I'm not a big fan of gambling although I bought one of those Mass Lottery season tickets a while back. I tried to pay for it online but there didn't seem to be any way to do so. Interestingly, and wisely I think, they don't allow you to pay for it with a credit card, even at the corner store (although you can use a debit card.)

Legal gambling is, I always thought, a tax on stupidity and desperation. It should be legal but not too easy. Mostly, its harmless unless you're, well, stupid or desperate.

But with last week's bill in Congress banning internet gambling I'm afraid that there might be unintended consequences. The bill restricts the money transfers that support internet gambling. As Robert Cringley notes, with so much money at stake, there will be workarounds, and that's where the unintended consequences come in.

There is, to my knowledge, no center for Al-Qaida hacking, nor is terrorism as an industry big enough to attract much third-party software development. But ally the interests of terrorists and Internet gamblers who all want to be paid, that's a $20 billion incentive to corrupt the world financial system -- an incentive that didn't exist before last week.

Not good. It's never good when Congress tries to legislate the internet and this is a prime example.