Internet poker going brink-and-mortar is just plain old poker. Something that never did go out of fashion.
Unless out here people are sitting in a casino on terminals, playing with each other. That might work. Internet poker in a closed sealed room. I await movies made about this.

... a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist...

How about a 4D space-time interweb? Where we can travel through space and time, fight gladiators, ride dinosaurs, wrong our rights, and vanish in a poof of temporal paradox

I second this. Hygienic unbearded ladies have always driven the motivations of men. (No offense to the bearded women...) We do need more of them.

shall be to return to the ways of the past. Stop the brushing. Lets get out our raw meat and vegetables, and slowly revive those bacteria populations ...
I shall call it the Bacteriophilic Trials of the 22nd Century.

Ok. Seriously. There is a problem, but there are solutions too. Water conflicts have been around for a long time now in the Middle East since the beginning of civilization tiself.
4500 years ago, the control of irrigation canals vital to survival was the source of conflict between the states of Umma and Lagash in the ancient Middle East. 2700 years ago, Assurbanipal, King of Assyria from 669 to 626 B.C., seized control of wells as part of his strategic warfare against Arabia. In the modern era, the Jordan River Basin has been the scene of a wide variety of water disputes. In the 1960s, Syria tried to divert the headwaters of the Jordan away from Israel, leading to air strikes against the diversion facilities. The 1967 war in the Middle East resulted in Israel winning control of all of the headwaters of the Jordan as well as the groundwater of the West Bank. In these cases, water was certainly an important factor in both pre- and post-1967 border disputes.
But contrast this to cases in Africa, like the Okavango delta (the world's largest inland delta) which through a negotiation by Angola, Botswana and Namibia has received a fresh lease of life. I think the key is how likely countries are to negotiate rather than go to war. The current Middle East does not seem like a place where cooperation can or will replace conflict.

Someone needs to convert all that oil into water. Now THAT would be a miracle!

Aah. Sepia-tinged nostalgia ...

Do the Scandinavians hate to be away from the mobile phone markets?

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.