[Al Skierkiewicz]

Guys,
This has been discussed many times here on CD. The CAN buss is essentially a transmission line with terminations at both ends. The terminations serve to reduce reflections along the line. On an FRC robot, the lines are fairly short and individual reflections may or may not cause interference on the buss as a whole when set up in a star topology. However, do not carry that forward to non-FRC designs in the future.
Any failure in the transceiver circuitry that would short the buss would affect all devices on the buss. Only opening the buss affects those device(s) down stream.