Now, I'm paranoid. So I'm not the best person to complain about this. But people are incredibly lax about security these days. A teacher in my school thought his system was so strong, when I told him I could get root on his system, he said "prove it." Not "How?", which he should have asked. So while I was showing him, he turns around and talks to another student. So when he's done, he turns back to me and says "So are you root yet?" I respond by typing 'su r007 -c cat\ /etc/shadow' and it works. As far as I know he hasn't fixed the hole yet.

For the curious: He uses grub, and doesn't password protect it. So I appended the option 'single' to the kernel boot parameters, which started me up in text mode as root. I then added a user r007 and then edited the /etc/passwd file to make its UID and GID 0. And then restarted again with the normal kernel parameters.