The header is touted as a replacement or augmentation of the doctype definition, which is supposedly broken. Well, it's not. IE can't handle doctypes properly because too many pages were designed-for-IE6 with wrong doctypes and leave newer versions no viable path to standard compliance without being treated like other standards compliant browsers (i.e. identifying as something other than IE.)
So, in order to have their cake and eat it too, Microsoft wants IE to be backwards-compatible to IE6 and more modern at the same time. The only way to do that is to make everybody add a redundant tag, and they trashtalk doctype to get their will. But doctype says to which standard a document was written. Microsoft on the other hand wants developers to keep writing pages to browser versions, which is what got us into this mess in the first place.
The correct way to solve this is to make new IE versions identify as something new, like MSWB, and provide an IE6 compatible control for applications which request MSIE. And tell developers to write to standards, not browsers, and test with more than one browser!
You know it's not going to work as designed. Microsoft will expect other browsers to render websites according to the X-UA-Compatible property and point fingers if they don't, but Microsoft will certainly never attempt to render websites like Firefox, Safari or Opera do. The worst part is that the default will be to render like IE6, because all the old sites with broken browser detection code are the reason for this tag. They can't tell IE7 from IE6, and now Microsoft can't deliver a new browser without breaking lots of important business applications.
It's brilliant: The reason is that there are too many websites out there which work in IE6, but fail miserably in standards compliant browsers. These websites will of course not get that tag. For the the tag to make any sense at all, newer IE browsers must therefore assume that an untagged site expects IE6, so the page will be shown as if the browser were the steaming pile of crap IE6. It's another quirks mode just for IE6, and the only way to escape it is to add a redundant tag.
Broken IE6 websites can't tell IE7 from the browser that they were so foolishly designed for, so they try to use all the non-standard stuff in IE7 which the new browser can't support without turning back into the mess that IE6 was. What to do? Make browser-dependence part of the standard...
You misunderstood the criterion. The test is meant to take the "appearance" of the bot out of the test. Take the set of all yes/no questions which a human being can answer. If the bot can answer all these questions too, it is intelligent. The test does not involve other questions, such as questions which don't have a clear answer or questions which are not boolean. The idea behind that modification is that cognition, not articulation, is intelligence and that making a person believe that a bot is a human (like the Turing test demands) therefore tests the wrong aspect of the interaction. Any question can be reformulated into one or more binary questions:
"Will it rain tomorrow?" (Yes/No/Maybe) becomes "Are you sure it will rain tomorrow?" and "Are you sure it won't rain tomorrow?"
The example "Do you still beat your wife?" can clearly be answered by "yes" or "no" (It's the same question as "Have you been beating your wife and do you beat your wife?") The trick about that question is that the answer "no" can lead a person to draw an illogical conclusion, but that is irrelevant for the test. (You could ask additional questions to see if the bot understands the fallacy.)
Consumers should never attempt to solve a corporation's problems by not demanding the full product or service. Corporations will not lower your fees when you are in a tight spot.
The first fallacy is to assume that there is a problem which can be solved by generating less traffic: New uses will always require higher bandwidths and generate more traffic, so even casual users will exceed any perceived "acceptable" limit. Back in the nineties, students were asked not to use the web (with its bandwidth eating graphics) too much. Internet access was much more expensive back then. Would the internet be as fast and as cheap as it is today if people had restrained themselves? The web dwarfed email traffic. P2P dwarfs web traffic. HDTV streaming or whatever is next will dwarf P2P traffic. The only solution is to keep upgrading the net.
The second fallacy is that generating much traffic is unfair towards casual users who pay the same price. There's always someone who uses the net much less. Even without any P2P, most of the/. readers would without a doubt create several hundred times as much traffic as people who only use email and read news on the web. On the other hand, the casual users will make frequent use of the ISP's helpline to configure an email client or "fix the internet." The heavy users on the other hand would not be caught dead calling ISP support staff. Which do you think is more expensive, upgrading routers or paying people to handhold customers through everything remotely related to your product?
The third fallacy is that imposing traffic limits would reduce the problem: If you can't download all you want, are you going to use up your limit at night or when it's convenient, i.e. when everybody else uses the net because that's when it's convenient for them too? The problem isn't the total traffic, it's the bandwidth at peak times. Whether anyone downloads hundreds of gigabytes at night is totally irrelevant, because there is no off-peak bandwidth shortage.
Digital cinema currently uses 2K projectors (2048 pixels wide), which is about the same resolution as you effectively get from analog projection (and only very slightly higher than HDTV 1080p). State of the art projectors are capable of showing pictures which are 4096 pixels wide (4K), which is significantly better than analog projection. At a 2:1 aspect ratio those formats are 2 and 8 megapixels.
A Googlebomb is when a page becomes associated with an unfitting search term which doesn't appear on the page itself. This effect is caused when many website authors place misnamed links to that page, usually in an intentional and coordinated manner.
It has been solved. The code.png image is indeed a sequential file. Counting sequences of one color separated by other colors reveals a numbering scheme between the red dots which, when applied to the rest of the file, yields indexes into the decimal representation of PI (the description shows familiar substrings at offsets 0, 1 and 2.) Taking 6 digits each from the listed positions gets you two 3-digit ASCII codes which form the description of a stack machine that decodes the messages on pages 2/3 and 3/3. The 2/3 message is "cerebrum, vere-tempus, together (adv.)". Turn Latin into English and English into Latin and you get "brain, real-time, simul (una)". Googling reveals that a company called N-BRAIN will release a collaborative software development package called UNA on 2008-01-18. An encoding of "UNAreleasedate" for the stack machine is "eRnnnueNueAueRleIaue-leNaueRleBanue-leNaue-leIanueBleRaue-leNaueBleBanue-leIanueBleRanue-leNau", which transports you from page 3/3 to the congratulations. They'll send you a standalone version of UNA if you provide them with your email address and the email addresses of your collaborators. You can also check a box to request an interview. A cookie contains the code you entered in step 1/3. They say they'll look at the order of the entrants and the code to determine who gets an interview.
N-BRAIN is a privately held company in Boulder, Colorado. You can apply for a job without going through the puzzle. According to http://www.n-brain.net/jobs.htm they don't look at resumes but give you an assignment to evaluate your code-fu. The team page lists four people, including the founder John A. De Goes, who is the author of two books on game programming ("3D Game Programming with C++" and "3D Game Programming with C++ Gold Edition"), worked as an instructor at http://www.gameinstitute.com/ and is a member of the Boulder martial arts and agile software meetup groups.
The code.png contains 6 colors. If you interpret it linearly and separate it into blocks delineated by green-blue, you'll notice that many of these blocks appear several times throughout the file.
This second version is correct, the number-code is: 1,1,1,2,1,1,2,1,1,2,1,1,2,2,2,1,1,2,1,1,2,4,2,3,3,1,1,-2,0,1,1,-2,0,1,1,-5,0,0,0,-1,2,-4,-2,1,-1,2,0,-2,1,-5,0,1,1,-4,-2,0,1,1,-4,-2,0,1,1,-2,0,-2,-2,0,1,1,0,-2,1,-5,0,0,0,-4,0,0,0,-2,-2,0,1,1,-6,0,1,1
Take the quote from which the words in the scrambled message are, remove duplicate words from the quote ("uniquify", but leave the order intact), then look up the position of each word from the scrambled message in the cleaned-up quote. The relative movement of the position through the quote is the number-string.
The above code passes all tests, but might not be what they wanted. Here's a more plausible version. (Tests do not a specification make.)
var jMax=d[0].length-1; for (var i=d.length-1; i>0; i--){ for (var j=jMax; j>=0; j--){ if (!d[i][j]&&d[i-1][j]&&(j==0||!d[i-1][j-1])&&(j==jMax||!d[i-1][j+1])&&(j==0||j==jMax||!d[i][j-1]||!d[i][j+1])){ d[i][j]=true; d[i-1][j]=false; } } }
The encoding of the number string is as follows: each number moves the cursor left (negative numbers) or right (positive numbers) or not at all (0) and then drops a blue block at the cursor position, which then falls according to f(d). If you cheated, you get no blue blocks here. The numbers are to be found by applying the hover-hint "list, uniquify, relativity" to the word list which is presented after the completion of the tests.
var jMax=d[0].length-1; for (var i=d.length-1; i>0; i--){ for (var j=jMax; j>=0; j--){ if (!d[i][j]&&d[i-1][j]&&((j>0&&!d[i][j-1])||(j<jMax&&!d[i][j+1])||(j==0&&!d[i-1][1])||(j==jMax&&!d[i-1][j-1]))){ d[i][j]=true; d[i-1][j]=false; } } }
Mathematical proofs are constructed of facts, but their purpose is not to be, but to explain and verify. In an article, you might refer to a research paper or a historic document to show that the described fact is actually correct, and even though that paper/document is factual itself, it has no place in an encyclopedia. It is a reference. The provable fact is the object of an encyclopedia, not the proof (except where the proof itself is notable and has its own article.)
Mathematical proofs are arguments, not facts. An encyclopedia should list provable facts with references. There are some notable methods of proving something (e.g. proof by induction), but an applied generic proof method or a "handcrafted" proof for a single problem is just an argument and should only be included if it adds insight beyond the proven fact.
My solution: Avoid looking at your own old code. It's a bit like looking at pictures of yourself in 70s/80s/90s clothes. What the hell was I thinking? If you extrapolate from that experience, it hits you hard: The current code sucks too, and the clothes don't compensate for that any more than they did back then.
You really have a problem when you look at your old code and clothes and find nothing wrong with them. Of course, if you're sufficiently famous, that's called "style."
The way this would work is quite simple: Google classifies all sites. So when you tell it that you like or dislike one site, Google adjusts the weight of the classes to which the site belongs in your profile. When you search, Google uses your personal class weights as one parameter of the ranking algorithm. For example, if you search for "mercedes" and "thumb down" price comparison sites, and then search for "canon", Google won't show you price comparison sites on the first page, even if they are not the same sites which compare car prices (so you haven't demoted them specifically yet.)
Have they accounted for the image benefit of the "I'm feeling lucky" button? Would Google have as many users for normal searches if that button were not there? Accounting will make everything look bad if you tell them to.
If it doesn't involve humans, it's not a "social norm".
Yawn. It does involve humans, but not human intervention. Reading comprehension: work on it.
When "permission" is "granted" to complete a TCP connection, for example, tells you nothing about the intent of the person who setup the server on the other end.
Again, it doesn't have to. Implicit permission through indistinguishability is sufficient. If that is not in line with the intent of the owner, it's the owner's fault. Some people are just too dense to understand that. If you don't want to provide public internet access, DON'T. If your access point looks like an open access point, it will be used like an open access point and only an idiot would expect differently.
it's OK for a systems administrator with root-level access to read other people's email, because there's an "absence of access controls" for him.
No, the user has access controls, the root user just has the power to access these files regardless. If the admin ignores the relevant set of file permissions, he needs explicit permission (which is usually granted in a contract.) I can crack WEP in minutes and access a WEP protected network like any user who has the key. The access controls are still there and I am therefore not allowed to do that (and I don't).
Let me know with how taking a few things off the shelves at that store and walking out goes.
You're being intentionally dense.
implicit (through well-established social norms) permission
The implicit permission is established by a social norm, which takes into account that the person who is supposed to follow that norm must have a reasonable chance to recognize what is expected of him. If your garden looks just like the park that it borders on and there is no sign or fence to tell people that it is private property, then no social norm and no law forbids people to enter your garden. If the entrance to your house looks like an art gallery front and people wander in through the open door, they are not breaking any rules and they are firmly within the social norm as well.
Apparently, however, the whole world changes when dealing with computers.
Apparently it does. People like you seem to have a problem with the fact that the firmly established social norms around computers don't always involve human intervention and often rely on machine-readable rather than human-readable information. It is standard that the absence of access controls implies permission to use the service. That is not only a sensible and long established social norm - where legislators have a clue it's also codified in law. Apparently you don't just want people who install computers with open services to be exempt from having to follow the established norms, you want to give them the right to lash out at others for not tiptoeing around their misconfigured access points.
Nothing in any of my arguments suggests reducing the utility of intentionally free wifi networks
If you really don't understand this by now, you need to work on your reading comprehension, a lot.
given all wifi networks use the same frequencies - so you're saying private ones are abusing it as well)
Private networks use the resource as defined by the standard and in accordance with established networking norms. They use their share of bandwidth, but don't unnecessarily keep others from using bandwidth in different ways. People who want that human interaction is required before a connection may be established do prevent others from using the resource for automatic connections, unnecessarily and contrary to standard behaviour in computer networks.
that tells you _nothing_ about the intent of the person who owns that network.
It doesn't have to tell me anything, because the intent is irrelevant if a normal interaction doesn't give me a chance to know that I'm not welcome. Looking like a publicly accessible wireless LAN implies permission to connect, just as looking like a store implies permission to enter.
it promotes the idea that people should assume if they don't have permission to use someone else's property, they shouldn't.
That would be a catastrophic thing to tell people, because we interact with other people's property based solely on implicit or automatic permission all the time. You could hardly set foot in a city otherwise. It's even clearer with wireless networks, because you are taking a piece of PUBLIC property and refuse to cooperate with other people who are in the same space. It is not hard to clearly state your intent, but you insist on reducing the usefulness of the technology just so that you can keep using a public frequency band without bothering about the conventions of the medium. That is truly impolite and disrespectful.
Can we please stay on topic? If you can't tell that you're on private property or you can reasonably assume that you're welcome on private property, you're not trespassing. I'm arguing that it is reasonable to assume that you're welcome to have your computer automatically connect to open wireless access points, because to a computer they look exactly like intentionally open access points.
You've already spent numerous posts telling me that you consider an unsecured WAP to be explicitly giving you permission to connect and use any services you can find through it.
No I didn't. I explained that the implicit permission is sufficient, because that's the only practical way to operate computer networks in general and wireless networks in particular. I did not argue that the legislators in every part of the world have enough of a clue to understand that, but that in many places it isn't just moral but also perfectly legal to rely on this implicit permission.
I also explained that requiring explicit access permission by law is a strategic mistake because it leaves more people vulnerable in the long run by hiding the fact that in even more places the law does not even attempt to protect these people from passive eavesdropping.
Would you similarly argue you can only have someone charged with trespassing if you have a fence ?
You can indeed not charge someone with trespass if it was not obvious to him that he was on private property and not welcome. If your house has an entrance like an art gallery or a shop, and people wander in, you can tell them to leave and then they have to leave, but you can't charge them with trespass just because they came into your house.
Ask yourself this: if you were using someone's unsecured WAP and they asked you to stop, would you ?
If I am interactively using my computer at that time, I probably would, because I am a polite person. I would also tell them to enable encryption so that their network is secure and my computer could avoid their network in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
The header is touted as a replacement or augmentation of the doctype definition, which is supposedly broken. Well, it's not. IE can't handle doctypes properly because too many pages were designed-for-IE6 with wrong doctypes and leave newer versions no viable path to standard compliance without being treated like other standards compliant browsers (i.e. identifying as something other than IE.)
So, in order to have their cake and eat it too, Microsoft wants IE to be backwards-compatible to IE6 and more modern at the same time. The only way to do that is to make everybody add a redundant tag, and they trashtalk doctype to get their will. But doctype says to which standard a document was written. Microsoft on the other hand wants developers to keep writing pages to browser versions, which is what got us into this mess in the first place.
The correct way to solve this is to make new IE versions identify as something new, like MSWB, and provide an IE6 compatible control for applications which request MSIE. And tell developers to write to standards, not browsers, and test with more than one browser!
You know it's not going to work as designed. Microsoft will expect other browsers to render websites according to the X-UA-Compatible property and point fingers if they don't, but Microsoft will certainly never attempt to render websites like Firefox, Safari or Opera do. The worst part is that the default will be to render like IE6, because all the old sites with broken browser detection code are the reason for this tag. They can't tell IE7 from IE6, and now Microsoft can't deliver a new browser without breaking lots of important business applications.
It's brilliant: The reason is that there are too many websites out there which work in IE6, but fail miserably in standards compliant browsers. These websites will of course not get that tag. For the the tag to make any sense at all, newer IE browsers must therefore assume that an untagged site expects IE6, so the page will be shown as if the browser were the steaming pile of crap IE6. It's another quirks mode just for IE6, and the only way to escape it is to add a redundant tag.
Broken IE6 websites can't tell IE7 from the browser that they were so foolishly designed for, so they try to use all the non-standard stuff in IE7 which the new browser can't support without turning back into the mess that IE6 was. What to do? Make browser-dependence part of the standard...
You misunderstood the criterion. The test is meant to take the "appearance" of the bot out of the test. Take the set of all yes/no questions which a human being can answer. If the bot can answer all these questions too, it is intelligent. The test does not involve other questions, such as questions which don't have a clear answer or questions which are not boolean. The idea behind that modification is that cognition, not articulation, is intelligence and that making a person believe that a bot is a human (like the Turing test demands) therefore tests the wrong aspect of the interaction. Any question can be reformulated into one or more binary questions:
"Will it rain tomorrow?" (Yes/No/Maybe) becomes "Are you sure it will rain tomorrow?" and "Are you sure it won't rain tomorrow?"
The example "Do you still beat your wife?" can clearly be answered by "yes" or "no" (It's the same question as "Have you been beating your wife and do you beat your wife?") The trick about that question is that the answer "no" can lead a person to draw an illogical conclusion, but that is irrelevant for the test. (You could ask additional questions to see if the bot understands the fallacy.)
It is random, but the result is not evenly distributed.
Consumers should never attempt to solve a corporation's problems by not demanding the full product or service. Corporations will not lower your fees when you are in a tight spot.
/. readers would without a doubt create several hundred times as much traffic as people who only use email and read news on the web. On the other hand, the casual users will make frequent use of the ISP's helpline to configure an email client or "fix the internet." The heavy users on the other hand would not be caught dead calling ISP support staff. Which do you think is more expensive, upgrading routers or paying people to handhold customers through everything remotely related to your product?
The first fallacy is to assume that there is a problem which can be solved by generating less traffic: New uses will always require higher bandwidths and generate more traffic, so even casual users will exceed any perceived "acceptable" limit. Back in the nineties, students were asked not to use the web (with its bandwidth eating graphics) too much. Internet access was much more expensive back then. Would the internet be as fast and as cheap as it is today if people had restrained themselves? The web dwarfed email traffic. P2P dwarfs web traffic. HDTV streaming or whatever is next will dwarf P2P traffic. The only solution is to keep upgrading the net.
The second fallacy is that generating much traffic is unfair towards casual users who pay the same price. There's always someone who uses the net much less. Even without any P2P, most of the
The third fallacy is that imposing traffic limits would reduce the problem: If you can't download all you want, are you going to use up your limit at night or when it's convenient, i.e. when everybody else uses the net because that's when it's convenient for them too? The problem isn't the total traffic, it's the bandwidth at peak times. Whether anyone downloads hundreds of gigabytes at night is totally irrelevant, because there is no off-peak bandwidth shortage.
Digital cinema currently uses 2K projectors (2048 pixels wide), which is about the same resolution as you effectively get from analog projection (and only very slightly higher than HDTV 1080p). State of the art projectors are capable of showing pictures which are 4096 pixels wide (4K), which is significantly better than analog projection. At a 2:1 aspect ratio those formats are 2 and 8 megapixels.
A Googlebomb is when a page becomes associated with an unfitting search term which doesn't appear on the page itself. This effect is caused when many website authors place misnamed links to that page, usually in an intentional and coordinated manner.
It has been solved. The code.png image is indeed a sequential file. Counting sequences of one color separated by other colors reveals a numbering scheme between the red dots which, when applied to the rest of the file, yields indexes into the decimal representation of PI (the description shows familiar substrings at offsets 0, 1 and 2.) Taking 6 digits each from the listed positions gets you two 3-digit ASCII codes which form the description of a stack machine that decodes the messages on pages 2/3 and 3/3. The 2/3 message is "cerebrum, vere-tempus, together (adv.)". Turn Latin into English and English into Latin and you get "brain, real-time, simul (una)". Googling reveals that a company called N-BRAIN will release a collaborative software development package called UNA on 2008-01-18. An encoding of "UNAreleasedate" for the stack machine is "eRnnnueNueAueRleIaue-leNaueRleBanue-leNaue-leIanueBleRaue-leNaueBleBanue-leIanueBleRanue-leNau", which transports you from page 3/3 to the congratulations. They'll send you a standalone version of UNA if you provide them with your email address and the email addresses of your collaborators. You can also check a box to request an interview. A cookie contains the code you entered in step 1/3. They say they'll look at the order of the entrants and the code to determine who gets an interview.
N-BRAIN is a privately held company in Boulder, Colorado. You can apply for a job without going through the puzzle. According to http://www.n-brain.net/jobs.htm they don't look at resumes but give you an assignment to evaluate your code-fu. The team page lists four people, including the founder John A. De Goes, who is the author of two books on game programming ("3D Game Programming with C++" and "3D Game Programming with C++ Gold Edition"), worked as an instructor at http://www.gameinstitute.com/ and is a member of the Boulder martial arts and agile software meetup groups.
Part 2 is at: http://wanted-master-software-developers.com/?key=coLLAborATE
The code.png contains 6 colors. If you interpret it linearly and separate it into blocks delineated by green-blue, you'll notice that many of these blocks appear several times throughout the file.
Someone in the Google group has decoded the CSS classnames in the source (substitution cypher), the result then leads to part 3: http://www.wanted-master-software-developers.com/?you=me
This second version is correct, the number-code is: 1,1,1,2,1,1,2,1,1,2,1,1,2,2,2,1,1,2,1,1,2,4,2,3,3,1,1,-2,0,1,1,-2,0,1,1,-5,0,0,0,-1,2,-4,-2,1,-1,2,0,-2,1,-5,0,1,1,-4,-2,0,1,1,-4,-2,0,1,1,-2,0,-2,-2,0,1,1,0,-2,1,-5,0,0,0,-4,0,0,0,-2,-2,0,1,1,-6,0,1,1
Take the quote from which the words in the scrambled message are, remove duplicate words from the quote ("uniquify", but leave the order intact), then look up the position of each word from the scrambled message in the cleaned-up quote. The relative movement of the position through the quote is the number-string.
The above code passes all tests, but might not be what they wanted. Here's a more plausible version. (Tests do not a specification make.)
var jMax=d[0].length-1;
for (var i=d.length-1; i>0; i--){
for (var j=jMax; j>=0; j--){
if (!d[i][j]&&d[i-1][j]&&(j==0||!d[i-1][j-1])&&(j==jMax||!d[i-1][j+1])&&(j==0||j==jMax||!d[i][j-1]||!d[i][j+1])){
d[i][j]=true;
d[i-1][j]=false;
}
}
}
The encoding of the number string is as follows: each number moves the cursor left (negative numbers) or right (positive numbers) or not at all (0) and then drops a blue block at the cursor position, which then falls according to f(d). If you cheated, you get no blue blocks here. The numbers are to be found by applying the hover-hint "list, uniquify, relativity" to the word list which is presented after the completion of the tests.
var jMax=d[0].length-1;
for (var i=d.length-1; i>0; i--){
for (var j=jMax; j>=0; j--){
if (!d[i][j]&&d[i-1][j]&&((j>0&&!d[i][j-1])||(j<jMax&&!d[i][j+1])||(j==0&&!d[i-1][1])||(j==jMax&&!d[i-1][j-1]))){
d[i][j]=true;
d[i-1][j]=false;
}
}
}
Mathematical proofs are FACTS
Mathematical proofs are constructed of facts, but their purpose is not to be, but to explain and verify. In an article, you might refer to a research paper or a historic document to show that the described fact is actually correct, and even though that paper/document is factual itself, it has no place in an encyclopedia. It is a reference. The provable fact is the object of an encyclopedia, not the proof (except where the proof itself is notable and has its own article.)
Mathematical proofs are arguments, not facts. An encyclopedia should list provable facts with references. There are some notable methods of proving something (e.g. proof by induction), but an applied generic proof method or a "handcrafted" proof for a single problem is just an argument and should only be included if it adds insight beyond the proven fact.
My solution: Avoid looking at your own old code. It's a bit like looking at pictures of yourself in 70s/80s/90s clothes. What the hell was I thinking? If you extrapolate from that experience, it hits you hard: The current code sucks too, and the clothes don't compensate for that any more than they did back then.
You really have a problem when you look at your old code and clothes and find nothing wrong with them. Of course, if you're sufficiently famous, that's called "style."
The way this would work is quite simple: Google classifies all sites. So when you tell it that you like or dislike one site, Google adjusts the weight of the classes to which the site belongs in your profile. When you search, Google uses your personal class weights as one parameter of the ranking algorithm. For example, if you search for "mercedes" and "thumb down" price comparison sites, and then search for "canon", Google won't show you price comparison sites on the first page, even if they are not the same sites which compare car prices (so you haven't demoted them specifically yet.)
Have they accounted for the image benefit of the "I'm feeling lucky" button? Would Google have as many users for normal searches if that button were not there? Accounting will make everything look bad if you tell them to.
If it doesn't involve humans, it's not a "social norm".
...
Yawn. It does involve humans, but not human intervention. Reading comprehension: work on it.
When "permission" is "granted" to complete a TCP connection, for example, tells you nothing about the intent of the person who setup the server on the other end.
Again, it doesn't have to. Implicit permission through indistinguishability is sufficient. If that is not in line with the intent of the owner, it's the owner's fault. Some people are just too dense to understand that. If you don't want to provide public internet access, DON'T. If your access point looks like an open access point, it will be used like an open access point and only an idiot would expect differently.
it's OK for a systems administrator with root-level access to read other people's email, because there's an "absence of access controls" for him.
No, the user has access controls, the root user just has the power to access these files regardless. If the admin ignores the relevant set of file permissions, he needs explicit permission (which is usually granted in a contract.) I can crack WEP in minutes and access a WEP protected network like any user who has the key. The access controls are still there and I am therefore not allowed to do that (and I don't).
people acting like selfish arseholes.
Let me know with how taking a few things off the shelves at that store and walking out goes.
You're being intentionally dense.
implicit (through well-established social norms) permission
The implicit permission is established by a social norm, which takes into account that the person who is supposed to follow that norm must have a reasonable chance to recognize what is expected of him. If your garden looks just like the park that it borders on and there is no sign or fence to tell people that it is private property, then no social norm and no law forbids people to enter your garden. If the entrance to your house looks like an art gallery front and people wander in through the open door, they are not breaking any rules and they are firmly within the social norm as well.
Apparently, however, the whole world changes when dealing with computers.
Apparently it does. People like you seem to have a problem with the fact that the firmly established social norms around computers don't always involve human intervention and often rely on machine-readable rather than human-readable information. It is standard that the absence of access controls implies permission to use the service. That is not only a sensible and long established social norm - where legislators have a clue it's also codified in law. Apparently you don't just want people who install computers with open services to be exempt from having to follow the established norms, you want to give them the right to lash out at others for not tiptoeing around their misconfigured access points.
Nothing in any of my arguments suggests reducing the utility of intentionally free wifi networks
If you really don't understand this by now, you need to work on your reading comprehension, a lot.
given all wifi networks use the same frequencies - so you're saying private ones are abusing it as well)
Private networks use the resource as defined by the standard and in accordance with established networking norms. They use their share of bandwidth, but don't unnecessarily keep others from using bandwidth in different ways. People who want that human interaction is required before a connection may be established do prevent others from using the resource for automatic connections, unnecessarily and contrary to standard behaviour in computer networks.
that tells you _nothing_ about the intent of the person who owns that network.
It doesn't have to tell me anything, because the intent is irrelevant if a normal interaction doesn't give me a chance to know that I'm not welcome. Looking like a publicly accessible wireless LAN implies permission to connect, just as looking like a store implies permission to enter.
it promotes the idea that people should assume if they don't have permission to use someone else's property, they shouldn't.
That would be a catastrophic thing to tell people, because we interact with other people's property based solely on implicit or automatic permission all the time. You could hardly set foot in a city otherwise. It's even clearer with wireless networks, because you are taking a piece of PUBLIC property and refuse to cooperate with other people who are in the same space. It is not hard to clearly state your intent, but you insist on reducing the usefulness of the technology just so that you can keep using a public frequency band without bothering about the conventions of the medium. That is truly impolite and disrespectful.
Can we please stay on topic? If you can't tell that you're on private property or you can reasonably assume that you're welcome on private property, you're not trespassing. I'm arguing that it is reasonable to assume that you're welcome to have your computer automatically connect to open wireless access points, because to a computer they look exactly like intentionally open access points.
You've already spent numerous posts telling me that you consider an unsecured WAP to be explicitly giving you permission to connect and use any services you can find through it.
No I didn't. I explained that the implicit permission is sufficient, because that's the only practical way to operate computer networks in general and wireless networks in particular. I did not argue that the legislators in every part of the world have enough of a clue to understand that, but that in many places it isn't just moral but also perfectly legal to rely on this implicit permission.
I also explained that requiring explicit access permission by law is a strategic mistake because it leaves more people vulnerable in the long run by hiding the fact that in even more places the law does not even attempt to protect these people from passive eavesdropping.
Would you similarly argue you can only have someone charged with trespassing if you have a fence ?
You can indeed not charge someone with trespass if it was not obvious to him that he was on private property and not welcome. If your house has an entrance like an art gallery or a shop, and people wander in, you can tell them to leave and then they have to leave, but you can't charge them with trespass just because they came into your house.
Ask yourself this: if you were using someone's unsecured WAP and they asked you to stop, would you ?
If I am interactively using my computer at that time, I probably would, because I am a polite person. I would also tell them to enable encryption so that their network is secure and my computer could avoid their network in the future.