"I develop open source AI software and I really don't like poofs, and emailed RMS once about modifying the GPL to include a provision that no queers should be allowed to use the software. The simple fact is that fags would gladly use AI software to figure out how to make all children of the world suck their filthy knobs. RMS replied that I should fuck off on account of being an idiot"
Ya see, philosophically, a bias is a bias. You may feel that your objection to the military is "objectively" valid, and someone may feel that his homophobia is objective.
You'd both be wrong, both being merely biased fools. Do not be upset when others find your point of view far less convincing than you do.
While it's great to hear positive user reviews about the software, I think I am suspicious of the fact that it took you 10 minutes to complete the process. It sounds like you've got a very simple tax case, in which case any software will do fine.
BTW: for simple cases, under certain levels of income (about 25k I think) you can do your taxes for free on TurboTax.com (or could do it in years past, anyway)
Now here's the deal. I was a dependant for half of 2003, but then I got a full time job in May. I was a resident of NYC for half of that year, and half of the year I was not. I have a W2, and some 1099's. Some business expenses. Some charitable donations. I paid for college. I invested in a 401k....
With these more complex tax situations, it's not going to take you 10 minutes to file no matter what software you use. In fact, in the past I noticed that after all the permutations, where was no way that TurboTax and TaxCut agreed on how much my return should be
(I was running TaxCut on the PC and TurboTax on the website, they've got their full version on the website and it's free around to fuck around with, just costs money to file once you're ready)
I believe that last year, TaxCut gave me a better refund. It's just a question of what items of the tax law the software is aware of. I certainly know fuck-all about it. Until Tax Cut asked me whether I had put more miles on my car for business purposes than I did for going to the store (something of that nature anyway) I didn't know that shit would have any relevance to my tax return whatsoever.
If you have a tax situation of any complexity, using the right software makes financial difference. If all you've got is a W2 then you're probably OK using any of them.
I'd like to see some feedback as to who had a good experience with any of these programs when it came to tax nuance.
I dunno who modded you Interesting. Every time a spam thread comes up someone says "don't even opt out, it let'em know they got a live one" so it's not really interesting to me to hear the same concept rehashed. But you're the lucky winner because I am going to respond.
When I worked for a small online retailer (college days) we decided it may be a good idea to do an e-mail promotion and e-mail all of our past customers (people we've actualy done business with) to let them know of our new sale or whatever it was. We got something like 80% responses back as unsubscribes, which pretty much kept us from doing anything like that again.
Surely there are entities out there who will use an unsubscribe as a confirmation of validity. There are others, like the company I worked for, who will take it as a directive not to mail this person anymore, and there's got to be a percentage of time where using that link indeed works.
Re versioning directory structures: If I rename the directory "a" to be called "b", and do a commit, I want people who do an update to suddenly have "a" renamed to "b" -- with all their local changes still intact. Subversion does it, Arch does it, CVS won't.
Interesting point. I think it doesn't come up much because when people learn how to use CVS one of the basic things they learn is that you pick your dir hirearchy before you start, because it's not going to be easy to change. What CVS really is, is RCS with a directory being a unit. Since the directory in CVS is the main point of reference, so to speak, it is consistant with the intent that you can't just rename a directory the way you want to. It certainly is a limitation on CVS at the core level.
Cvs is a completely useless tool... unless you need it.
I first encountered CVS in college, where a prof made us submit one of our projects as a CVS root. The purpose was to introduce us to the concept of revision control, but it didn't make an impact on me because I was developing on my own in an incremental fashion and it wasn't necessary to go back versions.
Then I woked at a place where I worked a few days a week and someone worked other days on the same project and we kept steping on each other's toes in terms of changes we made to production software, until it hit me that revision control is exactly what's needed to streamline the process. No more lost or overwritten changes, no morre being unsure what the other guy's done.
then i worked on large but individual project, and i started using VSS (this was a windows based proj, the prior proj that I put in CVS was on Unix) and I figured that it would just make a whole lot of sense for me to be able to see what it is that I've been doing, and to roll back changes if needed. This came in very useful since the code was, again, developed incrementally so occasionally it would happen that "the release from 10 days ago worked great, but the software from today does add the new feature that you said it does but it also brike something else". with CVS (or VSS in this case) I could see exactly what the difference was between releases and pinpoint the source of the problem much quicker.
At my current job, there's about 10 people working from the same CVS tree, with weekly builds becoming branches. W/O CVS we'd be completely fucked and disorganized. Developing the same software between 10 people is complex enough, if we kept fucking up each others changes it'd be a lot worse.
The point I intended to make but digressed is that there's no point trying to study CVS. If zipping up a verion works for you, then you don't need CVS. The way I seem to work with revision control is when i realize I have some need (for example, to see differences between 2 versions of 1 file, or to see which files have changed in the last 5 days) I go ahead and figure out how to do it w. CVS. Realizing WHAT you want to do is the first step. Figuring out HOW to do it follows.
For college recruits: are you the best and the brightest of your class, having also shown motivation outside of school. If so, this is an indicator that you will be able to do what is required for you.
For more senior hires: what, based on your past experience, have you got to offer that's going to make us a more effecient, productive, competitive firm? And you better be able to talk about designs you've produced and your problem solving technique.
I am a former Anderson employee. Never had been interviewd by anyone stupid enough to think that I, in my position, had anything to do with the scandal. Unless your job is in accounting or you're the former CEO, no one is going to think you're the cause of the troubles. If they ask why you didn't immediately leave, just say that you were comited to the project you were working on and did not want to abandon your manager and team mates just because the company was going through hard times. Be sure to highlight the success of your team/division and shift the conversation from having to defend your former employer, and maybe make it sound like you have some commitment to your work in the process.
I've in the past built an application that uses Access as a db, using an ODBC::JDBC bridge. My choice for using Access as a db was the correct one given the nature of the application (don't argue design decisions here. Yes, i COULD have told them to convert to Linux and use mySQL. I could also implement it in the way that would be the least pain for the cusomer. I did the later)
Here's what Access has going for it:
1. It's easy, and it's visual. You can start creating tables and entering data w/o knowing anything about how it is stored or retrieved. The beginning class obviously is more concerned with "WHY A DATABASE" not with "HOW." This way the students get to using it right away, with Access being available in all computer labs and on a lot of home pc's.
2. You can use Access to demonstrate what a front-end is. You can easily design Forms in Access through which you can view, enter, and edit your data. When I took a DB class, we designed our front-ends in Java. Those who didn't know Java had a steep learning curve in those projects! For a beginners class, don't confuse them with other stuff. Access makes it simple.
3. Similarly, in Access you can create reports very easily. This shows you ways in which you can GET your data out, w/o having you learn too much technology. You can start joining your tables for example, w/o learning the syntax for the join statement.
These 3 reasons show you why Access is a good choice for teaching people what databases are and what they do.
Now, say you're done with that stuff and you still have time in your course. Guess what, Access has SQL view, in which you can enter your SQL queries using regular syntax. What's more, Access translates gui-made queries into SQL for you. This way you can show people how the stuff they've been using REALLY works. This way you first teach the "WHAT" and only later the "HOW."
Now that you've shown them the WHAT and the HOW, you can explain the WHY. Given the people's current understanding, you can start explaining about ACID and fuzzy dumps and query optimization and all that.
So what, in your opinion, is the disgraceful motivation? To meanly mess with sex offenders?
As anyone who's been in any legal trouble knows, your convictions stay with you. You may be out of jail but you will forever have to answer "yes" on the "have you ever been convicted of a crime" box on all sorts of application. Your jail term is meant to punish you by confiscating months or years of your life. Being released from jail does not mean you start with a clean slate, however, and it does not mean your past transgressions cannot haunt you in unpleasant ways.
The one semi-valid point in your comment is when you point out the difference between convicted car thieves vs. that of convicted sexual offenders. I think the point you make there is not w/o merit but I have, off the top of my head, come up with a justification for the different treatment.
When you steal a car, it's not because you're sick. It's just a straight-forward personal gain crime. When you kill someone, it could also be a crime of that nature, or it could be because you're sick. In the later case you're going to be in a mental institution until you're deemed cured. In terms of sexual assault, it's never a for-gain crime, but it's not easy to draw a line between a rapist who's truly fucked up in the head and one who was just a horny asshole. Personally, I think there's usually a mental component when someone commits a sexual assault but obviously not all these convicts receive mental treatment as opposed to regular jail time.
The bottom line is if you hang out with a former car thief, it doesn't raise your chances of having your car stolen. On the other hand, if you have your son hang out with someone who has previously been compelled by some inner instinct to have sex with a young boy... you're probably better off knowing. If there is no way for you to know that it's not a good idea for your kids to hang out with the person accross the street, the government truly has no way to release these people. Releasing them but marking them as people you should be weary about is a fair compromise. Just like any other convict goes through his life with people being weary of him whenever he fills out that questionaire.
And finally, as far as making such information public - I think that if there's one group of society that doesn't need to worry about identity theft, it is convicted sex offenders.
Cars currently have plenty of electronics that affect critical components such as fuel injection. Windows will apparently be running non critical components like the CD player.
You're right in that I didn't read the article. However, IIRC the comment I am responding to said something along the lines of "oh no they're going to fire someone for being anti-social" - which is not the case.
If your company restructures from cubes to open floor and you cannot be productive in that environment, you're not being fired for being anti-social. You and the company are no longer a fit, however. It goes vice-versa too, if a company goes from open floor to cubes, the clastraphobic will be looking to get out since the company no longer fits their working style.
It's a far cry from firing someone because you do not like their social skills.
I think it's silly to argue about the different meanings of a word whose common usage is consistant with the way it was used here, especially given that the study was done (I presume) in Hebrew.
That's a different matter than just not being able to work in a room full of noisy people. The question is - if someone is able to communicate easily and clearly in meetings/lunches/etc., gets on well with co-workers, keeps everyone informed of their progress that needs to be, but needs some peace and quiet to get their work done, is it OK to fire them because you've decided to subject everyone to working in a giant gymnasium?
And how is discrimination based on social skills any different from discrimination based on race, sex, religion, or right-handedness?
It's different because it affects your performance at the job.
Ok let's say you're a big smart genius programmer. But your team mates do not feel comfortable talking to you. Performance suffers because of your inability to communicate with others to ensure that the project is being developed in an optimal way. May be you're so smart and efficient that you've foresaw the necessity to write library X but didn't tell anyone so your coworkers spent a few days developing the same thing, and if they came to let you know of this new development you said "I already got it done jerkwads." All of a sudden the fact that you're brilliant and efficient does not make up for the fact that you're more or less useless to the team due to your attitude and resistance to open communication.
being black, female, hindu, or left-handed does not have the same negative impact.
Okay so you have an office as a code monkey. Is the project you're working on solely yours?
Because if it's not, then your office is nice for you but shitty for your company. If I am on your team and I need to ask you something or discuss something, what hampers communication more than having to get up and knock on your door to seek an audience with you? Chances are it's going to discourage me from asking and hamper communications.
I work in a company where everyone just has a desk and it's great. I can yell a question over to my manager or walk over to the desk of anyone on other teams and discuss how my changes may affect them or discuss ways of implementing something so that it works best for all of us. I can also stop by the desk of anyone in HR and anyone in management, including the CEO (this is a huge firm, too.) Not that I have much to discuss with the CEO but it's great being in a culture where if I really had a question only he could answer I can stop by and ask easily.
Offices work well if you're working on a complete piece of work. For example a newspaper article or something. When you develop software in a place with a thousand and a half programmers, you better be able to communicate with them because chances are everything you do interacts with something they do and know about.
The fact that our managers also have only a desk and are as accessible as any of us more than makes up for inability to whack off to porn behind an office door.
The problem with your "hack" plan is that in involves getting out of your mom's basement and it's not possible to beat off while the hacking is in progress.
If I have a knife and I leave it on a table, and a neighborhood kid comes over and stabs himself in the head, I'll probably get sued (and lose) even though I didn't do the stabbing.
No, not really applicable. If you leave your computer all set to hack something and have a big button on your screen that says "CLICK HERE TO HACK THE PENTAGON" and a child walks in and clicks it, yea you're liable. If you leave your computer on and the child starts coding shit and hacks the pentagon, you're not liable.
Kindof like, if you don't have a good lock on your door and someone breaks in and uses your window as a sniping post and kills the governor, you're not really liable.
Why are programmers designing GUI in the first place? I understand in the open source model the guy's just desinging stuff for himself and if someone else doesn't like it, they can change it to suit their needs, but in the real world of business software, the UI requirements should be mandated to the programmer before the start of the project. Usually the programmer is less in position to know how the users think and use the program than sales people and product managers, so it should really be those guys that draw up GUI and the user experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. It's fine.
Hypothetical Scenario:
"I develop open source AI software and I really don't like poofs, and emailed RMS once about modifying the GPL to include a provision that no queers should be allowed to use the software. The simple fact is that fags would gladly use AI software to figure out how to make all children of the world suck their filthy knobs. RMS replied that I should fuck off on account of being an idiot"
Ya see, philosophically, a bias is a bias. You may feel that your objection to the military is "objectively" valid, and someone may feel that his homophobia is objective.
You'd both be wrong, both being merely biased fools. Do not be upset when others find your point of view far less convincing than you do.
While it's great to hear positive user reviews about the software, I think I am suspicious of the fact that it took you 10 minutes to complete the process. It sounds like you've got a very simple tax case, in which case any software will do fine.
BTW: for simple cases, under certain levels of income (about 25k I think) you can do your taxes for free on TurboTax.com (or could do it in years past, anyway)
Now here's the deal. I was a dependant for half of 2003, but then I got a full time job in May. I was a resident of NYC for half of that year, and half of the year I was not. I have a W2, and some 1099's. Some business expenses. Some charitable donations. I paid for college. I invested in a 401k....
With these more complex tax situations, it's not going to take you 10 minutes to file no matter what software you use. In fact, in the past I noticed that after all the permutations, where was no way that TurboTax and TaxCut agreed on how much my return should be
(I was running TaxCut on the PC and TurboTax on the website, they've got their full version on the website and it's free around to fuck around with, just costs money to file once you're ready)
I believe that last year, TaxCut gave me a better refund. It's just a question of what items of the tax law the software is aware of. I certainly know fuck-all about it. Until Tax Cut asked me whether I had put more miles on my car for business purposes than I did for going to the store (something of that nature anyway) I didn't know that shit would have any relevance to my tax return whatsoever.
If you have a tax situation of any complexity, using the right software makes financial difference. If all you've got is a W2 then you're probably OK using any of them.
I'd like to see some feedback as to who had a good experience with any of these programs when it came to tax nuance.
I dunno who modded you Interesting. Every time a spam thread comes up someone says "don't even opt out, it let'em know they got a live one" so it's not really interesting to me to hear the same concept rehashed. But you're the lucky winner because I am going to respond.
When I worked for a small online retailer (college days) we decided it may be a good idea to do an e-mail promotion and e-mail all of our past customers (people we've actualy done business with) to let them know of our new sale or whatever it was. We got something like 80% responses back as unsubscribes, which pretty much kept us from doing anything like that again.
Surely there are entities out there who will use an unsubscribe as a confirmation of validity. There are others, like the company I worked for, who will take it as a directive not to mail this person anymore, and there's got to be a percentage of time where using that link indeed works.
Re versioning directory structures: If I rename the directory "a" to be called "b", and do a commit, I want people who do an update to suddenly have "a" renamed to "b" -- with all their local changes still intact. Subversion does it, Arch does it, CVS won't.
Interesting point. I think it doesn't come up much because when people learn how to use CVS one of the basic things they learn is that you pick your dir hirearchy before you start, because it's not going to be easy to change. What CVS really is, is RCS with a directory being a unit. Since the directory in CVS is the main point of reference, so to speak, it is consistant with the intent that you can't just rename a directory the way you want to. It certainly is a limitation on CVS at the core level.
Cvs is a completely useless tool ... unless you need it.
I first encountered CVS in college, where a prof made us submit one of our projects as a CVS root. The purpose was to introduce us to the concept of revision control, but it didn't make an impact on me because I was developing on my own in an incremental fashion and it wasn't necessary to go back versions.
Then I woked at a place where I worked a few days a week and someone worked other days on the same project and we kept steping on each other's toes in terms of changes we made to production software, until it hit me that revision control is exactly what's needed to streamline the process. No more lost or overwritten changes, no morre being unsure what the other guy's done.
then i worked on large but individual project, and i started using VSS (this was a windows based proj, the prior proj that I put in CVS was on Unix) and I figured that it would just make a whole lot of sense for me to be able to see what it is that I've been doing, and to roll back changes if needed. This came in very useful since the code was, again, developed incrementally so occasionally it would happen that "the release from 10 days ago worked great, but the software from today does add the new feature that you said it does but it also brike something else". with CVS (or VSS in this case) I could see exactly what the difference was between releases and pinpoint the source of the problem much quicker.
At my current job, there's about 10 people working from the same CVS tree, with weekly builds becoming branches. W/O CVS we'd be completely fucked and disorganized. Developing the same software between 10 people is complex enough, if we kept fucking up each others changes it'd be a lot worse.
The point I intended to make but digressed is that there's no point trying to study CVS. If zipping up a verion works for you, then you don't need CVS. The way I seem to work with revision control is when i realize I have some need (for example, to see differences between 2 versions of 1 file, or to see which files have changed in the last 5 days) I go ahead and figure out how to do it w. CVS. Realizing WHAT you want to do is the first step. Figuring out HOW to do it follows.
In my company, the selection is basically this:
For college recruits: are you the best and the brightest of your class, having also shown motivation outside of school. If so, this is an indicator that you will be able to do what is required for you.
For more senior hires: what, based on your past experience, have you got to offer that's going to make us a more effecient, productive, competitive firm? And you better be able to talk about designs you've produced and your problem solving technique.
I am a former Anderson employee. Never had been interviewd by anyone stupid enough to think that I, in my position, had anything to do with the scandal. Unless your job is in accounting or you're the former CEO, no one is going to think you're the cause of the troubles. If they ask why you didn't immediately leave, just say that you were comited to the project you were working on and did not want to abandon your manager and team mates just because the company was going through hard times. Be sure to highlight the success of your team/division and shift the conversation from having to defend your former employer, and maybe make it sound like you have some commitment to your work in the process.
Store them in the recycle bin ("trash" if a mac user)
Or, if you're from the Prof. Pawagi school of pronounciation, John Von Neumann sounds like "nine one one"
I've in the past built an application that uses Access as a db, using an ODBC::JDBC bridge. My choice for using Access as a db was the correct one given the nature of the application (don't argue design decisions here. Yes, i COULD have told them to convert to Linux and use mySQL. I could also implement it in the way that would be the least pain for the cusomer. I did the later)
Here's what Access has going for it:
1. It's easy, and it's visual. You can start creating tables and entering data w/o knowing anything about how it is stored or retrieved. The beginning class obviously is more concerned with "WHY A DATABASE" not with "HOW." This way the students get to using it right away, with Access being available in all computer labs and on a lot of home pc's.
2. You can use Access to demonstrate what a front-end is. You can easily design Forms in Access through which you can view, enter, and edit your data. When I took a DB class, we designed our front-ends in Java. Those who didn't know Java had a steep learning curve in those projects! For a beginners class, don't confuse them with other stuff. Access makes it simple.
3. Similarly, in Access you can create reports very easily. This shows you ways in which you can GET your data out, w/o having you learn too much technology. You can start joining your tables for example, w/o learning the syntax for the join statement.
These 3 reasons show you why Access is a good choice for teaching people what databases are and what they do.
Now, say you're done with that stuff and you still have time in your course. Guess what, Access has SQL view, in which you can enter your SQL queries using regular syntax. What's more, Access translates gui-made queries into SQL for you. This way you can show people how the stuff they've been using REALLY works. This way you first teach the "WHAT" and only later the "HOW."
Now that you've shown them the WHAT and the HOW, you can explain the WHY. Given the people's current understanding, you can start explaining about ACID and fuzzy dumps and query optimization and all that.
perhaps since the dot-com bubble? ..... people are answering web-forms and uploading files all the way.
.com experience and uploading their resumes, yea!
Filling out forms about their
why don't you use emacs for email?
So what, in your opinion, is the disgraceful motivation? To meanly mess with sex offenders?
As anyone who's been in any legal trouble knows, your convictions stay with you. You may be out of jail but you will forever have to answer "yes" on the "have you ever been convicted of a crime" box on all sorts of application. Your jail term is meant to punish you by confiscating months or years of your life. Being released from jail does not mean you start with a clean slate, however, and it does not mean your past transgressions cannot haunt you in unpleasant ways.
The one semi-valid point in your comment is when you point out the difference between convicted car thieves vs. that of convicted sexual offenders. I think the point you make there is not w/o merit but I have, off the top of my head, come up with a justification for the different treatment.
When you steal a car, it's not because you're sick. It's just a straight-forward personal gain crime. When you kill someone, it could also be a crime of that nature, or it could be because you're sick. In the later case you're going to be in a mental institution until you're deemed cured. In terms of sexual assault, it's never a for-gain crime, but it's not easy to draw a line between a rapist who's truly fucked up in the head and one who was just a horny asshole. Personally, I think there's usually a mental component when someone commits a sexual assault but obviously not all these convicts receive mental treatment as opposed to regular jail time.
The bottom line is if you hang out with a former car thief, it doesn't raise your chances of having your car stolen. On the other hand, if you have your son hang out with someone who has previously been compelled by some inner instinct to have sex with a young boy... you're probably better off knowing. If there is no way for you to know that it's not a good idea for your kids to hang out with the person accross the street, the government truly has no way to release these people. Releasing them but marking them as people you should be weary about is a fair compromise. Just like any other convict goes through his life with people being weary of him whenever he fills out that questionaire.
And finally, as far as making such information public - I think that if there's one group of society that doesn't need to worry about identity theft, it is convicted sex offenders.
Clever but silly at the same time.
Cars currently have plenty of electronics that affect critical components such as fuel injection. Windows will apparently be running non critical components like the CD player.
Where do you picture the lawsuits?
You're right in that I didn't read the article. However, IIRC the comment I am responding to said something along the lines of "oh no they're going to fire someone for being anti-social" - which is not the case.
If your company restructures from cubes to open floor and you cannot be productive in that environment, you're not being fired for being anti-social. You and the company are no longer a fit, however. It goes vice-versa too, if a company goes from open floor to cubes, the clastraphobic will be looking to get out since the company no longer fits their working style.
It's a far cry from firing someone because you do not like their social skills.
Thanks.
I think it's silly to argue about the different meanings of a word whose common usage is consistant with the way it was used here, especially given that the study was done (I presume) in Hebrew.
That's a different matter than just not being able to work in a room full of noisy people. The question is - if someone is able to communicate easily and clearly in meetings/lunches/etc., gets on well with co-workers, keeps everyone informed of their progress that needs to be, but needs some peace and quiet to get their work done, is it OK to fire them because you've decided to subject everyone to working in a giant gymnasium?
No one would fire a person like that.
And how is discrimination based on social skills any different from discrimination based on race, sex, religion, or right-handedness?
It's different because it affects your performance at the job.
Ok let's say you're a big smart genius programmer. But your team mates do not feel comfortable talking to you. Performance suffers because of your inability to communicate with others to ensure that the project is being developed in an optimal way. May be you're so smart and efficient that you've foresaw the necessity to write library X but didn't tell anyone so your coworkers spent a few days developing the same thing, and if they came to let you know of this new development you said "I already got it done jerkwads." All of a sudden the fact that you're brilliant and efficient does not make up for the fact that you're more or less useless to the team due to your attitude and resistance to open communication.
being black, female, hindu, or left-handed does not have the same negative impact.
Okay so you have an office as a code monkey. Is the project you're working on solely yours?
Because if it's not, then your office is nice for you but shitty for your company. If I am on your team and I need to ask you something or discuss something, what hampers communication more than having to get up and knock on your door to seek an audience with you? Chances are it's going to discourage me from asking and hamper communications.
I work in a company where everyone just has a desk and it's great. I can yell a question over to my manager or walk over to the desk of anyone on other teams and discuss how my changes may affect them or discuss ways of implementing something so that it works best for all of us. I can also stop by the desk of anyone in HR and anyone in management, including the CEO (this is a huge firm, too.) Not that I have much to discuss with the CEO but it's great being in a culture where if I really had a question only he could answer I can stop by and ask easily.
Offices work well if you're working on a complete piece of work. For example a newspaper article or something. When you develop software in a place with a thousand and a half programmers, you better be able to communicate with them because chances are everything you do interacts with something they do and know about.
The fact that our managers also have only a desk and are as accessible as any of us more than makes up for inability to whack off to porn behind an office door.
Doing a search for fuzzy hampster cock returns a full 166 results while the same on MSN returns only 64 and the first one points to Slashdot.
What is Gates up to?
The problem with your "hack" plan is that in involves getting out of your mom's basement and it's not possible to beat off while the hacking is in progress.
If I have a knife and I leave it on a table, and a neighborhood kid comes over and stabs himself in the head, I'll probably get sued (and lose) even though I didn't do the stabbing.
No, not really applicable. If you leave your computer all set to hack something and have a big button on your screen that says "CLICK HERE TO HACK THE PENTAGON" and a child walks in and clicks it, yea you're liable. If you leave your computer on and the child starts coding shit and hacks the pentagon, you're not liable.
Kindof like, if you don't have a good lock on your door and someone breaks in and uses your window as a sniping post and kills the governor, you're not really liable.
A bit of a difference.. Haha, get it?
Why are programmers designing GUI in the first place? I understand in the open source model the guy's just desinging stuff for himself and if someone else doesn't like it, they can change it to suit their needs, but in the real world of business software, the UI requirements should be mandated to the programmer before the start of the project. Usually the programmer is less in position to know how the users think and use the program than sales people and product managers, so it should really be those guys that draw up GUI and the user experience.