I feel the opposite. I don't think it's unethical, even if it might be illegal.

Even calling this "bandwidth theft" is quite the hyperbole—if the server can't handle the bandwidth, then rate limit the requests.

I think if you're serving out pages to the public, you don't really get to tell me what kind of browser I'm allowed to download it with. As long as I'm speaking HTTP, it seems fair.

Sadly, that law has been slowly creeping against this mentality... Lately I feel like I'm some old internet hippy with these views. On a site called "Hacker News", no less.