Things that piss me off: non-communicative devices

In my Jon & Lobo novels, I write about machines of all types that are intelligent and constantly communicating. I make this scenario science fictional by having the machines be extremely intelligent (if self-absorbed) and their conversations quite human-like. What is not fiction is that we live in a world in which many machines are regularly chatting away without appearing to do so.

What pisses me off is the way some of them chatter, the way in which simple devices sometimes fail to communicate simple things.

Cases in point: Bluetooth mice and keyboards. These battery-powered rascals talk to the system with which they're mated. Their conversations consist of keystrokes (keyboards) and coordinate changes (mice). When they're working, they function well.

The problem is what happens when their batteries fail. For not a lot of hardware and software effort, they could send a signal to their host system, something along the lines of "Power dying. Help!" The host system could pop up a nice message telling me to change the batteries, I would comply, and I wouldn't end up wanting to beat my peripherals into dust after they suddenly stop working and I can't tell if it's because Vista lost its Bluetooth connection--again--or the batteries just died.

Not that this wasted my time tonight or anything.

If you make a peripheral, you should be required to make it talk to all the key host operating systems. If you don't, you should be forced to sit in a room with a thousand of your peripherals, all currently not connected, and a hundred sets of batteries, and then find the hundred that need those batteries.

Or we could just beat you silly. That would work, too.