I can see situations in the future where people's lives could be dependent on networks working properly, or at least endangered if a network fails.
Actually it's not the future. My father's design bureau was making hardware, since 70s (including network stuff) for running industrial processes of a kind where software crash or a network malfunction was usually associated with casualties. Gas pipelines, power plants, electric grids, stuff like that. That's a completely different class of hardware, more of a kind you'd find in avionics - modules in triplicate, voting, pervasive error correction, etc. Software was also designed differently, with a lot more review processes, and with data structures designed for integrity checking (I still use this trick in my work, which saves me a lot of grief during debugging) and recovery from memory corruption and such. I'd be seriously loath to put any of the current crop of COTS network boxes into a life-critical network. --vadim