people will do what they do, the only real law is "don't get caught". people learn ethics as they get older, meaning that when we are at school, we usually have less ethics than when we are older. This does not apply across the board, example, X11 seems much more responsible than some who have posted here, most recently whiteboy, who is eleven years' X11's senior, but is sorely lacking in graciousness and consideration. There are in fact tons of older people with no ethics at all. that's not my point, my point is that you can do what you like, but if you do things that are illegal or immoral and so on, then you will probably (and you should) get caught and have to face the consequences. This in itself will probably affect your social development, but the important thing is that if you do something you might get caught at, you have to be prepared to get caught.
Too many people these days do stuff, get caught, and are really bitter about it, because they think it's their right to break the law, sometimes it is, or should be, but often they are just infringing on someone else's rights and that is not fair. Don't fall into the trap of getting caught, and then resenting it. I think that the start of good ethics is to take responsibility for your actions.
on another note, i do actually use puttytel to connect to my shell account, it is the bollocks when compared with telnet, which i think i have only used once, on my flatmate's win98 machine. I was only using the word 'telnet' as a generic verb rather than to describe the program i was using (at the risk of sounding pedantic!). Thanks for the advice though, as always much appreciated.
I don't think i want to be able to use an X session though, as i am at a point now where i am trying to gain a thorough grounding in the amazing 32bit command line and a GUI would just distract me.
