While it would be good to be told, you are making a huge deal over this. It's a failure, but that doesn't mean that she's going to die if she doesn't wake up. It doesn't even mean she's going to have any problems.

Reading your description of her insulin pump makes me think of how complicated that is and how much she is relying on the pump for rather than doing out herself. It looks like the pump is doing an incredible huge amount.

I'm young. I remember when insulin pumps really started getting popular. I don't remember how old I was, but I remember my dad's first pump. Before that he had no way to inject insulin overnight. However you also don't eat while you're asleep. Every pump that he has had up to 4 years ago has not monitored his blood sugar, has not reacted to his blood sugar, has not calculated out how much insulin he should be injecting. (Actually he tried a continuous monitoring solution around 4 years ago and it did not work because he had been giving himself injections for too long and it would not keep an accurate reading). It was a device which he could tell to give him insulin and it would do so without requiring 5-10 injections every day, only a replacement ever 3 days.

Yes, it is absolutely a failure. Yes it absolutely should tell you. But its not the life or death situation you're making it out to be, and truthfully anyone with diabetes should know the warning signs of too high and too low, should know how much insulin to give themselves with what they're eating, and so on. The pump is an amazingly useful tool, but it should be just that a tool, because situations arise when you can't use the pump. It just so happens that my dad personally survived with diabetes over 30 years without one.
This is probably somewhat offtopic for the discussion, but there's a huge difference between an implantable pacemarker. While they both are relied on, one is internal, one is external, and the failures of the insulin pump are very different when they cause too much insulin to be given and not enough. One is much more a life or death scenario while the other can be worked around using the means that was used for the past 90 years because over one night the lack of insulin isn't scary.

The thing is, that it probably wouldn't take two years. What it needs to do is well defined and it is in an embedded system. I am far from an expert (though I do have some knowledge, probably the level of an introductory grad class) but it wouldn't surprise me if what it would come down to in terms of time is more in the order of one month. Much of the changes would be in the style of coding - it requires a more restricted style of coding. Writing your code in order to be verifiable in such a small setting is reasonable.

What it would bump is cost, the programmers would have to be more specialized. However, I think this is a fair trade for peoples lives.

It's more than unit testing, but it is something that is done for software which flies planes and there are people out there who have been taught the necessary skills.

Where by proven I mean mathematically proven using formal verification

I want medical devices to run code which has been proven. It can be done, even if it takes a lot of time and effort. Life and death situations are the only ones which make sense to go through proving code for, but it makes sense in those situations.

We do have vocational high schools available in the US. I don't know how common they are (in order to go from my town you had to go to school about a half hour away), but they're definitely available and definitely not uncommon.

Kismet automatically logs everything.

I disagree that it requires going out of your way to record the private data. I'm pretty sure that I have accidentally recorded private data in exactly the same manner that google has - I have had some other use for kismet, was running kismet and was walking around. It automatically logged everything. I realize after accidentally having left kismet running that I had collected multiple gigabytes of data, and deleted it. In my case, I was using kismet to check if I had burned out my wireless card, in google's case they were using it for wifi mapping. The personal data was a side effect.

If there isn't any runnable software left that will read these file formats then it is legal to break the DRM, plus amazon has already said that they would provide DRM-free copies if they stopped selling the kindles.

Simple solution - backups.

Seriously, storing books locally is trivial. Amazon lets you download books to your computer and if you plug the kindle into usb it shows up like an external harddrive or flashdrive. I keep dumps off all the books on my kindle on my computer and my computer backed up on a backup server. So I now have the copy on the kindle, the copy on amazon's server, the copy on my laptop, and the copy on the backup server. If one of those copies disappears I have it in each of the other locations still (especially because I keep the wireless off on my kindle unless I have specific use to have it on)

Just because they keep a copy in the cloud doesn't mean you can't keep a local backup. There are legitimate complaints about the kindle, "I must rely on amazon for everything" is far from one of them. (Even without the fact that most of the books on my kindle came from sources besides amazon which are DRM free)

There is a wide range of settings for those - I remember the few times I had lancets used on me (between about 8 and 15) I felt no pain. However, my dad also had put them on the lowest setting, a setting which would not work on his fingers.

I would say that it is possible to make them not hurt, depending on the person, however if you need to do so often then the scar tissue does make you need to use a higher setting which will hurt more. Also, that is assuming that you need no more blood than to test your blood glucose levels (that is all that was being tested in the few cases where I had one used on me)

It still depends on what department you are in though. I wrote up my homework in LaTeX for all of my classes since I learned it freshman year. In both departments (I was a math/CS double major), professors took me more seriously than other students specifically because of handing in homework written up in LaTeX. It was easier for them to grade and they recognized it and were thankful for it. So in engineering it might be getting smaller, but from a student's perspective, it is not getting any smaller in either math or computer science. Most of the grad students I know learned LaTeX early on in their master's program because it was just something necessary to know, if they had not already learned it as an undergrad.

Yes, you can load work from other sources. You can buy books from other places and load them on via usb, or have them emailed to your kindle. Amazon even tells you how to load books from elseware onto the kindle. The books (including pdfs and plaintext files) you load via usb are not put into the cloud. Personally my kindle 2 has much more from other sources than from amazon (and of those from amazon, only one was paid for). The device and the store are actually much more separate than people realize.

But it is an /optional/ feature, that they put out a press release for, put a big message on the amazon kindle forums about and are sending out an updated user's manual with. It is even a feature that defaults to off. They are telling people about it and letting them not turn it on. Otherwise it'd be terrible. It'd make sense as a complaint if they didn't share what they were doing. There's also the option of not updating the software if you care so much about keeping the kindle exactly as it is. The kindle store has problems, that doesn't mean that everything that amazon does with the kindle is a problem.

Actually, the toughbook tablets are smaller and only 5 lbs. The normal laptops are 8 lbs or so when looking at the fully-ruggeds. The CF-19 (and older CF-18) are actually surprisingly light, especially for the ruggedness. I remember about two years ago looking through Best Buy at the laptops just because I was curious how they were in terms of weight, and for actual laptops, there was maybe 3 there which were under 5 lbs. I use a CF-19, though not in that sort of environment. There's only a 10.4" screen, but if that's large enough, then it is a really nice machine, and a tablet.

My Kindle 2 has around a three or four day battery with heavy internet use. It's about two with some music and some internet use (by some I mean a noticeable amount but less than I would consider heavy use). From this experience it would be days. I've not seen a Nook but I'd expect it to be similar to the Kindle.