Umm..
Canute ordered the tide to stop flowing to show his followers that while the deeds of kings might appear great in the minds of men, they were nothing in the face of God's power.

Geez... At least get the old stories right before using them in an absurd analogy.

Nonsense. Climate change is God's wrath for allowing a black (probably Muslim, possibly alien) Democratic President to come to power.

^ This, I would agree with.
COBOL is not a great programming language, and people who are experts in it are NOT good programmers per se. It definitely worked well back in the days, and we should appreciate its use, but let us not let nostalgia tinge the garbage that was useful a long time ago, and now just sits there as the elephant that no one cares to move around, gently tended by the cheap Asian labour... and has no exploits because it doesn't really move around a lot.

Yup. I was hired into one of those mainframe companies that worked with COBOL and JCL. The work was the most menial of works I had ever done(after they trained me for 6 months in it).
The financial sector, the lumbering dinosaur that accepts change only when they have no other option, and the ones maintaining decades-old mainframes really have no incentive to change technologies at the moment. It's easier to just outsource the maintenance and servicing of the mainframes. There are enough of coders (like in the company I joined) in developing countries across the world who would gladly take it up.
From my experience, there is little development happening any more. I think the day when they run out of people who want to this crappy menial job (which is never) is the day COBOL will go extinct.

The moon is probably valuated many zillion dollars, give the tidal effects and romance industry that it fuels. Who's up to catching it?

Panama is somehow involved, too? Hard to believe that the land of fish, trees and butterflies is now involved in the raids within Mexico.

Now let those pesky kids try to get onto my lawn! *evil laugh*

I have never found myself comfortable with any gaming consoles. My fingers have never been able to get the hang of the consoles. I think the future, the human race will be divided into 4 groups of evolved species with differing hand configurations - the consolers, the keyboarders, the swipers and the rest of the world. Let the games begin!

This is I believe is a great answer. Had me pondering over it for a while. So it is impossible to get instantaneous data transfer rates, past rates often are misleading, and predicting future rates takes computing. Better prediction of the future takes more computing, and thus as most of the commentors have put it.. it's just not worth the effort.

Given its former imperialist ways, I always group it with the Western imperial nations...

So the West have always wished to save people. Enforce their value system on the rest of the world. And as long as they have an economic stake in another nation, they shall. It's their bloody right. They pay for that right. And we need to respect that. Times really haven't changed. We, the 3rd world, are truly the White Man's Burden. Rescue us from the chains that bind us.

I do not think people in the west understand economies of developing countries. To talk about sanitation, and use that to judge a country is very myopic. There is a massive schism in India between the rich and the poor. India do have poor people, and sanitary conditions are not ok. But it also have some of the richest business houses around, like the Tatas and Reliance. Like all countries, it takes time for it to find its feet. All countries go through this. For a country which is as massive as India, and with only 60 years since independence, it has done well when compared to the other countries around it. Considering that it is still a functional democracy. But since liberalization policies were followed a few decades ago, corporations are getting powerful, and they ARE at the moment trying to control internet censorship. Reliance, an ISP, which also produces movies blocked it's internet subscribers from any file-sharing websites a long while ago.

People in the developed world, in line with their general ignorance of developing countries, seem to not be aware of some important facts. India is set to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest Facebook market by number of users as early as 2015. 7% of India has internet access, and given India's population, even 7% of its population amounts to more people than many Western European countries. Internet censorship is therefore a big deal and it will affect the lives of millions. Like all developing countries, India grapples with poverty. But on the other end, the rich and middle-class in India are at levels of Western society, in terms of both awareness and with a very major stake in the internet.