> Set a taint flag, 

That's hardly any useful if the machine is dead afterwards.

quoted text
> print a loud message 

Neither.

You'll just end up with "Linux destroyed my laptop" headlines all 
over the internet and rightfully very annoyed users.

quoted text
> Or have you forgotten the original Unix
> philosophy too ?

The philosophy didn't include physically destroying hardware
as far as I know.

quoted text
> > > Here we had obviously-useful-to-you functionality which was taken away
> > > without, afaik, providing any alternative.
> > 
> > I don't think it's that unreasonable to require source code modifications
> > for anything that can kill hardware.
> 
> As root you can erase the bios, 

We don't ship the devbios driver for good reasons.

quoted text
> lock the hard disk with a random
> password, reflash your video card .... 

That all requires significant effort and custom software. It's not that we 
have a one liner echo destroy > /sys/.../flash-bios. 

-Andi

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