not as if users care about watching out before setting +x.

After all, there are tons of popular projects requesting users to run "curl http://... | sudo sh" and consider that a good idea, too.

Exactly. This is just a more elaborate form of Windows little pop-up-boxes asking you "are you sure you want to...."

I keep trying to teach my nephews that the default answer to that question is no... but of course, "yes" is the way you get anything done.

Normal users just set them without thinking twice about it.

Do you know one of the most asked questions in Mac OS X user forums from new users is how to disable root?