How cute...

Apple has created a 'sad ipod' icon, for when things really go wrong.
This is how it describes identifying the problem on it's website
You might see these symptoms:
: A sad or unhappy iPod icon appears on the screen.


Makes me think of Sherry Turkle's work on our emotional relationship with objects:
Now, I believe that a new kind of computational object — the relational artifact — is provoking striking new changes in the narrative of human development, especially in the way people think about life, and about what kind of relationships it is appropriate to have with a machine. Relational artifacts include children's playthings (such as Furbies and Tamagotchis), digital dolls that double as health monitoring systems for the homebound elderly (Matsushita's forthcoming Tama), sentient robots whose knowledge and personalities change through their interactions with humans, as well as software that responds to its users’ emotional states and responds with "emotional states" of their own.

The computational object is no longer affectively "neutral." People are learning to interact with computers through conversation and gesture, people are learning that to relate successfully to a computer you do not have to know how it works, but to take it "at interface value," that is to assess its emotional "state," much as you would if you were relating to another person.