EFF Files Brief in Case to Hold IBM Responsible for Facilitating Apartheid

Ah. I stand corrected.

my opinions are based on my observations. i observe companies being immoral all the time. there are a few notable exceptions - i think google are generally good, tesla, valve, recently (and only recently) microsoft, maybe some others.

bear in mind, throughout my replies, i've given various (uncited, but i believe easily verifiable) examples of why i believe what i believe.

> Expecting people to donate time to teach you the subject is pure entitlement.

no, i expect people who engage in HN comments to engage in discussion. i've expressed my opinion. if you disagree with it, i expect that you explain why, or to say nothing. dismissing me as ignorant because i don't have a background in business ethics is not an explanation.

> Read the SEP article. It's very easy to understand. Section 2.1 - the very first body section

your arrogance is becoming outrageous.

i did read section 2.1, here are some things it said-

> If the corporation is a legal person, is it also a moral person? Anglo-American law takes no explicit position on this...

ok, so no legal position on the "morality" of a company.

> ... Thus, for French, corporations are both legal and moral persons, and hence moral agents in their own right.

ok, French seems to think they are. on the other hand, Velasquez has a different opinion -

> Attributing moral agency to corporations opens the door to the intuitively implausible conclusion that a corporation can be morally responsible for something no natural person connected with it is responsible for.

so, really, you're asserting that corporations are moral, citing this article as proof, when in fact, (at least in the section you have directed me to) the law makes no statement, and there appears to be no general consensus on the matter.

> and should at least give you pause in publicly asserting they are not.

indeed.

"The use of punched cards in the Jacquard loom influenced Charles Babbage, who decided to use punched cards to control the sequence of computations in his proposed analytical engine. Unlike Hollerith's cards of 50 years later, which were handled in decks like playing cards, Babbage's punched cards were to be strung together like Jaquard's. Despite this and the fact that he never actually built an analytical engine, Babbage's proposed use of cards played a crucial role in later years, providing a precident that prevented Hollerith's company (and its successors) from claiming patent rights on the very idea of storing data on punched cards."

http://www.adbranch.com/how-ibm-helped-automate-the-nazi-dea...

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Art...

"Auschwitz historians were originally convinced that there were no machines at Auschwitz, that all the prisoner documents were processed at a remote location, primarily because they could find no trace of the equipment in the area. They even speculated that the stamped forms from Auschwitz III were actually punched at the massive Hollerith service at Mauthausen concentration camp. Indeed, even the Farben Hollerith documents had been identified some time ago at Auschwitz, but were not understood as IBM printouts. That is, not until the Hollerith Büro itself was discovered. Archivists only found the Büro because it was listed in the I.G. Werk Auschwitz phone book on page 50. The phone extension was 4496. "I was looking for something else," recalls Auschwitz' Setkiewicz, "and there it was." Once the printouts were reexamined in the light of IBM punch card revelations, the connection became clear."

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/census-tabulator...

"And in this day and age of high resolution bitmapped displays with millions of colors, driven by the supercomputer-crushing performance of modern graphics hardware, your xterm window emulates an 80 column VT100 in order to provide some semblance of compatibility with 80 column Hollerith punched cards that date to the 1920s and were common on the IBM 1604."

http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/cardint.htm

Windows command prompts and xterm windows have a default width whose lineage traces back to 1801 (or earlier if the loom's history is considered).

It is painful to learn how our industry (software and computational hardware) can and have been abused for such unfathomably despicable, misguided purposes.

The 4th Prime Minister of Malaysia; that's who. ;)