yoav_hollander

To me, the really-interesting question here is "How can we find such issues in the design before they hit".

In the article, I explain why this is going to be a bigger problem in the near future, and speculate that some simulation-based could, perhaps, do the trick. But I am not sure.

Any thoughts about that?

To Matthew Wilkes: It is true that in military situations the tradeoffs of safety vs. utility are quite different.

However, I think this is one of those (many) cases where it is an "operator error" which a better design could have prevented.

In other words, I think it was a plain bug. Somewhere in the fire() function there should have been some check for:

     distance(current_gps_coordinates, target_coordinates) < min_safety_distance

but there was not.

The archived Washington Post article is still here: https://web.archive.org/web/20130624110018/http:/www.gpsnavi...