I think the point is that you should be able to trust the "ordinary" users on those boxes as well as you trust the root there. With the state of Unix security as it is, if an intruder can log into an ordinary account, chances are that if they are really motivated, they can become root as well (or are you running OpenBSD everywhere?). --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)