Is There an Economist in the House?

I'm noticing many stories on Google News detailing the destruction of the Mississippi gambling industry.
From the Seattle P-I:

The effect on the Mississippi economy could be severe. About 14,000 people
work in the dozen casinos along the Mississippi coastline. Each casino
has a land-based hotel.
The hurricane damage could cost Mississippi some
$400,000 to $500,000 a day in lost gambling taxes. Last year, the
state's casinos generated $2.7 billion in revenue.

My questions:

If casino's aren't fleecing working people out of $500,000 per day, plus the
Casino's cut, won't the people have more of their own money to pay for things
they need?

Don't casinos really just bleed money from an economy like
medieval physicians would bleed a sick patient?

Casino's don't produce anything. They don't invest in anything except their own proliferation. Jobs are 'created' by having casino's, but those are necessarily a fraction of the value of the money that is being skimmed off for profit and taxes.

With apologies to those whose living is tied to the gambling industry, is the damage done to gambling in Mississippi truly damage to the economy?

Clue me in if I'm off the mark here.

Amazon Photo-Printing Service

15 Free prints when you start.
http://amazon.shutterfly.com/?scic=0&ref=ce_stf_gw/002-9434769-9207208

eBooks from King County Library System

This eBook service is available to me, in Clark County!!! I haven't used this service yet, so can't say how well it works, but I've just found out I'm eligible as are most of my regular visitors. (Apologies to my European colleagues. Though I'm sure your proximity to the world's finest chocolate, and other such benefits more than outweigh this little perk.)
Soon, all libraries will provide such service. Eventually libraries will be 1/10th the size, because they will only have kiosks where you browse for titles to download to your eBook reader, or one that you borrow from the library.

Find Recorded Musicians Similar to....

Last.fm does a good-looking job of listing artists similar to one you enter. I have been using MusicMatch for the past year and they're similar artist results are not nearly so broad, especially in mixing big-names with obscure names. Musicmatch appears to weigh the notoriety of the musician more heavily than their similarity to your chosen musician.
My standard test is the "Leonard Cohen" test, which I think works well because you expect to see obscure names in any list of Cohen sound-alikes. If you see only big-names, you wonder how comprehensive the search is.

Voice: AOL, Google, Skype

Lief made a good point in the comments of my Googletalk post. I'm not familiar with almost any IM clients out there, so it may have been a day late and a dollar short for me to plug Googletalk that way.
Do AOL/MSN Messenger/AIM/Trillian et. al. have a voice-only mode?
Also I heard that Skype is an existing service that has more to offer than the new Googletalk.
If any of you regular readers has, or cares to install one of these tools, let me know which one and we can test the phone features.
It appears to require broadband. My apologies to those without.

Unheard Beethoven

Here's a great example of the value of the Internet.
Two guys unearthed hundreds of Beethoven works that aren't recorded anywhere else and made MIDI tracks from the scores. Now they are available online: http://www.unheardbeethoven.org/

This ability for small entities to publish obscure information for a small subset of the population makes my heart glad.

Comment Spam

Hey folks, I'm starting to get comment spam, so I turned on the option to require character-verification before posting comments.
If you find this reduces your inclination to comment, let me know. I could set it up so that all of you that comment regularly are "members" or something.

Talking Over the Web

Google is introducing an IM and Voice Conversation client called Google Talk:

"so all our users can talk to each other for free"

"Now that is a noble cause!"

Each party must have a GMail account, which is open for anyone with a cell-phone to sign up as of today. I could really see this catching on like wildfire.

Internet Explorer Follow-up

The FriendlyCanadian site has demonstrated that while using IE in it's default security mode for the Internet Zone, it is possible for any web page to read the contents of your Windows clipboard*. Here is the line of code they use to get the clipboard text:

var content = clipboardData.getData("Text");

In English: "Whatever's in your clipboard, give it to me!"

There is no other prerequisite, they just have it. They can do whatever they can dream up with it. If it happens to be your credit card number, or a password, or other sensitive text, you may regret that someone else has it.
The magnitude of this problem is somewhat subjective. It has been around for 5 years. However since so few people will truly need it, I'd say at best it's an unnecessary vulnerability. The only time you would need it is if you had some wacky software that couldn't accomplish some data transfer task any other way. For most of us, that's very unlikely.

*clipboard is an object Windows uses to store anything you copy with Ctrl-C, or by right-clicking your mouse and choosing Copy.

IE Copy/Paste Scripting Behavior

Here's some 5 year old news for you:
This site points out how Internet Explorer can allow a website to see what's in your clipboard.
You can disable or prompt for that feature by setting the value of the following registry key to 3 or 1, respectively:
HKeyCurrentUser\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\3\1407

Alternatively, you could use this Internet Explorer menu and choose Disable or Prompt:

• Tools>>Internet Options
• Click on the Security tab, then the Custom Level button
• Scroll to almost the bottom to find the option called: Scripting
• The second option below Scripting is Allow paste operations via script
• That is the option you will probably want to set to Disable or Prompt

I'm Baaacckk

The beach was terrific, as usual. The weather was mostly cloudy, which was probably for the best as it looks like the days were scorching here while we were gone.

I've decided that my ideal year would be something like this
2 weeks of Fall (Just for the moodiness)
2 weeks of Winter (at least a full foot of snow for the duration)
4 weeks of Spring
44 weeks of Summer

On vacation I had the opportunity to read some interesting books

• Red Star books 2 & 3 - Really cool graphics and inventive storyline. Archangel Studios are melding computer-graphics and hand-sketches into beautiful comics. The storylines are very roughly modeled on Soviet history and include futuristic and mystical elements.
• Cormac McCarthy's latest, No Country for Old Men. Clearly a well-written book. One that has the ability to haunt you afterwards.
• And, I read a "readable" version of Beowulf, which was really neat. I never knew that Beowulf was supposed to have torn off the Grendel's arm! Classic tough-guy story.

Tip of the day: when going to the beach *ALWAYS* bring your windbreaker.

I am leaving for vacation in mere minutes

Sorry if you've been feverishly watching the news for tsunami for the past day or so, I'm not at the beach yet.
You can begin feverishly watching the news for tsunami in about 4 hours. Thanks.

James Edward Zimmerman & the Stirling Cycle Engine

Here's a neat paper on uncle Jim I haven't seen before:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/77/19884/00919524.pdf?arnumber=919524

On Vacation Soon

If a tsunami hits the Washington coast in the next 6 days, you can know where I'll be: Davy Jones' locker. That's right, vacation time has rolled around again and so I will cut myself off from the connected world and spend some time getting sand between my toes, wind in my stubble and my senses filled with all things beachy.
Looks like I already missed the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, but I'm sure it will still be nice to see tonight.
One last link. I wonder if these guys have a few mirrors to spare, and an azimuth tracking motor, and maybe event a stirling engine just lying about the shop they could give me? What's it going to take to get my sweaty little hands on one of these bad boys?

Got Water?

At the Clark County Fair last night, I picked up a pamphlet that said Amboy receives an annual average rainfall of 80 inches!! Which means, that if my roof is 40*44 feet, and 80 inches is 6 and 2/3rds feet, the cubic feet of rainwater per year is 11739 cubic feet!! That translates to 87,809 gallons of water landing on my roof annually!!!
Man. I gotta dig a pond.

More on the Dish

In the test on about 1 qt. water that I conducted just after the plastic melting phase, I was not able to boil it, though I warmed it considerably in about 10 minutes. I painted the bottom of the pot flat black. And even so, it was still so bright it was hard to look at.
Several problems that may have contributed to the inability to boil:

• Pot not in the optimal focal point. I need to be able to either move the dish or the pot more flexibly to align the pot with the focal point better.
• Apply more mirror to the dish
• Large quantity of wrinkles in the mirror

I think I really need to improve the range of the dishes motion so that I can aim directly at the sun. Then, I could mount a hanging hook at the focal point and know that I can get the focal point there. And, then I should probably consider applying "real mirrors" instead of the wrinkly mylar.

This is taken just after the last shot, you can see the plastic bit is drooping. You can see there is quite a bit of area I could still cover with 'mirror'. 

Solar Collector v 1.1 up

Here's my second attempt at a solar collector. The picture shows smoke coming off of the melting plastic.

Funny Blog

Dooce.com
http://www.dooce.com/archives/how_to_annoy_me/index.html

Simple Programming IDE for Kids

http://www.ms-inc.net/ViewPost01480487.aspx