In physical 'hacking' if you don't make any effort to secure your valuables, you can't claim they were stolen. I wonder why it is different with virtual valuables?
It would be more like "I leave my front door open, and you walk in and take a photograph".
Also, I believe that the voicemail "hackers" also deleted some voicemails, and in that case something was indeed taken.
By your logic, just because I didn't password protect it, doesn't mean it's legal open for you to load in a browser.
If you run foo.com, and you open it to the public, then you have made the decision to allow the public to use it. You've got a DNS record that tells the world they're welcome to access your site. On the other hand, if I sit outside your house and use your open WiFi to scan for computers inside your house with open ports, I'm probably committing a crime. If you have not made your desktop machine public, my accessing it is almost certainly against your wishes.
The difference is only expectation. Some folks have the expectation that voicemail is as private as, for instance, an answering machine. Which is clearly not the case if you are technically savvy, which I'm thinking a judge is not.
I'm not sure how you think an answering machine is different from voicemail. I can access my answering machine from any phone in the universe, too, or at least I could if this was still 1995. Voicemail is just an answering machine than handles a lot of telephone lines.
Edit: bins == trash (sorry was thinking in anglicisms)
It does seem bizarre, doesn't it? Sometimes petty legal issues are resolved using precedent and it can seem arbitrary, probably because it is.
For instance, its accepted in the US that in a rear-end collision its the car in back that is at fault. In Austria I've been told the car in front is at fault!
Both sides could be argued. But like in baseball with the infield-fly rule, a rule gets made to settle it once and for all, and it is really arbitrary.
What on Earth are you talking about? That phone was still the property of Apple. Gizmodo's blogger was investigated for involvement in felony theft. Leaving your property does not stop it from being your property. If someone finds your property and refuses to return it (or in some cases simply neglects to turn it into the police), they are guilty of a crime.