Chalk this up as another piece of evidence that Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and the internet have become shining beacons for justice.

According to the Associated Press, Donna Campbell of Miami was shocked to discover, when she Googled her husband Arnim Ramdass, that he was part of a group of co-workers that won a $19 million lottery jackpot months before. The group chose a lump sum payout, from which Arnim had received $600,000 before taxes.

Campbell became suspicious when Ramdass had their phone disconnected and refused to turn on the television. When the lightbulb in Campbell's head finally flickered on, she queried the internet about her husband.

When she confronted Ramdass about the money, he made a lame excuse that he'd bought the ticket for his daughter by a former wife. Shortly thereafter, he disappeared, just ahead of Campbell's lawsuit to recover her portion of the winnings.

If I was Ramdass, I'd give myself up. He can't hide from Google forever.

A New York Times piece takes a look at Rebecca Paul Hargrove, the $750,000 per year, former beauty queen/Chair of the Illinois Republican Party in charge of the Tennessee state lottery.

She's supposedly worth it, given that her marketing prowess has increased the Lottery's sales substantially -- and truthfully, $750 thousand per year is a drop in the bucket for the state Lottery. The average Tennessean spends 93 cents per day on lottery tickets. When you consider the fact that Lottery players are far more likely to be less-educated minority men, the terrible impact of the Lottery becomes more clear. According (PDF File) to a Georgia study, "Black males are more than 10 times as likely as white females with the same levels of education to be active lottery players. This effect is especially pronounced for less-educated black males. The model predicts that the incidence of active lottery play for that group is nearly 43%, which is more than 30 times the rate of play among non-black females who have an education above the high school level".

Sunday's New York Times reported that government officials in at least 12 states are exploring the possibility of leasing out their state lotteries to private operators. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has voiced his support for the idea, where he says his state has been told it could reap a windfall of as much as $37 billion.

Critics contend that a privately held lottery would market itself more aggressively -- further victimizing the low-income and minority consumers who already form a disproportionate share of the lottery's customer base. Others worry that the traditional beneficiaries of the lottery -- schools -- would be shortchanged in the long run because the one-time cash infusion would be used to fund other needs.

But there's something else to think about. The only reason that the California Lottery is worth as much as $37 billion is that it exists as a monopoly, exempted from competition because the very government that sponsors it would send anyone to jail if they tried to do the same thing on their own. After all, gambling is wrong!

What makes the lottery a good business is that the payout ratios (tickets sold minus prize money paid out) are very low because there's no competition. If the lottery weren't a monopoly, competition would work, payouts would soar, and the lottery wouldn't be such a great business -- nor would it victimize the poor the way that it currently does.

But of course, private operators want to buy the monopoly rights to the lottery. But from a rational perspective, I have a problem with this: If Goldman Sachs (or whoever ends up winning the auction) can run a lottery, why shouldn't someone else be allowed to? If there's something wrong with the idea of legalized gambling (which, apparently there is, because it's illegal), does using it to raise money for state bureaucracy somehow negate that? What's next? The Massachusetts State Whorehouse?

We shouldn't be talking about privatizing the lottery -- we should be talking about abolishing it.

I chuckled when I read this piece on MSN Money. Brad Duke of Star, Idaho, is planning to turn his $125 million Powerball lottery winnings into $1 billion in 12 years.

The fact that that's an annual return of nearly 23% doesn't seem to bother him: "I'm a little behind. I've reached nine figures, so I made more than $15 million in just over a year. I want to reach $2 billion by the time I'm 55."

How good would a 23% annual return be? At Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK.A), Warren Buffett has achieved an annual return of 21.4%.

To help him accomplish this feat, Duke says that "I have a financial team of three people who work for me full time. Two of them have a lot of experience building real estate empires, so we're focusing part of the money on buying raw land and building commercial and residential developments."

I would like to speak with these advisers. To me, it's completely inappropriate for these people to be telling a jackpot winner that he can earn him 23%.

Last year, the United States Congress passed a bill banning financial institutions from processing internet gambling transactions, effectively outlawing online gambling. Shares of off-shore online casinos like Party Gaming, a British company, plummeted. Recently, Manchester won the rights to build the island-nation's first Las Vegas-stlyle casino resort. England has traditionally been anti-gambling and British tabloid The Daily Mail referred to the decision as "Labour's day of shame." Other news outlets warned of addiction and organized crime.

Let's talk about online gambling in the United States, and our government's policy on it. On the one hand, the vast majority of states have the Lottery, which entices people to waste their hard-earned money on an infinitely small chance at untold riches. Yet when private companies seek to tap into the appetite for gambling that so many Americans possess, our elected officials manage to muster up moral outrage, and pass laws banning it. Now far be it from me to accuse our political leaders of hypocrisy, but running a gambling operation while simultaneously banning other people's gambling operations seems a bit... inconsistent.

Our ban on online gambling has attracted worldwide attention. Charlie McCreevy, commissioner for the European Union's internal market, said this about it at the European Parliament in Brussels: "In order to protect, I'd say, their own business, their industry there, they have de facto prevented foreigners from online betting into the United States." He also referred to the ban as "protectionist."

Brick and mortar casino operators such as Harrah's Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE:HET) and MGM Mirage (NYSE:MGM) are asking Congress to fund research into whether online gambling can be effectively regulated. Given the widespread controversy over the online gambling ban, it seems likely that, eventually, we will have regulated, legalized online gaming in the United States. When that happens, companies like Cryptologic, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRYP) should prosper.

What are the odds you might find the four railroads in McDonald's Monopoly sweepstakes, therefore winning $5 million? By the numbers, it's roughly one in 41 billion. Umm-hmm. But it's better described by Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times as "you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning while on your way home from purchasing a winning Lotto ticket with your wife, Jessica Alba, the first lady of the United States."

The Wall Street Journal's Carl Bialik has a funny analysis of the odds, deciding that you're more likely to win a much larger prize in the multi-state Powerball lottery (and this would be the first time I've ever seen the lottery singled out as the smart investment choice -- but check out this analysis of the true value of lotto tickets before pulling money out of your mutual funds).

Of course, it's not as if McDonald's Corporation (NYSE:MCD) would have a financial impact from paying out the $5 million; after all, sweepstakes like this are insured. Those insurers, habitual worry-warts that they are, say the odds are actually not quite so bad: after all, if you were to find the rarest game piece (this year, the general agreement is that it's Short Line Railroad), you'd go to any length to get the others ... even, say, buy them on eBay. It's against eBay policy but what's a little "policy" when $5 million is on the line?

Were I the SVP of marketing of a corporation like McDonald's, though, I might forget the insurance and go to any length to make sure the $5 million was awarded. McDonald's doesn't break out marketing expense, but total SG&A for the past year is about $2 billion -- $5 million would be a small part of a marketing strategy and that goodwill of having a winner seems worth it. And besides: who wants to bet a million-dollar winner would keep on eating McDonald's french fries? I know I would.