Actually, a lot of 'hardcore UNIX admins' have this enabled for their personal account. As long as you have a good password, don't do silly things like run system daemons as the same UID, use system accounts for apache authentication and such, there's no harm in this. Don't enable it for other accounts or users who aren't UNIX-savvy as they may have weak passwords or use services that allow cleartext password transfers.

As others have explained (e.g. 'bbum' above), the problem is that any program running under your account can (with this "hint") get full control of the machine. And a sufficiently clever piece of malware can do this without leaving any noticeable trace - so you might never know that your machine has been taken over.

I strongly recommend against implementing this hint.

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