Feeling protected

David Pogue uses a Windows machine so that he can dictate his writing to a voice-recognition system. And so he gets to experience the "joys" of that operating system:

...I wound up calling Microsoft for help. A genius named Rob walked me through using the Windows command line to restore the lost shared file from a backup. After 20 minutes, I was back in business.

I asked him, though, why, if this DLL file was so important, the uninstaller program had been allowed to remove it. After all, so-called driver protection and system-file protection were two of the most-hyped features of Windows XP.

He looked it up, and indeed, my missing DLL was on the list of protected files. Why it got deleted anyway, he didn’t know.

How could he, after all?

I don't mean to imply that you can't make a Mac unbootable, but I do think it's a bit harder. Macs usually ask you for your administrator password before you do something truly stupid. (Like just now: I tried to delete a kernel extension, and the Finder asked me for my admin password.)