If I had access to confidential police records, including undercover cops, and wanted to sell it, I might arrange a distribution method such as this.

It's a good thing that nobody with significant amounts of money has an interest in determining the identities of undercover cops.

So, next is checking into 4Square from your Minecraft bunker.

Obama is formally and criminally charged with treason by the U.S. military

The underlying enabling fallacy the public has accepted here is that their political representatives have the lawful authority to do anything within their office that does not contravene the laws - and of course, they write the laws.

This deviates from the structure of American government as established, in two ways. In office, the authority of said political representatives must derive from the People. What powers and authorities the People did not vest in the federal government remain with the People, or with the states respectively.

Secondly, politicians do not make law anymore. The draft and enact legislation ("legis", legal), and this term refers to the paperwork and bureaucratic process only. Legislation and legal refer to that which has the form and appearance of law, without necessarily having the substance. Was everything dated correctly? Submitted to the correct parties? Turned in on time? Did it receive the proper number of Yea votes? Great, it's legal. But in order to be law as well, it must have the proper derivation of authority - and that must come from the People. Just as governments cannot give anyone money that they have not taken from someone else, so also can they not exercise powers, authorities and privileges that were not vested in them by the People. By default, rights belong to the People. This is the purpose of founding documents: To specifically allocate powers and authorities to governments, and to define their nature and limitations.

By contrast, the vast majority of what American politicians do today is analogous to malware. And like malware, it successfully evades detection because the People, by and large, have not updated their detection algorithms in a very long time.

As the political malware increasingly bogs down the system's runtime, the People have begun to do so. The results will be easy to extrapolate from the computer analogy.

The estimation by non-users that drug use produces a sudden, drastic and permanent brain deterioration in the users seems to have been unrealistically amplified by society, in my experience.

The estimation can cause non-users to discredit the assessments of users on general principle, which of course leaves their assessments the only valid ones remaining - for them, anyway. The article's question isn't likely to be resolvable within a context like that, because the typical result is just marked social division between users and non-users. I suppose the two social factions will just have to resign themselves to arguing the matter with no possible chance of resolution.

That estimation also produces other resultants, too: A societal justification for keeping most drugs on the black market, with all the private and government programs that drug money is used to fund. And for users, it keeps them reliant on a distribution network, at the prices they set, and limits both their quality assurance and selection of substances. Additionally, it should be noted that if you're a major drug distribution network with a lot of the say about what specific types of drugs become readily available within a country, you have the ability to partially shape the mindset, mood, energy level and attitude of a given generation.
The ability to influence that can be intensely useful for, say, politicians.

With all that potential incentive attached to it, that common estimation is beginning to seem less and less innocuous and naturally-occurring. When that estimation rubs off from "society", where - specifically - do people get it from? Ah, that's right. It's the slant on medical research data of prolonged, hard use of certain drugs, provided to us at an early age by government-controlled public schools and government-funded anti-drug campaigns in the media.

But it's not as if there could be a hidden agenda at work there.

Short answer: "It's a risk to give access to your identifying information to people on the internet. Unless it's us."

So the geeks would be the early adopters, and everyone else would probably wait until Facebook inevitably turned the thumbscrews on the users enough for them to become dissatisfied.

Sure, the geeky masses. WordStar. Spreadsheets. In other words, business needs at home and in the small offices.

For personal use, the geek stigma was only overcome once people found they could play decent computer games.

Thirty years ago, the idea that non-geeks would ever start using computers themselves seemed absurd.

Forty years ago, the idea that people - rather than corporations and governments - would use computers themselves seemed absurd.

For that matter, I wonder how much Assange's appearance itself can be altered.

Suppose the embassy were to play host to a convention with a large number of people?

On the nose.

I'm amazed the British government is making such a PR debacle of this by pursuing it so publicly. Surely Assange would be scheduled for a heart attack in a year or two instead, and leave it at that?

Ecuadorean diplomats should now regularly ship moving crates, boxes, novelty oversized cakes and so forth out of the embassy on a daily basis.

You unintentionally expose a great proof for the concept that enabling us to exercise freedom is not the agenda of this kind of legislation.

Banning ownership of specific 'things' is enforceable across the board, which is the appeal. Even though it overreaches into legitimate uses, politicians haven't been finding that a concern. But they should. We never gave them the authority to pass legislation which encroaches upon our rights. However, this now happens routinely today.

Now if only there were some cryptic clue as to their actual agenda. Because it certainly isn't upholding our rights.

I was going to reply to tell you you're correct, and to ask you to stop freely giving out the results of your intelligence to the government in the form of a viable plan of action.

Then I noticed the flaw. When people print guns freely, and when they're upset enough at the government, the popular, strong refusal to that sort of legislation becomes an insurmountable obstacle to disarming the citizenry.

We'll encounter state militias mainstreaming again long before we'll encounter any significant threat to disarm us. The U.N. small arms treaty which attempted to bring the gun rights of the citizenry within any member nation under the authority of the United Nations just collapse, because the United States delegates stated that problems domestically would prevent them from being able to meet the deadline. In other words, the People adamantly refused to tolerate it. The best the U.S. delegates could do was shake their fists in the air and yell, "We'll be ba-a-ack! Just you wait!" in traditional bureaucra-speak.

And that's how that works.

In addition to a lot of the arguments being made here against Mr. Gemmell's rationale, he's not even thinking creatively about the alternative ways a revenue stream could be generated. Case in point: I just played a Flash game yesterday that shows a video ad while loading. The ad unlocked additional features of the game for that playthrough.

But Mr. Gemmell doesn't consider developing new, innovative possibilities like this. He just wants the cash, and will happily use the "locking down" of other peoples' machines on a widespread basis to achieve this. Where's the "locking down" of the property rights that are supposed to come with buying something, like an Android? If it's my device, why wouldn't I have root? It would be apropos if Mr. Gemmell made enough money to buy a car, only to have it stolen within the first couple of weeks.

Mr. Gemmell makes it sound only right for companies and developers to "protect" their [currently-only-imagined] profits, but it comes at the expense of the property rights of the users. So he argues for further inroads on users' access to their own machines, while attempting to make it seem natural, fair and just.