The finger stick is not especially accurate either. Check the range of acceptable values when you calibrate the device for a different strip. HUGE variation in acceptable values. The A1C test is the more accurate test, the finger stick is just to give you a heads-up in case things get wildly out of whack.

I'm an engineer also, and wonder if you have any idea of how long a new vehicle development cycle is. Do you really think that it takes Honda or Toyota (or GM) 4 years to bring a new model to market? That the 2008 model year vehicles being currently rolled out were started back in 2004? With the exception of the large-scale use of lithium battery technology on the scale required for a car, there is absolutely NOTHING in the GM Volt that is revolutionary or in uncharted waters. Granted, they have been very ingenious in combining existing concepts in the design of the Volt, but that is not the same as breaking new ground and doing things that have never been done before.

If it were my company, I would hedge my bets and offer two different battery technologies, the NiMH and the Lithium batteries. I would explore the use of ultracapacitors to reduce the stress of charge/discharge cycles in regenerative braking. Spend a couple of years testing those elements of the design, and the rest of the vehicle could be prepped for production in about 18 months. 2010 is a totally achievable milestone, a bit conservation in my opinion. GM runs the risk of having some other car company steal their thunder (and a good chunk of their sales) with an alternative plug-in hybrid design hitting the marketplace in the 2009 model year.

So when I'm watching NASA TV and they lose signal as they pass out of a certain ground-based receiver's range, what's happening there? Only enough constant bandwidth for command & control, and not TV?

I think that any contemplated usage aboard the ISS will first have to deal with 90-minute orbits and the communications blackouts as the ISS moves around the globe. Surgery isn't usually the kind of thing that can be paused until the ground-based network reconnects.

Nice ideas, but a bit outside the practicality of current technologies. Here are the problems as I see them: batteries, batteries, batteries.

1) Battery life for the control device. I think that a necessary battery life would be at least a year between replacement (yes, it must have a replaceable battery), with charge life in excess of 24 hrs per charge over that life.

Two things are going to be major draws on electrical power -- the use of the graphical display, and the wireless connection to the sensor and pump patch. I'm not sure if Bluetooth would prove to be too power-hungry a wireless technology to use, but there are alternatives, like ZigBee. You can mitigate the wireless connection draw on the power my limiting it to longer intervals of time between querying the sensor/pump patch, but that gets in the way of the continuous display. I suspect that even waiting a minute between samplings is going to disrupt the user experience -- who is going to enter a command and wait a minute before checking to see the impact of that command? The display power draw can be mitigated by using a low-power technology (like OLED), but I'm not at all sure that such a display technology is amenable to touch-screen control.

2) Battery power for the pump/sensor patch. This is going to require a lot more power than the control device, and the patch will have to include its own control device to manage operation in the event the wireless remote is lost, broken, or too far away to connect. But there is existing battery technology to address the situation here, in the form of an implantable high-capacity battery, that can be recharged nightly in some manner or other -- I'm not sure if wireless recharging through the skin is practical, or if a recharging terminal would have to be accessible. A more desirable solution would be a flexible thin battery as part of the patch, but I don't believe that we possess such technology at this point in time, nor is there anything on the horizon that I am aware of.

And until you can get around the issue of liability risks for a medical device, Apple is not going to be interested in such a thing. I read somewhere that a long time ago, Steve Jobs was approached by a group of hospital executives trying to get Apple to make a tablet computer for use in hospitals. After due consideration, the project was declined, due to the liability risks in making such a product. There is no benefit (and considerable risk) for Apple in going into the medical device field. Existing glucose monitor makers reap large profits from the sale of strips and needles, and the devices are necessary losses to support those other markets. Apple would have no such revenue from insulin patches, and it would be crazy for them to get into such an enterprise. Same thing is true for any other electronics manufacturer. Some sort of a tie-in with a drug company is needed, and all the players are too large to consider such allegiances, preferring to go it on their own.

This is not news.

It would be news if the 6G iPod did NOT strongly resemble the iPhone.

In addition to the motors-in-the-wheels, and regenerative braking, replace the batteries with carbon fiber ultracapacitors and house those within the tube framework (possibly requiring larger diameter tubing), and you've definitely got something. Oh, and LED-lighting, and a power port for my iPod.

Yup. They can drop the speaker, I already have better speakers, as I suspect most people do. All it really needs is access via USB port and WiFi, plus line in and out jacks, and speaker connections.

If they want to be a little more upscale, some Bluetooth 2 capability that complements a set of decent external Bluetooth 2 speakers would attract a lot of people. Stringing cables around a room is so 20th century.

the acid test for me is -- can you mow the lawn while using these without having to crank up the volume high enough to damage your hearing?

And even when gigabit wifi is available, it won't be available in the U.S., which will still be struggling to roll out wired DSL. AT&T will have pushed through legislation forbidding anyone but them from offering it, and their plan for roll-out of gigabit wifi will be to have complete coverage by 2060.