Word: punch
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...according to Black's book and the lawsuit, was responsible for punch card technology used by Nazi demographers in the years leading up to World War II - and eventually by the SS, which was charged with rounding up Europe's Jews. Although it has long been known that IBM's German arm, which was taken over by the Nazis, had cooperated with the regime - and, indeed, was in a consortium of companies making payments to survivors and victims' families - Black says that the American parent was fully aware of the use to which the technology was put. And after...
...punch cards and counting machines, says Black, were provided to Hitler's government as early as 1933, and were probably used in the Nazis' first official census that year. The technology came in handy again in 1939 when the government conducted another census, this time with the explicit goal of identifying and locating German Jews - and finally, Black alleges, in tracking records at Nazi concentration camps...
...William Seltzer, an expert in demographic statistics at Fordham University, that provides the most damning evidence. "Microsoft is not responsible for every spreadsheet made with Excel," Seltzer told TIME.com. "But if someone is doing custom designing of a database, they have to know what's going on. With these punch cards, Dehomag had to design a card for every piece of new information that the government wanted...
...business climate as to that of 50 years ago. "One, we have to recognize that technology is morally neutral, but how we use it is not. Two, professional zeal and bureaucratic opportunism can easily blind people. IBM wasn't interested in ideology or patriotism; when they developed those punch cards, the company had something they were very proud of. And so they closed their eyes and jumped in. They pretended not to see anything but the business opportunities ahead of them...
...That's the worldview of Kitano's crime films, where life is to die for and death is a punch line. Could any view be bleaker?or, in the hands of a master showman, more rudely entertaining? For TV's Beat Takeshi and the movies' Takeshi Kitano are halves of the same protean artist. One does anything for a laugh; the other dares the audience not to laugh at the spectacle of man annihilating himself and his species for the sake of a rusty old word like honor...