You missed the point. You can make such a license if you like, indeed many people have made them. But it is a popularity contest in that unless a significant number of people agree with your priorities and therefore choose to adopt your license, you won't have accomplished anything.

And, of course, the GP disagrees with your priorities and wouldn't use your license. I see both sides, but I think I'd probably shy away from a license with such vague and potentially far-reaching restrictions.

Sure. What we can't have is the power of the sharp kitchen knife, plus the compatibility with existing code and libraries without the four years of training.

I can teach a novice to use a nice, pleasant, safe and very powerful subset of modern C++ in a fairly short period of time... as long as the novice is only working on code written in that subset. If the novice starts looking at and modifying other code, though, all bets are off until he's done his years on the mountain top.

The way I see it, C++14 is a very nice language with a bunch of baggage you should just ignore... except when you have to use because you're working with code that already does. This means given a clean, modern codebase you should be able to hire a bunch of smart novices and get them productive fairly quickly. Just keep an old salt around who can answer their questions when they step outside of the nice subset.

Non-sequiteur. X has nothing to do with the GUI, at least not any part of the GUI users care about. X is merely the tool used to draw stuff on the screen; it says nothing about what gets drawn. Everything users care about, including what windows, buttons, fonts, etc., look like, how applications interact with one another, and whether or not all of the above is nicely integrated and looks like it belongs together has nothing to do with X.

I insist on living and working in locations where I don't need an elevator... a remote tropical island would work well for this.

US courts have ruled that linking to infringing content constitutes contributory infringement. I'm not sure how "direct" the link has to be. Google search links to torrent sites which contain pointers to infringing content, for example, so that's apparently okay.

Courts in the US have held that linking directly to infringing content constitutes contributory infringement. Linking to another site isn't infringement just because the other site doesn't want you to link and benefit from their material (Tickemaster v Tickets.com established that), but linking to infringing material on another site does.

(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer nor am I a Google spokesperson.)

Which would be relevant only if Larry, Sergey and Eric decided to allow it to be. As long as the three of them stay united, they outvote the rest of the shareholders combined.

Aside from the rather questionable assertion that Google is a monopoly, the company's cash reserves are nowhere near that large, or, rather, the company's expenses are much larger than you believe. Last I heard, Google has cash reserves of ~$60B (which, note, aren't actually cash; you don't leave that much capital sitting idle), and annual operational costs of about $40B. How long Google could continue to operate with hugely decreased revenues depends on just how far the revenues declined, and how much economizing the company could do, but I strongly doubt that it would be "decades". If all advertising revenue derived from the search engine disappeared and Google didn't economize at all, it would be bankrupt in maybe three years.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't speak for Google. Everything in this post is derived from public information.)

Actually, the study in question was on freeways, and it didn't necessarily have anything to do with interchanges, which are all rate-controlled in the area. One spot they found regularly jammed was just a rise in the road. The partially obstructed vision was enough to cause a few drivers to slow just a bit, which snowballed and then created a jam which moved backwards from the rise at a fairly constant rate of precession, two or three mph, IIRC. So after the jam moved away from the rise, there was *no* cause for it. It just self-sustained as drivers bunched up when approaching the jam.

There was a /. article on it. It was fascinating.

Just wait a while and we'll evolve flame resistant birds.

Researchers will demonstrate the process used to spy on smartphones using gyroscopes at Usenix Security event on August 22, 2014. Researchers from Stanford and a defense research group at Rafael will demonstrate a way to spy on smartphones using gyroscopes at Usenix Security event on August 22, 2014. According to the "Gyrophone: Recognizing Speech From Gyroscope Signals" study, the gyroscopes integrated into smartphones were sensitive enough to enable some sound waves to be picked up, transforming them into crude microphones.

I can't help but feel like there are gyroscopes involved in this process somehow...

I don't have a link handy, but a group (from Stanford, IIRC) did it as a study, rather than to make a point. They found that by driving slow (perhaps even below the speed limit) in a line, they could fix traffic jams. Not because of anything to do with speed limits, but rather just the dynamics of heavy traffic which can cause self-perpetuating jams, even though there is actually plenty of road capacity, no obstructions, etc. By creating a moving roadblock for a few miles and creating a gap that allowed the jam to unjam, they could quickly get traffic flowing smoothly.

Perhaps. Assuming you're right, it leaves open the question of whether the restrictions actually affect the level of violence and in what direction. The assumption of the cities with high violence and tight restrictions is that the restrictions reduce violence. Though that assumption seems logical, history calls it into question. For example, both DC and Chicago saw massive increases in violence after they enacted their draconian restrictions. The rest of the country also saw rising violence at the same time, but nowhere near in the same degree. So perhaps the city leaders were prescient, saw the coming wave of violence and acted to mitigate it, or perhaps their action actually exacerbated it. Or maybe the restrictions made no difference at all.

My money is on restrictions increasing the violence, mainly because the restrictions only affect the law-abiding, which gives criminals an advantage, and eliminates their single biggest worry (per FBI studies, in which violent criminals overwhelmingly report that their biggest fear when committing a crime is that the target might be armed). We'll get a chance to see over the next few years, since DC and Chicago have been forced by the courts to loosen their restrictions dramatically.

There are three basic levels of users:

1) Complete novices: Don't really understand basic concepts but learn enough repetition to use their programs at a basic level.

2) Competent users: Get the main concepts fairly well, can manage applications and the computer settings fairly well, but they get out of their depth fairly quickly and don't know any coding.

3) Gurus: Whatever the task they'll figure it out eventually.

Group 1 is good with any OS because they're not doing anything more than clicking icons and using apps.

Group 3 will really excel with Linux because of the power and flexibility it gives them.

Group 2 is the Window's base. They're smart enough to master the Window's administration environment but Linux is too complex and text based.

The thing it that group 2 isn't really an issue in a corporate setting. The users, regardless of competency, are basically confined to acting like level 1 novices fiddling with apps but ignoring the OS. And the admin staff will be guru's regardless.

If there is a problem it likely has nothing to do with usability but instead is based on app availability. The big name high quality end user apps are still lacking on Linux, and those are the things people will miss.