Program logic bugs vs input/environmental errors

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 3 October 2014 at 19:05:51 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> But it is a business decision whether it is better to take 
> amazon.com off the network for a week or just let their search 
> engine occasionally serve food instead of books as search 
> results. Not an engineering decision.
>
> It is a business decision whether it is better for a game to 
> corrupt 1% of user accounts and let customer support manually 
> build them back up than to take the game off the network until 
> the problem is fixed. You would probably have heavier load on 
> customer support and loose more subscriptions by taking the 
> game off the network than giving those 1% one year of free game 
> play as a compensation.

The thing is, the privilege to make that kind of business 
decision is wholly dependent on the fact that there are no 
meaningful safety issues involved.

Compare that to the case of the Ford Pinto.  The allegation made 
was that Ford had preferred to risk paying out lawsuits to 
injured drivers over fixing a design flaw responsible for those 
(serious) injuries, because a cost-benefit analysis had shown the 
payouts were cheaper than rolling out the fix.  This allegation 
was rightly met with outrage, and severe punitive damages in 
court.