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Comment A story from the industry? (Score 1) 197

A friend of mine who does programming for heart-lung machines once told me about something like this. One of the radiation machines used to treat cancer patients had a multi-core processor, but its programming didn't always take this into account. So every so often, the machine would have a race condition, and administer radiation several thousand times more powerful than it was supposed to. The poor patient would go in for a routine procedure and end up in worse shape than he/she was in already. I'm not sure if this is one of those apocryphal things that floats around or if it actually happened, but it seems like it could be possible if all the software isn't carefully checked first.

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