That's a natural consequence of never living long in the same place, of treating friends as something disposable and trivially replaceable, etc... etc...
My preteen children year old are on firm warning... they can move out of state, but we parents are coming after them and moving into their attics/basements/spare rooms. There is no escape. And we live what we talk, taking care of our mother/mother-in-law next door.
No you aren't living what you're talking - you're choosing to take care of your mother in law, you're forcing your children to take care of you. I'm damn glad I'm not your child because you're not only a liar - you're ignorant and stupid enough to not even recognize your lie.
Spirit isn't stuck in the sand. It's hung up on a rock. The wheels cannot get any traction.
Partly right, partly wrong. She's hung up on a rock because she got stuck in stand - and attempts to drive out only dug her in deeper until she became hung up on a rock.
The USA has a habit of using its intelligence services to overthrow democratically elected officials in foreign countries and usually replaces them with dictators more favorable to its economic interests. Iran during the 1950s is a good example, though only one of many.
When the only example you cite is a well known one from sixty years ago... all that does is make you look like a loon.
If anyone wants a list that they can start researching, I found a decent one here. It's just a list to help you get started.
Over the years, I've found that when someone keeps repeating 'do your own research' - and provides nothing but an unsourced list... that's generally another sure sign of a loon.
Doubly so when it lists "Iraq 1991" as an attempt to replace a democratically elected government... In Iraq? You could equally as well add "Germany 1911-1918" and "Germany 1938-1945". Those governments were 'democratically' elected too.
If you take the time to do that, however, what will amaze you is how little retaliation there has been.
Or maybe - there has been so little retaliation because what you claim to have happened... didn't. (Or, IOW, yet another sign of a loon - pronouncing a conclusion without actually providing anything in the way facts.)
For those who feel inclined to speak about this without having done any research (like that stops anyone these days)
And the pentultimate sign of the loon - "if you do the research, you'll agree with me. If you disagree with me, that means you haven't done the research".
I've always wondered why the rovers aren't designed with bigger wheels and bubble-ish tires (not saying they have to be inflated) like on a truck outfitted for work in a swamp.
Because, among other reasons, there's only so much available to work with. Bigger tires means less room available for something else - or you have to accept complex (and potentially failure prone) inflating/unfolding mechanisms. (Which are going to up the cost.)
Designing a spacecraft is a complex trade off between hundreds of factors.
I wasn't around when Kennedy made his speech about going to the moon so I was wondering, what was the reception of the speech at the time?
My understanding is that it was lukewarm-to-positive at best, because we'd been recently and roundly spanked by the Soviets in space and because beating the Soviets was the name of the game. What there wasn't was neither a sudden nor a sustained burst of public support for going to the Moon and beyond.
There were cries of pork - but those centered mostly around the decision to build the new facilities in the Vice President's home state on land owned by his cronies. Not so much over the program at large. But then, there were also cries over the great expense and cost overruns of the Mercury program.
Republicans were much more of a financially conservative party then, did they balk at the cost and actually try and cut spending from it rather than reallocating it?
The big cuts came in '65-'67 when the true costs of the program (much, much higher than originally estimated) were becoming obvious. The costs were also pushed higher because of NASA's indulgence in gold plating and in ever increasing mission creep. (And I don't recall which side of the aisle they came from.)
What most people don't realize is that by the time Apollo 11 flew, the program was already running on fumes. Major hardware production had already been capped, the overall budget had already been sharply trimmed, and future programs had already been capped or eliminated. Many people blame Nixon for killing the Apollo program, but in reality all he did was pull the plug on the ventilator - the patient was already essentially dead of wounds incurred during the budget firefights in '65-'67.
The same applies, in reverse, to the Shuttle program. NASA started studying aircraft type reuseable spacecraft about 2 seconds after it was created, and spent considerable money and effort doing so across the 1960's. (In fact, the final study contracts for what became the Shuttle were signed while Apollo 11 was in flight!) Again, by the time Nixon arrived on the scene, the die was already largely cast - and he had greater priorities than spending political capital on space exploration, which the public cared little about so long as provided plenty of puff filled press releases, pretty pictures, and accomplishments both real and pseudo.
And that's really one of the keys to understanding how we got in such a mess, and why we can't seem to get out of it. There really isn't a national consensus over space exploration, and the debates raging today over basic policy are the ones we should have had forty years ago.
If the answer to these questions is that the response was more positive, was it Kennedy himself who paved the way for this plan to be accepted, or the general fear of the Soviets that got it pushed through?
The answer, which will surprise many people, is neither,
What isn't widely known (because most people only read the popular histories, not the academic ones) is that Kennedy chose the goal of landing on the moon rather hastily. He asked his advisers for a big flashy goal that the US could accomplish that the Soviet's couldn't, and of the options they offered he chose the moon landing and announced it, all within the span of a few weeks and without serious study on anyone's part. Within a few more weeks, as the costs and risks of the program became clearer, Kennedy began to seek ways to back off from supporting the program without political damage...
But what actually sealed Apollo's fate was an assassin's bullet in Dealey Plaza. That put one of the few major politicians that actually had any significant interest in space exploration into the Oval Office and allowed him to push the Apollo program as a monument to Kennedy.
ince producing the 2nd is cheaper than the 1st. Instead of building 1 or 2, we should build 20
Sure, building the second is cheaper than the building the first... The third is cheaper too - but by less than the difference between the first and second. In fact, the curve flattens out at "still pretty damm expensive" pretty quickly. This is partly because you're not really building enough for full economies of scale to kick in, and partly because there's still an enormous amount of unavoidable man hours involved in actually hand assembling and testing the things.
But building and launching aren't the only costs, you also have to consider operations. And since each probe requires a fully staffed and fully equipped control center 24/7 - those costs mount quickly.
Some will land on a boulder and never be heard from again, but some will also luck out and we'll have them in more scientifically interesting places.
The problem on Mars, as it is on Earth, is that generally the scientifically interesting places are also the places where they are 'most likely to land on a boulder'. I.E. mountains are more interesting that plains geologically speaking, and triple canopy rain forests are more interesting than plains biologically speaking.
I think that mostly you and I are in violent agreement... I was just mostly chastising the OP for his usage of buzzwords and boogeymen in place of reasoned discussion.
The Thresher may have started out as an improved Skipjack but it really didn't end up that way.
Which I pointed out in my original posting.
But what in effect you are saying is that the Navy Standardized reactors to save time and money.
Except - they didn't standardize (as I pointed out in my original post), as the engineering spaces and reactor compartments varied considerably.
On top of which, I really don't consider "let's use this because it's in production and thus available cheaply" to be the same as "we're going to use this reactor for all classes". The former is an accident of history, the latter is standardization.
The Lipscomb, as well as the Tullibee and Narwal are all considered one offs. For some reason the Jack is not.
One more oddity in the (USN) submarine class/naming/numbering system is pretty much lost in the noise.:)
Fossil fuels are the cheapest way to produce energy as long as they do not have to pay for negative externalities.
The problem of being that 'negative externalities' is a buzzword that means whatever the person using it wants it to mean and dragging in whatever costs at whatever rate they want to in order to 'prove' their point.
Like my example above, their process is profitable because they don't have to pay for dumping toxic substances into the environment.
The problem being that you, and many others, seem to have missed the whole environmental thing - where companies are being forced to pay for their wastes. (In the form of scrubbers that remove the toxic substances from the exhaust and the subsequent disposal thereof.)
They standardized a reactor called the S5W it was used for the Skipjack class of subs, the George Washington Class, The Ethan Allen Class, the Permit class,the Sturgeon class, The Lafayette class, and the Ben Franklin class.
That was an accident of history more than anything else. Thresher/Permit started life as 'Improved Skipjack'[1] and even though it evolved all out of recognition retained S5W. The same applies to George Washington (modified from Skipjack) and Ethan Allen (a mashup based of off Skipjack and Thresher/Permit). [2]
The balance of the SSBN's that compromise the '41 for Freedom' are all incrementally evolved from Ethan Allen, so they ended up with S5W as well. The fact that they were all designed and built in a short time frame on an accelerated schedule contributed mightily to this. Sturgeon retained S5W because she was also essentially an evolved Thresher/Permit.
So S5W was retained not because of any conscious decision to standardize, but to hold engineering effort and costs so as not to jeopardize construction and maintenance schedules. Between new construction boomers and SubSafe overhauls, US submarine shipyard capacity and budgets were maxed out throughout the bulk of the 1960's. (Scorpion had her SubSafe overhaul delayed and then only had a minimal overhaul because of this - which is often considered as one of the potential causes for her loss.)
On top of which, there really isn't a 'standard' S5W installation - they varied considerably between classes, there's several different machinery and reactor compartments layouts. (Including the unique installations like Jack and Lipscomb.) Not even the cores were standard - they varied by class and over time. So really, the S5W ended up being a family of roughly similar reactors rather than a single 'standard' reactor.
On top of which, by the mid 60's, the USN recognized that they'd created a problem - ship displacement has grown considerably while the output of the S5W power plant... hadn't. Hence both the 'Super-640' (the unbuilt follow on to the Franklin's) and the Los Angeles classes had new reactors because of this. (The Los Angeles's was also designed for increased stealth.)
I'm also told (and I invite correction) that the standardization in France is leading toward a 'monopoly/monoculture' because when one company can consistently underbid the others, it has gradually driven competitors from the field.
[1] See Friedman's US Submarines since 1945. [2] Ethan Allen essentially uses Thresher/Permit's engineering spaces with a Skipjack bow. (Though there's a lot of detailed systems differences throughout the ship as Ethan Allen and her descendants were a deep divers like the Thresher/Permit's.)
Apparently, the Dutch have developed the technology to clean up the oil spill long ago. Unfortunately, for various reasons, they aren't allowed to use it.
Actually, if you bother to read the article you linked to - they are using it in the Gulf. But rant away, it's linkage that makes you look cool and informative - not the contents of the link.
It's funny how the ones who fight hardest against the spread of their works are, in effect, ensuring that their efforts will be forgotten and they will not leave a mark on gaming history. They are cementing themselves into a tomb of their own making, burying themselves alive.
As much as you'd like to believe that - it's not at all true. Screenshots of the games will survive, as will reviews, walkthroughs, blog posts, etc... etc... While I'll grant these are nowhere as good as the game itself, it's foolish to believe the inability to play the game itself equates to being forgotten and failing to leave a mark. Even if the rare corner case where absolutely nothing survives - the games it inspired (if any) will leave accounts and traces.
And historians are long used to, and well experienced at, working backwards tracing such chains. It's what historian do after all.
Thanks to emulation, many of these older games have secured their spot in the memory of a digital society
If they are only remembered because they can be played, and not for the impacts and traces mentioned above, then probably they aren't worth remembering.
I don't think the idea behind this is to have a group of free loving hippies write the software for medical devices to "scratch an itch" (no offence intended!).
If the can't write it - then what exactly are they doing?
The big companies that manufacture these should continue to write the software, but make it open source. This means it can still be peer reviewed, and if they go bust the next big company can pick right up from where they left off.
Given the unlikelihood of the 'free loving hippies' having any experience with specialized code running on specialized hardware, I really don't see how that's of much use. This isn't a program running on a vanilla PC. (And I haven't even mentioned the medical considerations that define the code and hardware's function - and with which the 'hippies' are equally unlikely to be familiar.) Worse yet, the code and hardware evolve separately and interdependently - and both are bound by the evolution of medical knowledge. (So any other company is unlikely to adopt the code - as it's heavily hardware bound.) My gut feeling is that the more specialized the problem domain, the less useful that FOSS is going to be - the 'hippies'/'basement dwellers' simply lack the education/experience to do much more than review the code at the most basic of levels.
But my basic point is that the poster was complaining about the opacity of the Big Corp and that they are beyond the control of the end user - but in this instance, FOSS is no better from the same POV.
The idea is to copy a page (256 bytes) from the BASIC ROM to the video card address space. This puts random characters into one quarter of the screen.
Well, no. It puts the decidedly non-random contents of the BASIC ROM on the screen.
Then bubble sort the 256 bytes. It took about one second.
Which is roughly as surprising and unexpected as the Sun coming up in the East in the morning. Since much of (the non random and limited character set) data is repeated, many of the bytes don't have to move very far before being 'sorted'.
I'd certainly feel more comfortable if I knew that the software keeping me alive was written and tested by a faceless corporation, reviewed and approved by a faceless government agency, and skimmed over by at least a few J. Random Hackers
Why? It's not J. Random Hacker has any capability to verify the code at any but the most basic level. This is custom code running on custom hardware with it's functions heavily bound by medical considerations.
I'm a big fan of FOSS, but I've got my QA methodology hat on right now. Opening up the source code isn't providing better Quality Assurance coverage, it's just getting more eyes on the code, and at best a bunch of User Acceptance Testing.
But really - will it improve things? You get a bunch of eyes on the code that spot dumbshit mistakes like an undefined variable... But how many eyes will understand the code, and the specialized hardware it runs on, and the medical factors that go into determining how the software and hardware must work in the first place.
This isn't yet another web browser or word processor running on a vanilla PC. This is a highly specialized problem domain running in an unusual environment on nonstandard hardware.
I would say the more important argument when it comes to medical software is control -- do you really want to have a corporation that you have absolutely no control over to be in control of a device that sustains your very life?
And how is that worse having a group of random self appointed individuals, over whom I have absolutely no control, in control of a device that sustains my very life?
What happens if that company goes bankrupt, and the source code dies with the company?
From the number of FOSS projects I've seen die on the vine because the developers drift away to other interests or just drift away, I'm not certain that FOSS is any better. Making the assumption, of course, that for such a project as pacemaker code that a sufficient number of developers with the proper experience can be herded together at one time... This isn't a video codec or yet another word processor clone. This is a device upon which, as you said, people's lives depend. I'd be hesitant to trust 'some guy in a basement'.
It matters because when you buy the "leading open-source company", you also buy the programmers, many of whom will go on to work for Oracle.
Not just their programmers - but also their customer base.
Despite the anarchistic "Everyman is own IT department" fantasies of the FOSS movement, most companies and individuals just want something that works. The days when every business, large and small, had to have management, staff, and gurus to roll their own and keep them rolling are viewed with horror as the 'bad old days'. The idea that the software that keeps their business ticking depends on 'some guy in a basement' and his friends are viewed as equally terrifying. (Which is why these FOSS companies exist in the first place.)
Slashdot (and by extension the FOSS movement) really needs to realize that in the real world, people and businesses don't jump to forks for political reasons and in fact are cautious about changing things at because the costs (in actual money) and disruptions that accompany such jumps.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a natural consequence of never living long in the same place, of treating friends as something disposable and trivially replaceable, etc... etc...
No you aren't living what you're talking - you're choosing to take care of your mother in law, you're forcing your children to take care of you. I'm damn glad I'm not your child because you're not only a liar - you're ignorant and stupid enough to not even recognize your lie.
Given that all of the main instruments need to perform the rover's mission are at the end of arm...
This is probably a beautiful photograph that I will never see because I choose not to use the technology required .
Fixed that for you.
Partly right, partly wrong. She's hung up on a rock because she got stuck in stand - and attempts to drive out only dug her in deeper until she became hung up on a rock.
When the only example you cite is a well known one from sixty years ago... all that does is make you look like a loon.
Over the years, I've found that when someone keeps repeating 'do your own research' - and provides nothing but an unsourced list... that's generally another sure sign of a loon.
Doubly so when it lists "Iraq 1991" as an attempt to replace a democratically elected government... In Iraq? You could equally as well add "Germany 1911-1918" and "Germany 1938-1945". Those governments were 'democratically' elected too.
Or maybe - there has been so little retaliation because what you claim to have happened... didn't. (Or, IOW, yet another sign of a loon - pronouncing a conclusion without actually providing anything in the way facts.)
And the pentultimate sign of the loon - "if you do the research, you'll agree with me. If you disagree with me, that means you haven't done the research".
Because, among other reasons, there's only so much available to work with. Bigger tires means less room available for something else - or you have to accept complex (and potentially failure prone) inflating/unfolding mechanisms. (Which are going to up the cost.)
Designing a spacecraft is a complex trade off between hundreds of factors.
The "Science Of ___________" meme has finally jumped the shark.
My understanding is that it was lukewarm-to-positive at best, because we'd been recently and roundly spanked by the Soviets in space and because beating the Soviets was the name of the game. What there wasn't was neither a sudden nor a sustained burst of public support for going to the Moon and beyond.
There were cries of pork - but those centered mostly around the decision to build the new facilities in the Vice President's home state on land owned by his cronies. Not so much over the program at large. But then, there were also cries over the great expense and cost overruns of the Mercury program.
The big cuts came in '65-'67 when the true costs of the program (much, much higher than originally estimated) were becoming obvious. The costs were also pushed higher because of NASA's indulgence in gold plating and in ever increasing mission creep. (And I don't recall which side of the aisle they came from.)
What most people don't realize is that by the time Apollo 11 flew, the program was already running on fumes. Major hardware production had already been capped, the overall budget had already been sharply trimmed, and future programs had already been capped or eliminated. Many people blame Nixon for killing the Apollo program, but in reality all he did was pull the plug on the ventilator - the patient was already essentially dead of wounds incurred during the budget firefights in '65-'67.
The same applies, in reverse, to the Shuttle program. NASA started studying aircraft type reuseable spacecraft about 2 seconds after it was created, and spent considerable money and effort doing so across the 1960's. (In fact, the final study contracts for what became the Shuttle were signed while Apollo 11 was in flight!) Again, by the time Nixon arrived on the scene, the die was already largely cast - and he had greater priorities than spending political capital on space exploration, which the public cared little about so long as provided plenty of puff filled press releases, pretty pictures, and accomplishments both real and pseudo.
And that's really one of the keys to understanding how we got in such a mess, and why we can't seem to get out of it. There really isn't a national consensus over space exploration, and the debates raging today over basic policy are the ones we should have had forty years ago.
The answer, which will surprise many people, is neither,
What isn't widely known (because most people only read the popular histories, not the academic ones) is that Kennedy chose the goal of landing on the moon rather hastily. He asked his advisers for a big flashy goal that the US could accomplish that the Soviet's couldn't, and of the options they offered he chose the moon landing and announced it, all within the span of a few weeks and without serious study on anyone's part. Within a few more weeks, as the costs and risks of the program became clearer, Kennedy began to seek ways to back off from supporting the program without political damage...
But what actually sealed Apollo's fate was an assassin's bullet in Dealey Plaza. That put one of the few major politicians that actually had any significant interest in space exploration into the Oval Office and allowed him to push the Apollo program as a monument to Kennedy.
Sure, building the second is cheaper than the building the first... The third is cheaper too - but by less than the difference between the first and second. In fact, the curve flattens out at "still pretty damm expensive" pretty quickly. This is partly because you're not really building enough for full economies of scale to kick in, and partly because there's still an enormous amount of unavoidable man hours involved in actually hand assembling and testing the things.
But building and launching aren't the only costs, you also have to consider operations. And since each probe requires a fully staffed and fully equipped control center 24/7 - those costs mount quickly.
The problem on Mars, as it is on Earth, is that generally the scientifically interesting places are also the places where they are 'most likely to land on a boulder'. I.E. mountains are more interesting that plains geologically speaking, and triple canopy rain forests are more interesting than plains biologically speaking.
I think that mostly you and I are in violent agreement... I was just mostly chastising the OP for his usage of buzzwords and boogeymen in place of reasoned discussion.
Which I pointed out in my original posting.
Except - they didn't standardize (as I pointed out in my original post), as the engineering spaces and reactor compartments varied considerably.
On top of which, I really don't consider "let's use this because it's in production and thus available cheaply" to be the same as "we're going to use this reactor for all classes". The former is an accident of history, the latter is standardization.
One more oddity in the (USN) submarine class/naming/numbering system is pretty much lost in the noise. :)
The problem of being that 'negative externalities' is a buzzword that means whatever the person using it wants it to mean and dragging in whatever costs at whatever rate they want to in order to 'prove' their point.
The problem being that you, and many others, seem to have missed the whole environmental thing - where companies are being forced to pay for their wastes. (In the form of scrubbers that remove the toxic substances from the exhaust and the subsequent disposal thereof.)
That was an accident of history more than anything else. Thresher/Permit started life as 'Improved Skipjack'[1] and even though it evolved all out of recognition retained S5W. The same applies to George Washington (modified from Skipjack) and Ethan Allen (a mashup based of off Skipjack and Thresher/Permit). [2]
The balance of the SSBN's that compromise the '41 for Freedom' are all incrementally evolved from Ethan Allen, so they ended up with S5W as well. The fact that they were all designed and built in a short time frame on an accelerated schedule contributed mightily to this. Sturgeon retained S5W because she was also essentially an evolved Thresher/Permit.
So S5W was retained not because of any conscious decision to standardize, but to hold engineering effort and costs so as not to jeopardize construction and maintenance schedules. Between new construction boomers and SubSafe overhauls, US submarine shipyard capacity and budgets were maxed out throughout the bulk of the 1960's. (Scorpion had her SubSafe overhaul delayed and then only had a minimal overhaul because of this - which is often considered as one of the potential causes for her loss.)
On top of which, there really isn't a 'standard' S5W installation - they varied considerably between classes, there's several different machinery and reactor compartments layouts. (Including the unique installations like Jack and Lipscomb.) Not even the cores were standard - they varied by class and over time. So really, the S5W ended up being a family of roughly similar reactors rather than a single 'standard' reactor.
On top of which, by the mid 60's, the USN recognized that they'd created a problem - ship displacement has grown considerably while the output of the S5W power plant... hadn't. Hence both the 'Super-640' (the unbuilt follow on to the Franklin's) and the Los Angeles classes had new reactors because of this. (The Los Angeles's was also designed for increased stealth.)
I'm also told (and I invite correction) that the standardization in France is leading toward a 'monopoly/monoculture' because when one company can consistently underbid the others, it has gradually driven competitors from the field.
[1] See Friedman's US Submarines since 1945.
[2] Ethan Allen essentially uses Thresher/Permit's engineering spaces with a Skipjack bow. (Though there's a lot of detailed systems differences throughout the ship as Ethan Allen and her descendants were a deep divers like the Thresher/Permit's.)
Actually, if you bother to read the article you linked to - they are using it in the Gulf. But rant away, it's linkage that makes you look cool and informative - not the contents of the link.
As much as you'd like to believe that - it's not at all true. Screenshots of the games will survive, as will reviews, walkthroughs, blog posts, etc... etc... While I'll grant these are nowhere as good as the game itself, it's foolish to believe the inability to play the game itself equates to being forgotten and failing to leave a mark. Even if the rare corner case where absolutely nothing survives - the games it inspired (if any) will leave accounts and traces.
And historians are long used to, and well experienced at, working backwards tracing such chains. It's what historian do after all.
If they are only remembered because they can be played, and not for the impacts and traces mentioned above, then probably they aren't worth remembering.
About fifteen minutes ago.
In fact, I delete far more than I archive because probably 90% of the (non spam) email I receive are either trivial or of limited time value.
If the can't write it - then what exactly are they doing?
Given the unlikelihood of the 'free loving hippies' having any experience with specialized code running on specialized hardware, I really don't see how that's of much use. This isn't a program running on a vanilla PC. (And I haven't even mentioned the medical considerations that define the code and hardware's function - and with which the 'hippies' are equally unlikely to be familiar.) Worse yet, the code and hardware evolve separately and interdependently - and both are bound by the evolution of medical knowledge. (So any other company is unlikely to adopt the code - as it's heavily hardware bound.) My gut feeling is that the more specialized the problem domain, the less useful that FOSS is going to be - the 'hippies'/'basement dwellers' simply lack the education/experience to do much more than review the code at the most basic of levels.
But my basic point is that the poster was complaining about the opacity of the Big Corp and that they are beyond the control of the end user - but in this instance, FOSS is no better from the same POV.
True, but irrelevant to my point - which is that the OP is treating FOSS as a panacea. It isn't.
Well, no. It puts the decidedly non-random contents of the BASIC ROM on the screen.
Which is roughly as surprising and unexpected as the Sun coming up in the East in the morning. Since much of (the non random and limited character set) data is repeated, many of the bytes don't have to move very far before being 'sorted'.
Why? It's not J. Random Hacker has any capability to verify the code at any but the most basic level. This is custom code running on custom hardware with it's functions heavily bound by medical considerations.
If you define 'reasonable size' large enough, sure.
But really - will it improve things? You get a bunch of eyes on the code that spot dumbshit mistakes like an undefined variable... But how many eyes will understand the code, and the specialized hardware it runs on, and the medical factors that go into determining how the software and hardware must work in the first place.
This isn't yet another web browser or word processor running on a vanilla PC. This is a highly specialized problem domain running in an unusual environment on nonstandard hardware.
And how is that worse having a group of random self appointed individuals, over whom I have absolutely no control, in control of a device that sustains my very life?
From the number of FOSS projects I've seen die on the vine because the developers drift away to other interests or just drift away, I'm not certain that FOSS is any better. Making the assumption, of course, that for such a project as pacemaker code that a sufficient number of developers with the proper experience can be herded together at one time... This isn't a video codec or yet another word processor clone. This is a device upon which, as you said, people's lives depend. I'd be hesitant to trust 'some guy in a basement'.
Not just their programmers - but also their customer base.
Despite the anarchistic "Everyman is own IT department" fantasies of the FOSS movement, most companies and individuals just want something that works. The days when every business, large and small, had to have management, staff, and gurus to roll their own and keep them rolling are viewed with horror as the 'bad old days'. The idea that the software that keeps their business ticking depends on 'some guy in a basement' and his friends are viewed as equally terrifying. (Which is why these FOSS companies exist in the first place.)
Slashdot (and by extension the FOSS movement) really needs to realize that in the real world, people and businesses don't jump to forks for political reasons and in fact are cautious about changing things at because the costs (in actual money) and disruptions that accompany such jumps.