"In a typical month, surfers plunk down $640,000. Because players make more bets per hour than they would at Caesar's Palace, they literally lose money to the house twice as fast...Every week about 2 million players ante up at more than 1,800 virtual casinos...$3.5 billion will be lost on Internet bets this year, about three times the revenue of porn sites."

"A little over 10 percent of U.S. households had broadband connections as of Jan. 1, a penetration rate that makes the United States the seventh most wired country in the world."