But the human error behind Florida's false alarm is more easily dealt with. The National Weather Service said last week that as a result of the Tallahassee incident, it's adding a confirmation process to its alerting software nationwide that should make issuing a serious alert at least as difficult as deleting a folder from a Windows desktop.
"Now when the operator calls up on their computer screen what particular three-letter ID they'd like to send, another window will pop up and say, 'Do you really want to issue this radiological hazard warning?'" said Zaleski.
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C. Zannier, G. Melnik, and F. Maurer. ICSE '06: Proceeding of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering, page 341--350. New York, NY, USA, ACM Press, (2006)