I know you’re being sarcastic, but if does point out the fact that capitalism is only held in check by government. RockStar obviously waited until they knew they could get away with it given the current attitudes in all branches of the US government.

Yes. Sometimes you’re limited by the hardware you’re controlling. This code is a bit hard to justify with that excuse though. Normally your code would do a read from hardware to see if the value decremented and then repeat the write. (Possibly a sleep/yield in there if required.)

It’s definitely possible to convert in both directions. I’ve never done it though. The technical hurdles made it unpalatable. My main method of moving back and forth was to keep my personal data on a separate disk from the OS disk. That way I could always take my data with me when I changed OSes or VMs.

I think it’s far less invasive to setup a Linux VM that can be thrown away vs. setting up dual booting.

With Hyper-V or Virtualbox the OP can have a Linux distribution installed and booting very quickly without fear of disrupting his current Windows installation.