Seriously - how many physicians, even among the specialists, keep themselves up to date on the latest research? Many of them do, many of them are passionate, geeky about what they do, and in their spare time they'll be reading up on the latest research, they'll go to conferences, etc., like a passionate geeky programmer would. But many, and i'd say most, just don't. Their knowledge is whatever they were taught. And that wasn't necessarily the state of the art at the time they graduated - that depends on how up to date their *teachers* were.
So, yeah, wikipedia might be misleading; it might be out of date in certain places - in many places, even. But i don't necessarily think your physician will be more up to date. And i'm not sure how to fix that, either, because they *should* be!

in bigger companies, it's a CM team that handles these things. neither dev nor it can do the deployment. CM will testify that the release has been tested (which can be done by a testing group in dev, or a test department), and they will have a handle on everything that is installed right now and has ever been. They have the final word on whether something should be deployed. They build the packages going to the clients, if need be. And you can always go to them and ask "where's the code that's running right now?".
they'll also keep track of what documentation corresponds to what. you usually can't trust the developpers for things like that.

you need a CM team, even if they're not full-time CM.

Who is it that created the Software and the Hardware...US the *Wetware*... I always liked this little gem, as found in Ender's Game.

Microsoft Palladium is just another reason for not doing a secure OS correctly. Why do a software company need to put restriction in the hardware for privacy and security? BSD is one of the most secure OS and it doesn't use this kind of technique to achieve it. Why don't they (MS) code a secure OS that won't need any hardware restrictions?

I think one of the thing that make Windows insecure is that it's running under Admin rights most of the time. Why don't they forbid administrator to log in and instead ask for admin password before installing new hardware, software that needs admin rights or for changing system files. This way scripts or viruses won't be able to corrupt the system without the admin password. This technique work quite well for many other ( Unix base system ) OS . At some point, MS needs to rewrite the kernel completely to be able to achieve this and with 40 billions dollars I think it's doable. But with the way they used to code I understand why they don't want to start it over.