Transmissions - Page 26 Paragraph 5 Line 7: "..That an ex-student possessed full root privilages.."

In UNIX systems there exists many users. One user, called "root", is special in that root has full control and access to the system. The root user is the user that creates other users and defines their privilages. For example, in most UNIX setups all non-root users will not be able to modify other users' files but root can modify anyone's files. The root user exists as a means of administrating the UNIX system and is too powerful for every day use. One could arguably delete the entire contents of a the system hard drive as root and UNIX won't even warn you that you are an idiot. So most admins of a UNIX system keep their own regular user to do every day things and only log in as root to run the few commands that must be run as root.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superuser