I got tagged with a meme a few weeks ago and I refused to do it.

If you have no idea what Im talking about, you are lucky. Memes can be defined in a lot of different ways depending on the context of their usage. In this case, a meme is a set of questions that are passed from person to person. You fill out the questions. Post them on your blog. Then you tag another blogger who is supposed to do the same thing. Its supposed to be “viral fun” . Yes, bloggers are that hard up for fun.

It has the same intellectual resonance as doing The Wave at an event. You are embarrased if you do it sober, beligerant to non wavers if you do it drunk.

Memes come in all shapes in sizes. The 4 Things meme is what is getting waved around now.

If you are tagged, you are asked 4 Things

- 4 Jobs I have had,4 Movies I can watch over and over, 4 TV shows I watch, 4 places i have been on vacation

Can we all just disagree that this is pretty damn stupid ?

If you want to fillup a page on myspace or tagworld, meme away. But my goodness, real bloggers are answering memes.RSS feeds around the world are getting headlines with dumbass meme responses. Is this because of Bloggers Cramp ?

I dont know. The wave’s best days are behind it. We need to put questionmemeson the bench right next to it

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Ok, they didnt quite ask that question. Directly. But they sure raised the question indirectly. As have the CEOs of Overstock and Bioval

Both have sued a research company for writing reports that they say were not independent or objective. They were influenced, if not possibly written completely by hedge funds looking to profit from their short positions once the negative research reports were published

I dont know if the research company was influenced or not. I dont know if the law was broken or not. According to the 60 Minutes report, research reports are influenced all the time. Which is of course true. The key question is whether knowingly false information was supplied to influence the content of the report. Im sure the courts and authorities will determine what happened to the best of their abilities.

To me however, thats not the big issue.

Here we have the CEOs of two companies saying that one small research compay out of Arizona can have more influence on the actions of current and potential shareholders than not only every other research company combined, including those who have been following the company for an extended period of time, but also more influence than the CEOs themselves.Of course these CEOs must also believe that what is reported by this company is moreimportant than the results of operationsof the company.

Is a single research pen mightier than the P&L, Balance Sheet and Statement of Cash Flows ? that is the question you must ask yourself.

If you think the answer is yes, and you are an investor, you probably dont know enough about the companies you own stock in to stay in the market.

If you think the answer is yes, and you are a trader, hopefully you have gotten to the point of knowing you are just winging it anyway, and you win some and lose some.

If you are the CEO of a public company and you think the answer is yes. Please email me with the stock symbol of your company. I want to short it.

Any good CEO knows:

Sticks and Stones my hit my stock price, but a great operating company will make the shorts cover and push the stock price higher.

Any bad CEO knows:

If i can create a diversion, I know I can convince at least a few funds to hold on, and that gives me a chance to sell more stock.

If none of this makes sense, make sure none of your money is in the market

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I have to give Sam Smith credit. If he wants to be a nuisance, all he has to do is make up something in his column about me, and he knows I will get flooded with emails about it.

So he makes up a complete lie in one of his columns about me supporting Randy Wittman for the head coaching job at Indiana.

I like Randy. I think he has been a good coach in the NBA.

That said, I havent and wont put my support behind any given coaching candidate. Im not prepared to understand what makes a good recruiter or a good coach in the college ranks.

So i dont pretend to.

Im an IU fan. Whoever the school hires, that is my favorite Indiana coach, and thats who i will support until he or she isnt the Indiana coach.

its that simple

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Property owners have every right to do whatever they think is necessary to protect their property. Homeowners can build walls and add security. Content owners can add copy protection schemes to their digital content.

Unfortunately for content owners, digital rights/copy protection schemes have always proven crackable. No matter how smart the good guys think their programmers are, the bad guys have programmers that are just as smart. More importantly, the good guys have to build the perfect protection scheme, impenatrable by any of infinite number of possible attacks. The bad guys only have to find out where the good guys screwed up. Its a lot easier to be the bad guys and crack the copy protection. Which is exactly why every effort to fully protect digital content has failed.

Its an ever escalating war. Every time the bad guys crack the code, the good guys come up with a new way to try to protect their content.

Over time, the protect schemes evolve and mutate. Every few years, the good guys come up with a completely new approach. A different way of trying to solve the problem.

Call it Digital Rights Management Evolution

But this creates a problem.

As DRM evolves, the playback software and devices will change to enable encoding and playback of content using the latest and greatest versions of DRM.

So whats the problem ?

Many of us are not going to take the time to re encode the content we already own to make sure it continues to be compatible with the new playback devices we are buying. Most of us wont even know that we need to as we go through different media playback environments over the next years.

All we are going to know , is that we have files on our hard drives that we cant play back.

My advice ? Any and all digital content that you purchase and OWN, with any sort of copy protection, crack it, and make a backup copy for your own personal storage.

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Craig Moffet of Bernstein Research was asked to testify before the Senate Commerce Committee on the subject of Net Neutrality. His comments were of course right on the money. The interesting conclusions that can be drawn from his testimony are just as relevant to the discussion of the future of media on the net as they are to net neutrality.

Craigs sites facts and figures that should make anyone who believes that the net as alternative to TV is just around the corner, or will happen this decade for that matter, rethink their position.

‘Some of the nuggets from Craigs testimony

“despite a great deal of arm waving from “visionaries,” our telecommunications infrastructure is woefully unprepared for widespread delivery of advanced services, especially video, over the Internet. Downloading a single half hour TV show on the web consumes more bandwidth than does receiving 200 emails a day for a full year. Downloading a single high definition movie consumes more bandwidth than does the downloading of 35,000 web pages; it’s the equivalentof downloading 2,300 songs over Apple’s iTunes web site. Today’s networks simply aren’t scaled for that.

In a series of recent research reports that I entitled “The Dumb pipe Paradox” — which I believe provided the original impetus for the Committee’s invitation to testify today — I tried to address the expectation that the telcos are rapidly rushing in to meet this need and to provide competition for cable incumbents. In fact, by their own best estimates, they’ll be able to reach no more than 40% or so of American households with fiber over the next seven years.

And most of that will be in the form of hybrid fiber/legacy copper networks, such as that being constructed by AT&T under the banner of “Project Lightspeed.” These hybrid networks are expected to deliver 20Mbs average downstream bandwidth. After accounting for significant standard deviation around that average, that will mean many enabled subscribers will actually recieve far less. I and many others on Wall Street harbor real doubts as whether these hybrid networks will provide technologically sufficient to meet future demands

More importantly, in 60% of the country, there are simply no new networks on the horizon, and the existing infrastructure from the telcos — DSL running at speeds of just 1.5Mbs or so — simply won’t be adequate to be considered “broadband” in five years or so. That includes wireless networks, by the way. Current and planned wireless networks — including the over-hyped Wi-Max technology — offer the promise of satisfying today’s definition of broadband, but simply can’t feasibly support the kind of bandwidth required for the kind of dedicated point-to-point video connections that will be required to be considered broadband tomorrow.”

Craig is right. The last mile into our homes wont have enough bandwidth to support all that we will want to do via our internet connections at home. There is no moores law for bandwidth to the home. THere is a huge misconception that bandwidth will just continue toexperience unlimited expansionfor every broadband household. Its what we are used to with hard drives, processors, all technology. It gets faster, cheaper, bigger. Thats not the case for the next decade with bandwidth

The net result is that TV is going to be TV, delivered like TV for a long time to come. (I consider IPTV to be regular TV). There wont beenough bandwidth for it tobe any other way.

The problem is that our consumption of digital media at home will continue to grow. The bandwidth we want to consume will many times exceed the bandwidth available to us at that time.

The viewing of internet video will continue to grow. We will upload and download more and more video, consuming increasing amounts of bandwidth. We will want to download movies in High Def quality. Digital pictures will increase in resolution, and we will upload and share our lives through digital pictures that consumes multiple mbs per picture. Too do all of the above without limit, where and when you want to do it just cant happen. For the vast majority of us, there wont be enough bandwidth for at will , unlimited downloads.

You heard it here first. In the next few years, if you have multiple heavy net users at home, you will be scheduling your internet time and downloads. Instead of Net Nanny at home, you will have Download Nanny on yours and the kids or roommates PCs. If your roommate tries to download a 2gb movie at 9pm, and you still have to work to do later, you cant face the risk of the connection slowing to a crawl and timing out . You are going to set Download Nanny to pop up the dreaded “I dont think so Tim” window that reschedules the download to whatever open time it calculates is available based on the average download speed at any given time of day for your internet connection.

We will reach a point in the next few years where we are complaining about internet speed all the time. This wont be a corporate issue, it will be a home issue. We wont be able to do all the things we want to do on the net how and when we want to do it.

As far as the idea that everything we will ever want to watch on TV, the concept of unlimited video on demand from the internet ? The videos will be out there, stored on the net somewhere. THe problem is, you wont be able to download them and watch them whenever you want. You will be able to download them when you have bandwidth available and can schedule time to do it.

Kind of like the way it workswith cable and satelliteTV PPV and VOD today

It will be fascinating to see how it all plays out.

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I learned a lot from Don Nelson when he was coach and GM of the Mavericks. He told mesomething early on, that opened my eyes. I forget the exact conversation, but we were talking about players, and I asked him why he didnt talk to a specific player about something that was going on. What he said was that “THe worse evaluator of talent is a player trying to evaluate himself.”

The same applies to business people and particularly to entrepreneurs and want to be entrepreneurs. We tend to be less than honest with ourselves about our strengths and weaknesses.

I have been just as bad at this as anyone, particularly when I was getting started in the business world. For those of us who dream of starting and running a business, we know that we have to have a level of confidence in our own abilities. We dont want to believe that there are things we cant do. We want to believe that if we try hard enough, work long enough, and get a little lucky, that the sky is the limit.The problem is that we let our confidence cloud our judgements of what we truly know about ourselves.

Im one of the least organized people I know. Today, i have an assistant and others that help me run my life. If you ask me where IM going to be in 3 days. I have no idea. I do know that i have a kick ass assistant who is going to make sure that when i wake up that morning, I know where Im going and how to get there.

When i was 23 years old, sleeping on the floor and starting MicroSolutions, no assistant. No organization. I was a procrastinator.Accounting was a shoebox of receipts. I was a mess.

But I lied to myself and said that I could deal with it. That i would make time to get it all figured out and organized. That if I only set my mind to it, I could be a detail person. I could stop procrastinating. It doesnt work that way.

I did the things I was good at. I could sell. So I sold. I could write software programs. I could integrate PCs. I could set up local area networks. And I did. My business grew. But it also grew out of control A local area network or a software programwithout documentation is a disaster waiting to happen. And they did. Not to the point where it killed my business, but to the point where I spent far too much time fixing things rather than selling new deals.

Fortunately, one of my best customers at the time was interested in becoming a partner in my business. Martin Woodall ran a company called Hytec Data Systems. He was not only smart and a good programmer, but he was the most anal, detail oriented person I had ever met in my life. The perfect partner for me.

Our partnership wasnt always easy. We had more than our shares of knock down drag out fights. He of course would want everything done with precision and if lack of perfection was an option, he didnt want to do it. I of course was the exact opposite. I was the GO FOR IT guy. We can sort it out after the fact. We were perfect partners. We knew and trusted the skills of the other and although many might not think yelling was the best way to work things out, we managed.

It all came down to choice. I had the choice between lying to myself and pretending that I could turn on a switch and become a details person, or accepting the fact that Im not, and partnering with someone who is. Continuing to lie meant I would probably lose my business.

Every entrepreneur faces comparable choices. Each of us has to face the reality of who we are and what we are.

What choice will you make ?

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There seems to be “prevailing wisdom”, or we could call it a school of thought, that ifthe CEO of a public company owns stock, that their interests are aligned with shareholders.

The underlying logic is that all shareholders want the price of the stock they own to go up. So if management owns stock, and they work to get the price up, then management and shareholders have achieved a meeting of the minds and everyone is happy. Right ? Wrong.

There is one primary disconnect that makes this completely untrue and at its heart, the reason why executive pay has gotten so out of line and why individual shareholders are being taken advantage of every single day.

Lets start with shareholders and their interests.

There is a survey published by the Securities Industry Associationthat provides some fascinating data about who owns stock in the US, how much and how they hold it.

Here is the link to the survey, entitled Equity Ownership in America 2005.

For the sake of this argument, the highlights of the survey are that nearly 90 pct of equity owners hold some or all of their equity assets in tax deferred accounts,90 pct of all equity holders dont have any sell transations in any given year and 96 pct of investors agree with the statement, “I view my equity investments as savings for the long term”

My “analysis” of this data is that if corporate management wants to be in alignment with shareholders, they better understand the shareholder credo, which is:

“Ive invested in your company for my future and the future of my family. Dont screw it up !”

I understand that at this point some may suggest that the first disconnect is between individuals and the people who run the mutual funds they invest in. As I have written about before, I agree. But for the sake of discussion, lets move past that. The numbers and perspective mentioned above hold with those people who own stocks directly in companies

Now lets look at the perspective of the corporate insider, in particular the CEO.

There are two types of CEOs, those who are the founders or co-foundersof their companies, and those who were hired to do the job. The difference is important because those involved with the founding of their companies not only have a different personal connection with the company and its employees, but more importantly, since they founded the company, they most likely already own a lot of stock. The motivation of a founding CEO will be money, but there will be other considerations. Sometimes.

Then there are those hired to be CEOs. What are the goals of hired CEOs ?. Plain and simple, its to get paid. To make as big a chunk of money as they possibly can in the shortest amount of time. No one in their right mind is going to take on a job with the amount of pressure, stress and away from familytime that comes with being the CEO of a public companywithout getting paid incredible sums of money.

There is an interesting kinship between hired CEOs and professional athletes. Both realize that there are limited opportunities to make the big financial score, and if they dont make it this time through, they may never get the opportunity again.

There isnt a CEO in America with the opportunityto take the helm of a public corporation that didnt run the numbers in their head and play “what if”. What if the stock went to this price ? What if the stock went to that price? Then based on the total number they needed to get to the networth they always dreamed of, and using the CEO pay totals of men or women who had already done the same thing to get their current jobs as comps, they negotiated their deal from there. Any CEO in this position who tells you otherwise is lying.

Which is why the concept of CEO and shareholders interest being in alignment because they both own stock is a big lie. The CEO wants to hit the homerun of their career when they take the job, the shareholder just doesnt want to strike out with their life savings.

Stay tuned for Part2 for some ideas.

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Commoncause.org has some very worthwhile efforts under way. In fact, Ive always liked that they have pushed discussion of issues. THere is nothing better than open discussion about an issue to help both sides learn.

As a liberterian at heart, I actively support their published missions:

To strengthen public participation and faith in our institutions of self-government; to ensure that government and political processes serve the general interest, rather than special interests; to curb the excessive influence of money on government decisions and elections; to promote fair elections and high ethical standards for government officials; and to protect the civil rights and civil liberties of all Americans.

Not a single word there that I cant go along with.

So why has commoncause veered from the ideals of Archibald Cox, their former leader?

Archibald Cox for those who dont remember, and i paraphrase the commoncause website here, “stood up to President Nixon in his role as special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal. Hedefied President Nixon and said he would continue to demand the incriminating White House tapes, which of course led to Nixons resignation”

Special Prosecutor Cox found strength in the millions of people who stood up and supported his efforts. Again from the commoncause website , “The American people roared their support for Cox in calls and letters to Congress and the White House. Former Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC) declared the nation’s response: “In volume and intensity of denunciation, this outcry of the people was without the faintest precedent in the annals of the country.”"

How amazing and wonderful, that the American people under their own initiative, without prompting, took action to support their beliefs.

How sad that today, rather than encouraging people to do the same today for issues that Commoncause supports, they have lost faith in their supporters willingness to support causes from their own initiative. Instead, they have chosen to become a large scale spammer.

THey must consider their supporters untrustable drones. Why else provide form letters for them to send rather than letting the supporters provide their own perspective on issues ? They must not trust their drones to take action either. Why else create an automated spamming system rather than providing emails or snail mail addresses for theirsupporters to use on their own ?

Which leads to the reason for this post.

Last month i wrote a post saying why I thought there could be value to tiered levels of service on the internet. Some people agreed. Some disagreed. The beauty was in the discussion that resulted.

Discussion, its a beautiful thing. The exchange of ideas. It leads to better ideas.

Well the spammers at commoncause.org decided that they should spam me with the following form letter.

Saturday, January 28 2006

HDnet Mark Cuban

Dear HDnet Cuban,

I support network neutrality, and I am dismayed by comments made by your executives
recently indicating they want to see dramatic changes to the way the Internet
operates.

Net neutrality is the reason this democratic medium has grown exponentially,
fueled innovation and altered how we communicate. For-profit interests should
not be allowed to destroy the democratic culture of the web.

I strongly urge you to oppose policies that permit network operators to block,
impede or interfere with any lawful Internet traffic, now or in the future.

Reading the comments show the obvious lack of thought and effortinvolved. Comments made by “my executives” ? But wait , it gets better. On their website, they have my picture, altered with devil horns , with the following

“Take a look below (or here) at what some brazen telecom execs had to say, and then send a message telling them how you feel about the Internet.”

I guess i forgot that i worked at a telecom. My goodness.

I have gotten probably 1500 or so of the above spam emails. Fortunately, it didnt take me long to setup a filterand throw them in a folder and not be bothered with them, but that doesnt changethefact that Commoncause.org has lost thedirection that Archibald Cox provided. Does anyone over there really think that he would support spamming anyone ? Or would he try to educatepeople to the issues and encourage them to speak their minds…. in their own words.

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Its the trillion dollar question. Telcos and cable companies are retooling and/or rebuilding their networks to squeeze as much bandwidth as possible out of their plants. Satellite providers are looking at every
alternative means of increasing banwidth to, and adding a return path from the home.

None have achoice. There is no question that households will consume an ever increasing amount of bandwidth. The question is how much. What will peak simultaneous bandwidth consumption to the home be in the
next 5 and 10 years ?

Television, High Speed Data, Telephony, sharing home movies and pictures, remote backup and applications that havent been thought of will consume bandwidth. A lot of it. But lets break it down to get some minimum numbers.  Because if a provider cant hit minimums, they will have problems.

First of all, lets start with Television since that’s a battleground that all providers are fighting on. The very near term future of television is high definition. A high definition stream is going to require a minimum
of 8mbs per second on average. Thats a minimum. Now some people are trying to say that they can do high definition in far less bandwidth, they cant.

Even with the best compression, lower bit rates fail the smell test. More importantly, because its easy to see the difference in picture quality as bit rates are reduced, viewers will complain about reduced picture quality, and picture quality will become a competitive element. That competition will keep bitrates at 8mbs, if not higher for
sports and movies. So lets work with 8mbs.

Today its difficult for people to imagine a High Def TV in every room, but within 10 years HDTVs will be ubiquitous. More importantly, over the next 5 years, the homes with a HDTV in every bedroom and the family room, with HDPVR with Terabyte drives centrally housed,or connected to each PVR will be the most important homes in the neighborhood.

Why ? Because if the household can afford to be the first in the block to be an all HD household, they will be a household able to buy everything that the provider sells. They will also be the more technically sophisticated household, so they will be more likely to buy all the options for high speed data, in home wireless data and eventually media, online backup of PCs to a central location and anything else the provider can think of. These are the “whale” customers. The most profitable customers that always pay their bills and never churn off.

So lets look at our customer, The Whales, and their 3 kids and see what services they use.

First, each of the 3 kids has an LCD HDTV that operates both as a HDTV and a PC monitor. Their PC is of course connected to the net , and is also their stereo. It is not their TV PVR because of the hassles of cable card or lack of satellite PC connectivity for programming. Instead they have a provider installed HD PVR that shares a multi terabyte drive with their PC.

The kids are collectors. They save every bit of music and internet content that catches their fancy on their hard drives. They used to use ITunes, but instead they use a freeware desktop that front ends Itunes and
all the different broadband environments that have been created and presents it as a unified front. It of course strips out any and all commercials by identifying the tracking information that is part of the internet url or embedded in the content itself.

When it comes to TV content, they use the same front end to programatically control the provided PVR. With the front end, they dont use season passes any more. They save networks. Everything on MTV. It gets saved to the PVR. Everything from HDNet and HDNet Movies, CBS, NBC, HBO, Showtime, ABC, TNT, ESPNs, they all just automatically get saved. They understand the concept of mutliple terabytes and at 8mbs a stream, they know they can save content to their hearts content and if they need more storage, they can delete something or just add more
terabytes. Its cheap. So their PVRs have basically become network spiders pulling in content 24×7x365.

Of course they cant watch it all, but so what. When something they want to watch in realtime is on, like an NBA game, they watch it. If they arent at home, they use the front end to re route it to their personal IP address
that they bought their name-url for. At the mall during the game ? Just program the front end to send it to markcuban.pda. Never miss a minute, just watch it on my phone/PDA whatever at the mall. Of course, if all
their buddies want to watch it, they have added their personal urls toa buddy list and its multicast to them all. Their own personal version of slingbox.

But wait, there is more. Because they have collected everything on disk, they can use the front end to progam their own TV networks and share it from their goowy.com pages. A little MTV, a
little ESPN, a little HDNet and boom, their own tV network. Of course, they can use redswoosh.net to insert  contextual commercials and even make a little money from it if anybody watchs. For fun, they program in some home videos and pictures from the party they went to last week, set to music of course

None of this is far fetched. In fact, its likely. But back to the original question. What is the max amount of simultaneous bandwidth being consumed during a day ?

3 Tuners bringing in 3 networks in bedroom 1 , one being watched, two being saved. Thats 24 mbs. Same thing going
on in bedrooms2 and 3.Thats another 48mbs. thats 72mbs per sec and thats just the kids rooms.

Of course mom is watching a day and date release on HDNet Movies in the living room while saving Desperate Housewives for the hubby to watch later. Thats another 16mbs. We are up to 88mbs and going strong !

Dad is working on the collage of movies and pictures that he wants to give to the grandparents as a gift. So he is uploading and downloading digital pics and HDV files to and from the family storage site on
box.net. He hates that the kids use so much bandwidth, but thank goodness he is able to finally buy the 100mbs package.

When he is done with the collage, or at least after he makes some progress on it,he is going to plug in the
portable hard drive he got from the satellite company to the USB 2.0 port on his 80″ plasma. Ever since they bought
Netflix, he has subscribed to their movie service. They send him a hard drivefull of hundreds of movies that
Netflix customizes to his tastes, he loves murder mysteries. He watches as many as he wants to/canand
whenhe is done, he sends it back and gets another disk with the genre ofhis choice. His only
complaint is that they wont split genres on a disk, so he cant order half chick flicks for the wife, which of course
creates problems from time to time.

But it works itself out. There is enough bandwidth, and enough TVs to go around and every Sunday they look forward
to the family tradition of going to the movies together.

So there you have it. My over simplified vision of the bandwidth and technology consumption of a family of the
future. Not necessarily your typical family, but one of the millions of upper income families that every provider
will do whatever it takes to make happy. Which they just might….

If they offer more than 100mbs of bandwidth.

m

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Its been a month since the Super Bowl. March Madness is here and the NCAA march to the Final Four is about to begin.

What is the common element between the two ? Gambling.

EVeryone is going to be asked to participate in an office , school or online pool to predict the winner, and most likely some other derivative outcome. The score after a quarter, number of wins for a conference, whatever.

And when we get to the final two teams, then someone from each school is going to make a public wager that prominently features something of pride from their school.

And all of it is illegal. And everyone does it. We just hope we dont get Neuheisel’d. That someone we work with wont turn us in and make a big stink over it for some reason.

So why is it that we can and do bet on the outcome of the big sporting events in this country by the millions, but gambling is illegal ?

Why is it that we can go to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, or any of a hundred plus boats, reservations or other locations, in municipalities who found themselves in a position where they needed money ? What made gambling ok in those locations, but not others ?

Of course we can buy lottery tickets everywhere and anywhere. Its so easy, that we never read about suckers falling for the email lottery scams.

Of course there is also poker. THe same game many of us have played penny ante since we were kids, can now be found on tv every other minute. Its probably the most widely broadcast “sport” and its only reason for being is gambling.

Then of course there is gambling online. Not just poker, but hundreds of other games that have been around for a long time, with many others being invented by the week.

Can we live in an era of any more hypocrisy ?

Whats worse, is that those who are against gambling on a national basis seem to have this perception that gambling outlawed is gambling controlled. Anybody truly believe that ?

So instead of just being honest and straight forward about the whole thing and making it a source of revenue for local, state and federal government, we bury our head in the sand. If we are truly afraid of gambling addiction and ruin, we will find ourselves in far better position to support those in need of help by letting them stay above ground, rather than forcing them underground.

Gambling addiction is no laughing matter, but then neither is systemic hypocrisy. Do as I say, not as a I do might work with the kids at home, but it makes any efforts to reduce the action laughable.

Its time we recognize that people gamble. Some more than others. Some not at all. But gambling no longer has a stigma attached to it. ITs something just about everyone does, particularly this time of year. THere isnt a single community that I have ever heard of where anyone who purchases a lottery ticket or participates in a March Madness or Super Bowl pool is chastised and excluded from community events.

Its time to make gambling legal on a national basis. Rather than wasting millions on fruitless enforcement efforts, we can gain billions in tax revenues and keep jobs that have migrated offshore for the online gambling industry here in the US.

Its about time that the tens of millions of us that putu our 5 or 10 dollars for the office March Madness pool be allowed to do so legally.

Im sure Rick Neuheisel thought it was no big deal. ALl it takes is 1 zealot to turn someones life upside down. All because we let hypocrisy ring from sea to shining sea

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