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.