Peter writes: > Do please pay attention, this will all be on the exam. That's one of my problems. I pay too much attention, and then people get irritated when I see what they missed. > First, I didn't say "explicit authorization". You didn't have to. See, the applicability of a law is decided in court, not by Peter Deutsch. Thus, your notion of whether or not a law applies is little more than conjecture until it is confirmed or invalidated by a court of law. Even explicitly-worded statutes are still subject to interpretation by the courts. You cannot really say in advance how a specific case will go, particularly when no existing jurisprudence for similar cases points the way. > It's generally considered poor debating style to put > words into the mouths of others so as to appear to > win a point. I know of even more disreputable practices in debate. > Next, by subscribing to this list, you are granting > implicit permission to the list operator to connect > to your machine to deliver list-related email. Well, no. Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. A court would have to decide. It seems logical to me, but I'm not a judge, and judges don't always seem to be logical. Juries are even worse. > If I were to take this example to the RCMP, I would > fully expect to be told that no crime was committed, > because implicit authorization was obviously granted. The RCMP is an enforcement agency, not a judicial agency. They don't decide who is or isn't guilty of a crime (as far as I know). > Note, in signing up to a mailing list, you have > *not* granted permission to the list operator to send > fragments of code intended to run your implementation > of the Distributed Halting Problem ... Here again, that still has not been decided, and some recent cases have raised questions along those lines. > Because it's something you can control by, for > example, choosing not to visit the site. But I don't know what the site will do until I visit it (similar to the problem of shrink-wrapped licenses, which you cannot read without accepting them). > This is fundamentally difference from logging onto > someone else's machine and using it for your purposes with > such an implicit contract. But that's _exactly_ what I'm doing when I send a Web query to a machine! > What's your point? Sysadmins are supposed to be past the learning curve already.