very happy, e-gold stats on the present system have been great ever since The Gold Casino arrived on the scene, and now the casino just put up a "bet on the closing price of gold today" pool with no house take.
JMR

* "Real soon now." -- and it will definitely be more Tom, Dick, & Harry friendly.

(This is going to be unpopular, but) I agree. The judge (from the looks of things, I couldn't hit the ruling) is probably right for the wrong reason(s). Spam is an insoluble jurisdictional issue because Spam is an ECONOMIC issue. Many (not all!) in the anti-spam community might be described as a bit economics-challenged. This is not to poke fun at them, but just to say that follow-the-money applies when it comes to a group of lawyer-politicians proposing a nice-sounding anti-spam law (effectiveness be damned! It employs more lawyers!!!) just as when it comes to a spammer sending nasty ol' spam (and I agree, just about all people dislike UCE, including me).

The question becomes, what can be done that's actually effective? Plenty of laws can be written to sound good and they obviously don't work! (Disclaimer: Warning, the following is going to sound crass and commercial -- spam, if you will -- even though I'm about to offer to GIVE AWAY MONEY!! and I'm not imposing on anyone's e-mail bandwidth, so moderate me down and see if I care.)

Well, after last year's FC99 in Anguilla, and a number of conversations, we came up with The Flying Rat Project (the name comes from an old joke about never seeing baby pigeons, combined with the idea of pigeons carrying messages in ancient times). Yes, right now it only uses e-gold (that will change, this is a kludgy proof-of-concept, not what we have eventually planned) and yes, I dream about eventually making some money on the damthing (horrors! I'm not a lawyer who wants more laws just to make money for the chattering-class, I'm an evil-greedy-capitalist-Firengi-pig who wants there to be a market in e-mail and thinks that economics might -- just might -- work better than yet-another law!). Anyway, it works, and has for a while without much notice.

For now, I'll give anyone in the /. community who asks for it a bit of gold to try the concept out. (I've made this offer on Slashdot in the past, with surprisingly few takers, but now there's a casino and a lottery) so I expect better results. Think about it, with a "stamp" that pays you, you might not mind spam so much. If you keep a Flying Rat e-mail address secret and "blocked" it will never get unpaid spam. The Flying Rat software will be open source, AFAIK.

Thanks for listening, you can create an account Here (please choose a good passphrase and remember it!) and then just e-mail me the account number and I'll click you a bit. For free (but try to play around with Flying Rat some, before you gamble it away). Thanks.
JMR