While I personally don't think that they're much of a deterrent,

Sometimes they are just an amusement.

My local Dunkin Donuts is about 60 feet by 30 feet and has, count 'em, 13 of those dark plastic ceiling bubbles. I think they should hold a contest and give out free donuts to anyone who can guess exactly how many of them actually contain a camera.

Oh, and the place has been robbed twice in the last year.

just when I was beginning to think the internet was getting boring and staid...

Do you believe that your boss has the right to track your every move once you clock out for the day?

Does it really matter what the average person believes? Companies do it all the time and it gets worse with the current economic climate.

Companies issue cell and smart phones to be answered 24/7, replete with GPS. Some try to tell you if you can smoke, what kinds of food you should eat and how much you should exercise (and how). You'll need to submit to random drug tests. Or lie detector tests. Certainly credit score reviews. And the hits go on...

So while they might not being tracking your every move, give them time. They are already doing the next best thing.

it wants to protect its brick and mortar casinos...

And the state lotteries. They are up to their eyeballs in the online crackdown.

Needles. Haystacks. How is it that it every government endeavor except intelligence agencies someone asks "Hey, exactly what is the cost per needle found in those haystacks?"

Why is there no commission that meets twice a year and announces to the public: we found 8 terrorists, killed 3. It cost 160 billion dollars. The commission should be composed of people the public knows and trusts. They can have their backgrounds examined by the agencies. They should give out as much information as possible w/o putting people or procedures at risk. But give the people who are paying for all some fucking idea of the efficacy of the operation. Or perhaps that is what they are really afraid of?

Having seen that this wiretapping is actually producing beneficial results, he would then be more inclined to keep it going so it can keep producing these results

Obama is bright guy but, Blackberry aside, let's not kid ourselves that he understands technology any better than the normal user. The national security apparatus is worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year and hundreds of thousands of jobs in the government, military, and private sector. You better believe they are skilled at scaring the shit out people, regardless of whether the threat is real or imagine nor the programs effective or not. A lot jobs, prestige, and profit statements depend on that ability.

Precious few people in Washington or anywhere else want to take on the intelligence community. There is very little political upside and a very dark downside. Outside of a brief couple of years in the 70s with the Church Committee, etc., they get their way eventually. And don't think for a second that in the back of their minds politicians, including presidents, don't fear there could be leaks about their girlfriends, "random" personal banking audits that turn up high priced hooker payments, a plane crash or a grassy knoll in their future if they step too far out of line.

With two wars, a collapsing economy, global competition, etc., it quite possible that even if Obama sees through the fear mongering he would conclude he doesn't want to deal with this crap.

It seems that most books are long out-of-print

I just came up with 16 COBOL books on Amazon.

Opencobol is available

Don't know how good that compiler is but I don't think that's the main impediment to learning the language. It's kind of boring. It's great at reading, processing, and writing data. It's good, but slightly cumbersome, for reports. But beyond that there isn't much to be done with it. So unless you have some ready-to-go datasets to process at home I think it would be hard to sustain interest.

The comment was definitely about execution speed.

I can't argue with the ease of development using scripting languages. That's their main selling point so they better excel at it. However, in COBOL's problem domain it could stand up to a Java or C++ or C# reasonably well in development speed. COBOL gets a bad rap for being verbose but have you seen Java, et. al. lately? That said, COBOL really falls down in terms of ease of code reuse and that's where modern languages have a distinct advantage.

I can't comment on OO-COBOL. I on bailed that segment of industry long before it became available. The COBOL I knew didn't even have dynamic memory allocation.

designed for ease of expression for less-than-stellar programmers

Actually it was designed to be "self-documenting" more than anything and it is pretty successful at that. Most programmers should be able to pick up a COBOL program and figure out what it is doing pretty easily. That it was/is relatively easy to learn was a bonus.

Trust me, the same kind of people who were writing crappy COBOL code 30 years ago are today writing crappy Java or C#. It's rarely about the language.

Don't be so sure. Back in the day it looked pretty good coming from assembler, especially when you realized they were going to pay you the same amount of money. And most people today don't realize what a pain in the ass pre-ANSI C was.

Sounds to me like you are arguing my side of the case, whether you realize it or not. COBOL is not meant for all kinds of problems but it is very good at what it does, particularly things like transaction processing.

they could still reap even more benefits by recoding for modern languages and coding practices

Maybe. The fact is it appears they successfully migrated the system to a new platform within a year. I have seen many "modern" systems still jerking around with UML after a year and I can't count how many were never brought fruition.

But then, this is the US Postal Service. COBOL's probably fast enough for the task.

COBOL has a lot of issues but speed isn't a big one. I'm willing to bet that on tasks that are appropriate to COBOL it would kick most "modern" scripting languages asses in terms of speed.

so the Mayor pointing out "It would be stupid to commit a crime"

If this is true, then why are government officials so reluctant to have their own activities monitored? Why do law enforcement get so edgy about being filmed? Why are cameras not allowed in most court rooms? Why aren't public officials monitored all day long? It just stops crime, after all.

Other than Lil Kim's xbox, how much is there to attack?

Seriously, NK is dirt poor and supremely paranoid. It's not like their economy depends on the internet in any way.

And if you attack their military computers then you quickly escalate things to a very dangerous level.