[ale] root file perms

[jbayes at bronze37.mminternet.com (Joe Bayes)]

If a file is owned by root, then is there any point in turning off
root's read or write permissions?

spoo:~# ls -l foo bar
----------   1 root     root            4 Jun  5 13:55 bar
-rw-------   1 root     root            4 Jun  5 13:55 foo
spoo:~# 

It seems that I can both read from and write to bar, when logged in as
root. I guess it's understandable that you might want to have root
_always_ be able to read from or write to any file on the system, but
it also seems like it might be useful to have a way of preventing root
from accidentally reading from or writing to a file. 

Was this intentional?

--joe