Ha! This shows up in pop culture in the game Star Control II (awesome game btw):
spoiler alert | You are travelling thru space encountering an ever-increasing number of what appear to be robotic ships with whom you can briefly interact before they end communication and attack you. Long story short: a planet-bound race, the Slylandro, purchased a robotic ship for exploration and to establish friendly contact with other races. The ship had the power to self-replicate; it also carried a small defensive weapon and a powerful lightning-bolt type tool for breaking-down and gathering resources for ship replication. The Slylandro wanted more probes faster so they turned the replication priority up to 11, overriding all other priorities. When a ship meets you, it attempts to initiate contact but is quickly forced into resource-gathering/replication mode & proceeds with breaking apart your ship into raw components. It is, essentially, a paper-clip maximizer. :)
Bruteforcing all states of NES game could result in finding vulnerability in NES emulator and then to fill memory of emulator with FFs via changing settings it could make mess from accessible file system or, some life spans of universe later, find vulnerabilities in OS, hardware or connected network.
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer