This might work for technical breakdowns, but not for external events. ("All coolant pumps and emergency generators fail - because the whole power plant compound is under three meters of water.").

Yes, absolutely. I can look up what kinds of radiation X emits and its specific activity.

You have a point. Lets put it this way: I don't really care if the OS eats up 5 MB or 50 GB of my hard drive as space is cheap these days. I do mind, however, if the OS or the software it is bundled with is annoying, obtrusive, obnoxious, useless, superfluous, unnecessary or outdated and makes me spend time to get rid of it.

Actually, that's the job of the PC manufacturer. You know, stuffing the recovery partition with four dozen marginally useful programs that make you spend two hours to remove them after a Windows reinstall.

I need to isolate the passengers from each other. Otherwise, they'll tear up the passenger compartment and/or I have to make unplanned trips to the emergency room.

Admission, in a legal sense, usually implies not only admitting the facts, but also that there was an error or wrongdoing by the party doing the admitting.

And this has not happened.

Its also really hard for the US to offer an apology to Iran

Oh, um, yeah. Maybe they could offer an apology to the relatives of the people that got killed? Most, if not all of them, never took any hostages in any embassy. Some of them weren't even Iranians.

Nobody can say the US didn't admit to shooting down the airbus, and the US government did offer up an explanation.

And that isn't an "admission" in a legal sense - since they give themselves an acquittal in the same paragraph.

People may not like the explanation, or agree with it, but at least the US stood up for its actions.

If you call giving yourself a complete acquittal "standing up to your actions", yes.

What you're quoting isn't an apology or an acknogledgment of wrongdoing.

"The U.S. government deeply regrets this incident,"

To feel regret over something isn't the same as apologizing for it. You can feel sorry (i.e. feel regret) if a relative of your friend dies. That doesn't mean that you were involved in any way in the death of that relative.

As someone else stated, the system should be doing this automatically, and you need to override this safety to fire on planes with civilian transponders.

I hope this safety is more than a pop-up window:

Target is civilian. Fire anyway? yes/no/cancel

And you're sure there isn't an unofficial (maybe even unwritten) checklist with things to do if the missile doesn't launch, that, somewhere close to the bottom of the list, contains the point "Try disabling the IFF decoder."?

They managed to blow up a nuclear reactor by doing things they shouldn't have been doing while trying to make it work a certain way ...

You know, just like the jolt of adrenaline from almost running off the road, just without the almost running off the road.

It's easy: User interface design is a completely different skill.

Also, if you want a program to be easily usable by someone who didn't write it, you need to let someone else design the user interface.