I'm sure there are some people using telnet and using "password" as their root password. At a certain point it becomes more than reasonable to say "Well don't do that."

This is one of the reasons why you have to use a wrapper for the VLC binary to execute it within a root environment. Said wrapper is usually in an extra package on Linux and not provided on Windows and OS X (it can be compiled manually of course). Like 10 people per year complain about not being able to run VLC as root, but then again, why should you?