You give a player any bit of room to be an starfish, they'll take it until death do they part. Viruses to sabotage a person's ship is too much room... I love the idea, but we all know it would be abused. How he'd limit it... I'd like to see that.
Oh by the way, who said you'd program in Assembler? Because my CIS teacher was talking about Assembler today... forget though, he said we won't be coding anything. :( He said that for the majority of non-coder students. Sad face.