Friday, July 9, 2004
Japanese Vampire Robots Want Your Blood
Posted by Pat Logsdon in "OFF-TOPIC" @ 06:00 PM
While the headline is slightly sensationalistic, it's really not that far off the mark. A Japanese company has announced an automated booth that extracts blood from your body. I have several problems with this. First of all, how exactly does it know where to stick the needle? As far as I know, everyone's veins are different. Personally, I do not want a robot playing "Find the Vein" on my arm with something pointy.
As scary as that is, the thing that bothers me the most about this device is the possibility of a software crash in the middle of the "Blood Extraction Sub-Routine". I can see it now: my marble-white cold body slumped in the booth, one arm clamped inside the machine, the other wrapped around my Pocket PC (displaying a web page on how much blood the human body holds), my face lit eerily from below by the pale blue light of the screen, which reads "Fatal Exception Error". :mrgreen:
