For most of its early life, Anarchie was a terribly non-modal program, with absolutely no concept of active connections and their significance. This was normally considered good but in a few cases it causes problems. One such case is when you accidentally kill a long transfer midway through, by quitting the program or closing the wrong window.
Peter and I talked about this, and decided to put in a guard, a caution alert to confirm whether you really meant to kill this transfer. But we knew that an unconditional alert would prove to be annoying. Quite often you start a transfer and then immediately think better of it -- maybe you chose the wrong file or the wrong destination -- and want to just close the window and have it go away without a fuss. Putting an extra step in there would just be annoying.
Our solution to this was quite clever. Anarchie only prompts you to confirm killing a transfer if the transfer has already taken a long time. So if you immediately decide to kill a transfer you don't get an alert, but if you kill a transfer after a long time then you do. In this case, real time is an ideal metric. This prevents you from accidentally losing something that took a long time to generate.
[Of course, the Anarchie dialog currently has two buttons, Abort and Cancel. So nobody is perfect (-: -- Quinn]