Then they'll begin placing captchas in their advertisements, to ensure that you've read the ad before providing the real content.

And then developers will add OCR to AdBlock...

Why do you find disturbing that people can use computers without devoting their lives to learning them?

Wait I know the answer, it's because it disrupts the livelihood of the priests guarding the arcane knowledge.

Keeping tight control is a *good* think in user interface design

May I add, "as long as you have users that like your design and you keep listening to them to further tweak it".

Keeping tight control is a *good* think in user interface design strategy; it provides a more focused structure and simpler environment, which were their goals.

The mistake the Gnome developers made was calling the new desktop "Gnome 3". Had they presented it as an experimental new environment and named it "Project Harmony" or "Desktop Zen", or something like that, they would have stepped on less toes and met less resistance to the radical changes, and people would have seen it in better light.

Of course they would have had less audience, as distros wouldn't have adopted it so quickly. That trade-off was their choice, but I think "Linux is awesome! There are three good major desktops now!" was a better selling point than "They've updated Gnome, and it sucks".

And any submission that includes references to the Turing Test must have me!!!! :-P

Sudoku is not Math

Constraint satisfaction begs to differ.

Did you miss the "as little burden on their consciousness as possible" part?

You know, I heard that excuse a lot twenty years ago.

That's what they said twenty years after Gutenberg invented the movable type. Of course the printing press was perfect by then, there wasn't any possibility for improvement, technology hasn't advanced at all since, and books were as easy to handle then as they're now. So there's no excuse for anybody that didn't know how to read, and they should be blamed for not taking advantage of that brand new technology.

Or maybe computing technology is primitive and hard to use, and it requires years of professional training to understand?

(...I wonder where the impression that nerds are arrogant comes from?)

Only if the price to entry is low. If it's high, the unregulated market itself would prevent competition

So you're suggesting that tablet computers are not for serious computing? Outrageous! So, maybe we should relegate them to be used for, say, amateur usage by non-experts?

GPL or CC-BY-SA content is not safe from DMCA takedown notices either. I don't see how that's relevant.

The license still.grants pretty much absolute control to the rights holder

How come? The rights holder can't control non-commercial use after he has released it. So it's "open for non-commercial use".

There is not *one* definition of open and free, the BSD-GPL license wars prove it. Sure -NC is less open than those, but it isn't necessarily closed either.

They "steal" votes from the candidate that is near to their interests making the other win.

That assumes there's a major candidate that is near to their interests.

The fact remains that you will never be able to match the typing speed achieved on a keyboard, even with limited travel, when typing on a tablet's screen.

Most users I know use the "hunt and peck" technique and are unable to touch-type, so they will never be able to match the typing speed achieved on a keyboard, even with a physical keyboard. A tablet virtual keyboard thus proves no disadvantage to them.

Yes, it's legally equivalent to shareware and freeware; it's unclear whether it can be used for self-promotion where the content is not distributed for money, only for publicity; and it doesn't allow for building a corpus of open content like a fully open license would do.

However, CC-*-NC licenses allow for unlimited amateur work and redistribution, which is a step above what standard copyright allows even under free use terms. Given the "web 2.0" model of distributed content generation, that end-users can reuse the content without legal worries is a win toward freedom even if it doesn't go the extra mile and only some users can benefit from it.

Because freedom and openness are both incompatible with NC.

No, they aren't.

Seriously, I thought you should be able to defend the free/open principles with a less shallow argument than that. See my post below. Defending open content is not a binary proposition but more like a continuum; and CC-NC-SA falls inside that continuum nearer to "open" than "close".