That's not what addictive means :P

... What exactly do you mean by 'addictive'? Reading between the lines, that sounds like that's discontinuation syndrome, not addiction.

I'm not just self-taught about computers, but entirely self-taught.

I put this in bold print on my resume. I bragged that I learn fast and learn well.

And I backed it up at the interview.

No, that's for people who are bad at geography.

Yes, so if more people do that, that will not be an acceptable tactic from the government at all.

... That's bigamy.

Or run things that handle their errors and check your work.

The boot information for your OS has to live somewhere. If you want it to be any smarter than "load the first thing it finds", starting in the MBR and going from there is smart. Easy to do in the constraints of an early boot environment.

And either way, applications should not be mucking with the low-level bits of your hard drive without extensive documentation of that fact at least.

There's a long history of boot loaders living there: Systems that treat "slice 2" as the whole disk typically use it for just that: Storing boot information outside the other partitions.

And, ultimately, OS components are allowed to touch that and applications in general should not.

The problem is, we teach Palmer Script, which is an ergonomic and legibility anti-pattern if there ever was one.

If we taught a roughly connected italic, we'd all write in a legible script.

Early nurture wins!

Caught that myself yesterday. http://aria.blogs.theinternetco.net/2010/02/11/kb977165-causes-a-blue-screen/

I, for one, welcome our new ractor overlords.