Spending two weeks in a hotel room with all the amenities you can imagine (Contact to your beloved ones, television, internet access) is in no way comparable to solitary confinement, especially given the short time and the fact that you know when it will end. The gp comment is incredibly tone deaf.
I disagree that its tone deaf. Most of the comments here are talking about prisons. In prison inmates get television, board games, telephone access, recreational activities, visits, and more. It's on the same topic most everyone is discussing.
As for solitary confinement, no one gets assigned there directly. There would have to be a specific and documented reason, in this day and age particularly, why someone is placed there after ending up in a prison.
Yet even within the US there's an increasing number of (work)places where whites are no longer a majority or are at a disadvantage, as the article states.
More like strangers taking pictures of you without your consent (and often knowledge) with the intent to increase their profits and not sharing any of that with you.
Ethically, neither your consent or knowledge is required for someone to see you in public and remember that image. Why they do it isn't really relevant. If they use that image to do something unethical, like commit fraud, it is the fraud that is unethical, not the imaging.
I think many people would disagree. It might be legal, but that doesn't mean it's not unethical.
If a stranger on the street started following me, taking pictures without permission, and taking notes about my appearance of actions and storing it in their database, I would say he was behaving unethically.
Ask street photographers - it's a delicate balance. Many people really dislike having their pictures taken without their permission.
How does this compare to the pre-automation practice mentioned above of cashiers manually making a tally of how many men/women of each age group were visiting?
I mean, this is literally the "global village" coming to fruition. The online shopkeeper knows you just as well as a shopkeeper in a real village - it knows who you are, it remembers all your previous visits, it knows your hobbies (even if you didn't tell him about them, but someone else in the village), it can make suggestions based on that.
When you buy flowers, the village shopkeeper knows not only who's buying them, but also has a good idea for whom these flowers are intended. That's where we're heading.
This is the level of (non)privacy that we historically had, living in much smaller communities than modern cities. The trend of more anonymity brought by urbanization is reversing, but it's not something new or horrible, if anything, the possibility of being just another face in the crowd is an anomaly that existed for a (historically) short time and is slowly coming to an end once more.
That is a lot of words to simply say that some people think it is unethical. Which is an essentially empty statement. Couldn't you at least say most people and make it an argumentum ad populum?
lawful and ethical are two totally different things. They are both related but are mutually exclusive of each other
ethical != opinion
Ethical has weight and you can lose your job, and even go to jail for being unethical. RMS actually has a very strong academic ethical mind (Even though I disagree with him more then agree). BUT ethics isn't easily defined.
Until relatively recently, unavailability of large stockpiles of consumer data (at least, stockpiles at the scale now possible) was a significant impediment to a large and probably mostly-undiscovered class of potentially unethical behavior. Do you not suppose the removal of that impediment, with no other equally powerful compensatory regulations or oversight, to at least potentially be a serious problem now or at any time in the future?
Until relatively recently, unavailability of large stockpiles of consumer data (at least, stockpiles at the scale now possible) was a significant impediment to a large and probably mostly-undiscovered class of potentially ethical behavior, as well as behavior that actively combats unethical behavior. Data itself is amoral and can be used for either good or bad.
In 1991, Israel evacuated 14325 Ethiopian Jews in 36 hours using 35 aircraft, with up to 1122 passengers on a plane [1]. It's such an impressive feat, those must have been some of the best pilots, to be able to fly such an overcrowded plane (even though they stripped the seats from the planes it was probably still overloaded)
Not to knock the accomplishment but to be fair, the passengers were really light (confirmed according to article).
This comment sent me on a journey to find obesity data on Ethiopia and I found this ranked list that tied back to the CIA factbook as source and places them next to last (currently): http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?c=et&v=2228
Yeah, people are about the density of water but even an isle full of people isn't enough to be too meaningful to an airliner. The only times it may be a problem would be a short runway with a full fuel load at altitude. Airliner are typically flown well within it's performance limits. No airline would allow a flight plan that's close to the maximum performance of the aircraft since it would be a recipe for disaster in addition to hard on equipment.
Keeping the cargo secure and the wrench that extra passengers throws into emergency procedures is the real issue here.
I've heard that Boeing 747 airplanes have enough lift to fly properly (if not land properly) with their fuselages full of water. They are in service as fuel tankers.
Still, it's a bad idea to prang an airplane with a few hundred people in the aisles, so pilot skill is important.
