The price is negotiated and specified in the contract, yes.

What the hell are you talking about?
I don't run any company and I don't rent out any software developers.
Lay off the dope for a moment and check my posts in this thread. I am not AC so I'm easy to follow.

Should I ever contract a SW developer (not likely, but let's assume), you or otherwise, I would expect the finished product to be fit for purpose and work "as advertised", that is: as laid out in the spec. The contractor will then tell me the time they need for delivering the project and the price they will charge me. If I am satisfied with those, we will have a deal.

However if, some time(*) after the contractor delivered, the application crashes because a user ID happened to be a Mersenne Prime, then the program does not perform as specified, ergo: terms of the contract have not been met and I would expect the contractor to fix it for no additional cost.

(*) One year sounds reasonable to me.

See my example above. If the program would crash because the US government decided do add another digit to SSNs then the contractor could argue that it is a specification change and fixing it would require a (new) maintenance contract. The same would hold OS upgrades, DB provider changes, change requests, bad specs or any other circumstance that is outside the contractor's control. Bugs, that is: implementation ERRORS, do not fall in that scope.

I don't know the intricacies of painting fences but I've been developing software for a living since the late 80s. I assure you that I do not hold others to higher standards than I am held to.

That's the definition that I, and all places I have worked at, use.

Those are not bugs.

The customer is the one providing the spec.

Ambiguous or incomplete specs are usually the fault of the customer. Other than that, there are accepted ways of handling contract disputes.

The onus is on the customer to clearly communicate their expectations.

My assertion was independent of the OP's post. However, I would use the interpretation "implementation errors".

Can't fault you for that. However, a good developer should be able to resolve a lot of ambiguities by either asking for clarifications or documenting their assumptions (and having the customer vet them). This should be done before writing code.

Not on the planet I inhabit. Of course they may try to pull it off, but that would be a scam.

A friend of mine hired a contractor to put hardwood floors in his house. At some time before the job was finished, he noticed that the contractor was using thinner planks than he requested (and paid for). At the end, the contractor redid the floors at his own expense. This is as it should be.

Canada's ability to weather the recession was due to regulation and other measures put in place long before the Harper government got in power.

I agree that they are incompetent at what it takes to get elected: lying, cheating, back room dealing, slinging mud, etc.

Before every federal or provincial (Ontario) elections, I make a point to communicate with the candidates in my riding, ask them questions and try to judge their responses. We usually have Liberal, Conservative, NDP and Green, sometimes independents and/or obscure parties. The NDP candidates have consistently made the most "normal" impression: actually giving answers instead of spin, not afraid to admit they need get more data on a subject before they can form an opinion (instead of trying to guess what my position is and pretending to support it).

The NDP are not perfect by any means. There are some things in their platform I disagree with, but they are up-front.

A good portion of the citizenry have already realized that the only difference between police and any other organized crime gang is that the former is backed by government while the later are viewed as competition. The others will catch up after they have their first interaction with the police.

This view will not change until members of the force are at least as accountable as the average Joe.

Should I make a car analogy to demonstrate the error in this argument?

Address the message, not the messenger.

While true, this is a different issue.

If you develop these components, the interaction between them is your responsibility.
If you develop only some of them, the interaction is governed by the specifications. The components that fail to adhere to the spec are at fault and, if they are not yours, it is perfectly acceptable to demand additional payment for fixing the problem. Documentation helps: if you state clearly that your program works under XP SP3 (and the client signs off on if), additional work to make it not break under Win7 is outside the original scope.

Car components suffer from mechanical wear, chemical degradation, etc. Therefore, it is often hard to say whether whether a problem is due to those reasons or to a manufacturing defect.

Computer software (and some hardware), on the other hand, is not subject to such limitations. If you wrote an OS that crashes after 49.7 days of uptime, it is your fault, no matter how long it takes to detect the problem. If you build a processor that returns incorrect results on some FP division operations, it is your fault, and can cost you $475M.

I agree that some time limits are reasonable, but they should be measured in years.

Bugs do not just "appear". Any bug in your code exists only because you put it there, which means your work was sub-standard. Expecting more money for fixing your mistakes is like telling the customer that you'll bill them twice: once for doing a shoddy job and again for doing it right, like you were supposed to in the first place.

If, due to bugs in your program, it does not perform exactly as specified, you have not fulfilled your end of the contract.

I for one welcome our sack swelling overlords

No no no no no!

When you commit a crime, you don't get "fired from a cushy job", you go to jail.
Why should these people be treated differently?

I believe recent events, including this one, show that they actually have all the power that they think they do.

As long as there's no chance of said heads rolling, that was not a mistake.

I was under the impression that was sarcasm.
The "or something" looks like a dead giveaway.