I'm with Miss Cellania - it's not like there was no warning what it was about.

Plus I for one have heard/read about all of these stories in the past, and i appreciated the compilation being treated with a little lightheartedness. Gets the point across (be thankful for what you have) without being as depressing as these illustrations really could be.

cannon shot - specifically, bar shot

I think it's unnecessarily insulting to say anyone who thinks it isn't stealing is just trying to justify their own criminal activity.
We don't need or use other people's unsecured wifi and secure our own for the ip responsibility reasons listed above, but if we trusted or didn't care what people did with our signal we'd leave it open.
As for the ISP, they are selling you wifi at a certain level of bandwidth. As long as you (or the people you let use your service) don't exceed that, i think they really shouldn't have any reason to complain.
I understand the ISP or local laws may say otherwise, but the question wasn't whether it's legal - just whether it's moral.
As long as you're not hijacking a secured signal, it should be reasonable to assume you are welcome to use it. I also agree that if iSPs don't want their signal shared they should require password protection as part of the setup.

Personally i have no problem with people using unsecured wifi. If someone doesn't want other people using it, it's a simple matter to password-protect it.

We secure our wifi because we feel we would be partially morally responsible if someone used our signal to do something reprehensible online - somewhat akin to giving booze to an alcoholic, but that's a personal choice.

That being said, it's unlikely someone piggybacking on your signal is going to inconvenience you in any way.

And finally i would say telling people it's illegal to use open wifi is like saying it's illegal to listen to copyrighted music playing on a loudspeaker or reading a billboard asking someone else to marry someone. It's public and therefore fair game.

I'm pretty sure it's just an "if keys were religious figures, this is who they'd be" kind of thing. You know, like what kind of drug various social networking sites are equivalent to? Just my impression. I actually thought it was pretty amusing.

I live near the Evergreen Aviation museum in Oregon, home of the Spruce Goose. When you go into the plane and listen to the tour guide they'll tell you the very same story about the ice cream, complete with the names of some of the people who were involved in the purchase. I don't know if that counts as confirmed, but they oughta know. :-)