  The question of whether flares occur as a Poisson process has important
consequences for flare physics. Recently Lepreti et al. presented evidence for
local departure from Poisson statistics in the Geostationary Operational
Environmental Satellite (GOES) X-ray flare catalog. Here it is argued that this
effect arises from a selection effect inherent in the soft X-ray observations;
namely that the slow decay of enhanced flux following a large flare makes
detection of subsequent flares less likely. It is also shown that the power-law
tail of the GOES waiting-time distribution varies with the solar cycle. This
counts against any intrinsic significance to the appearance of a power law, or
to the value of its index.
