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Re:The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Sa... by astura on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @09:23AM (#16158329)
Totally unscientific idea:

Have PINs required for certain critical operations and post those PINs in multiple places around the facility. Each PIN is different for each operation. That way the user has to look up the PIN before sending out the "you're going to die" message.

Re:The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Sa... by rhino369 on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @12:35PM (#16160041)
Part of the problem is that these need to be sent quickly. An in bound ballistic missile could have only several minutes of warning or less. Make it too difficult and you waste thirty second looking up a pin. That could kill tens of thousands of people who couldn't get away from windows in time.
Re:The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Sa... by Y_Y on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @09:58AM (#16158599)
And which Person would be Identified by such a Number?
Re:The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Sa... by astura on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @11:21AM (#16159283)
I misspoke, PIN would be the wrong term, it would be an activation code.

The codes would be per action not per person. So the "send missile threat" activation code would be, for example, 98790 for everyone and the "test send missile threat" would be 16289 for everyone. You'd have to look up what the code was for your message you wanted to send. All test message start with 1 while all real messages start with 9. They could be rotating so employees don't memorize them.

So to send an alarm by mistake someone would need to press the wrong button and also look up the wrong code and also ignore the meaning of the code prefix.

Just an example.

Though maybe just "this is not a drill" would be better/easier.

Re:The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Sa... by logfromblammo on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @11:33AM (#16159403)
I think Y_Y was trying to convey that PIN expands to Personal Identification Number, which does not apply if no specific person can be identified.

In any case, your proposal suffers from the flaw that in a real emergency, nobody will have the extra seconds to spare to look up a code, because that would literally be thousands of people dying per lost second, so the emergency codes will all rotate from '99999' through '99999'. And an employee would actually be responsible for changing the codes from '99999' to '99999' every time they are required to rotate.