4 ms·

"Until event X, doing <thing that X demonstrated was bad> was not considered controversial" is an explanation of behavior, but not really a defense.

• marcoperaza 7y ago
  Negligence, recklessness, knowledge, or purposefulness are probably the only way actions can be wrongful. To have acted negligently, you at least ought to have known that it carried an unacceptable risk. So you need a story on how it was at least negligent and why they ought to have known the risk before releasing the product.[0] Mere causation can’t get you there. E.g. when a car hits a pedestrian, the driver and pedestrian equally “caused” the accident. It is only by way of characterizing their behaviors in one of the ways above that we can identify wrongdoing. Perhaps the driver wasn’t paying attention (negligent or reckless) and ran a red light. Or perhaps the pedestrian was intentionally throwing themselves in front of traffic. Etc. [0] Products liability law on its surface does eschew the moral-wrongdoing requirement in favor of strict liability for some kinds of product defects. But that has to do with economic incentives, practical ability to prove claims, etc.
• rayiner 7y ago
  Here, chip makers never promised to prevent X. Maybe preventing X is desirable now that people do Y, but you can hardly blame them for not preventing something they didn’t promise to prevent.
  • shawnz 7y ago
    They promised to develop general purpose chips which can meet as many desktop computing needs as possible, which now implicitly includes need Y (but they didn't anticipate that at the time). They could of course just reject the necessity of need Y, but if the majority of their clients actually do have need Y, can it really be said that the chip is successful at being general purpose?
    • rat9988 7y ago
      Yeah you can. Because the chip provides capabilities so you can do such protections in software if you want, or get more speed if you don't want.