Comment by walrus01

A little bit like Neal Stephenson's metaphor of unix-like OSes as the "hole hawg" of operating systems. In the sense that there's very little preventing you from doing something like "sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M" or running rm -rf on your homedir.

http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html

If I recall right this was written around the same time as Cryptonomicon 25+ years ago.