T1 call center is a dead-end job that nobody does by choice. Who cares what the performance goals are, do they fire for not up selling? yes/no

There is no air quote marks around safer. It is so, empirical data tells us without a doubt. You rigid rule-following is getting in the way of your unstated goals of being the safest possible driver. YMMV.

You are under mistaken impression that there is some intrinsic property of your operating system that protect you and your data. This is not the case. What makes Linux safer are better defaults, less market share, and higher technical competency of an average user.

Still, I will take your bet. Here is Linux distro I want you to run: http://www.securitydistro.com/...

What else would you want to make user-selectable behaviors? Should we also have a setting to have the car not pay attention to the road while texting, drinking coffee, and shaving/putting makeup on?

Exactly, so sooner we get GPP from behind the wheel to reading his newspaper while being auto-piloted, sooner we get another obnoxious and unsafe driver off the road so to speak.

Limitations of a normal driving are mostly due to driver's inability to control the vehicle (e.g. predict exact point when skid occurs). Introduction of computer-assisted safety features like ABS, traction control all increased overall safety on the roads and arguably should allow for overall speed increase. These safety systems all function by overriding driver's input in some limited way when it is predicted or observed to lead to undesirable outcome. With autonomous cars you do not have driver's input, so optimal value for all circumstances could be computed. With this is place, it would be car's mechanical limitations and not limitations of driver's ability that will be a limiting factor.

For example, it is not outside of realm of possibility to have your car driven by autopilot at its natural top speed on a highway. We as society, for a good reason do not trust human operators with the same. For automated drivers such cautious approach is no longer valid.

It is within Google's capability to dynamically map every speed trap and even moving police cars.

With this in place, and with computer reflexes why not speed like a maniac? I for one would buy Google car tomorrow if it could get me to work at 120mph shaving time off my commute.

Not all users are created equal. I've been running Win7 on my desktop for years, without an anti-virus, and never got anything.
 
Java/Flash are crap security wise, and many Win users run full admin and trained to click 'Allow' to everything completely negating OS protections. Do the same on Linux, and you will be in as much trouble.

'Antivirus' signature-based solutions are largely ineffective at mitigating anything. You should just use hostfile-based blacklist and secure your java/flash.

So this is how a bunch of scientists justified browsing for pron and cat videos all day long? Yes, we heard this before - they are working on average algorithm for images.