Hacker News Reader

Nice pacemaker you have there, unfortunately, we've ceased supporting the software, and you are too old for a new one to be implanted, so it might break or get hacked and you'll die. How long would you expect us to support it?! And obviously we can't give away our intellectual property!

https://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2010/jul/21/software-de...

View on HN

Strawman much? Windows XP /= pacemaker. Just because I disagree with this line of reasoning for Windows XP, doesn't mean I do for critical medical equipment.

Although XP is unfortunately used for some other medical equipment. However I think the problem there was using a consumer desktop operating system as an integral part of a medical device in the beginning.

Honestly I think hn, and generally internet commenting sucks because it's mostly all arguments. 1 person says something in a blog/article, 90% of top hn comments are criticism & counter argument, 95% of replies are arguments against the parent, on and on and on.

It wasn't an argument that your comment was wrong, so it wasn't a strawman, it was just an example of something. And then you later go on to agree with me that should be supported because it's proprietary and no one else can support it is subjective and changes based on the use case, eg. medical equipment which runs xp.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com