[arielby]

I agree that "are you sure you want to proceed?" dialog boxes on a word processor are absolutely horrible, but not all dialog boxes are so bad - Firefox's unacceptable certificate page, is, for example, a decent solution for its problem.

There are many actions that could be very harmful under some situations, but occasionally required (e.g. dealing with websites that get a certificate for `www.mysite.net` instead of `mysite.net`). Much of safety engineering is ensuring these are not encountered in day-to-day routine, but these are never perfect, and much worse in open, dynamic environments (like the military, when this case occured).

Militaries do typically have radio protocols to reduce the risk of artillery targeting unintended locations. I agree that good testers should have caught this bug, but there are hundreds of corner cases and you will always miss some of them. Domestic electric equipment is designed to prevent live wires from being exposed, but RCD-s are still a thing.