Human morality is relative, but it isn't absolutely relative. It's based in animal instinct, and that instinct is constant even if it's not equally strong in everyone or potentially distorted by neurobiological disorders or injury. These religions have heaped needless made-up constructs on top of these. Also, living in relative poverty might have a lot to do with it.

Also, you've got a great set of metal lyrics going there.

It's available as a PDF from their site. I downloaded it and skimmed through a few bits, it looks nicely written and seems to contain concrete advice.

You apparently can use spider silk for cloth if you really try hard enough. (Warning: NSF arachnophobes.)

He doesn't seem mentally incompetent to me. It might be that he's stress-sensitive and unable to socially interact like a normal person, but Asperger syndrome doesn't affect moral perception as such. IANAL/IANAP, but I don't think this crime is remotely excusable in a legal sense by his condition even if he "lives in his own little world". Removing moral agency from individuals like that willy-nilly, especially for such a fluid and vaugely defined condition, seems inappropriate.

There's not much, of course. I was gunning more for the admins of the system rather than trying to imply that McKinnon is somehow innocent of a crime. However, if he broke into a military base or contractors facility using a wire cutter to look for UFOs I'd personally view it as roughly equivalent to his current actions in a moral/ethical sense.

Yes they did. Not to be an arrogant asshole but that's literally 80'ies security, people dialing in to networks and poking around. Whomever was responsible for setting up those networks had to know about the concept of wardialing or they'd be completely incompetent. Any system that can be broken into using a war dialer/port scanner and an appropriate brute-force program is insecure. We all know what happens to a server with an internet-visible SSH daemon that password-auths guessable username/password combinations, right?

And the door analogy breaks down quite fast, because most doors/locks AFAIK isn't designed to protect against actual burglary - real burglars mostly just smash a window or drill the lock open, or so I've read.

As for what he did, if the guards of a military base suddenly waltzes off for hookers and blow and some random nut looking for UFO's wanders in and peeks about the hangars before getting caught, would this even be an issue? Or would it just be laughed off?

No, you aren't. Personally I think this is because of the violence/power aspect - when someone asserts power over someone else by hacking/ddosing/whatever then the gut instinct is to counterattack and put them down. In the case of 'Script Kiddie", by accusing them of being ignorant idiots and so forth, whereas some people apparently might respect an adversary if he's powerful or skilled enough. If you aren't asserting power like that then the put-down aspect doesn't enter into the equation.

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