>>> and it was an "amber alert" about a missing boy in our town.
Why would they expect people sitting at home in their residences to know the location of a missing child? Is there enough likelihood of success that it justifies disturbing thousands or tens of thousands of people?
I'm in favor of locating missing children, but these "Amber alerts" may have gotten out of hand.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Around here, the cable company runs a ticker strip message for missing children. Actually, the city of Independence has that built into the cableco franchise agreement: a channel for the high school and college's use (channel 22); a channel for the city itself (channel 14), and an 'all-purpose' general channel for anyone to use (channel 10). And the police dispatchers can 'flip a switch' and take over _all_ channels on a moment's notice for things like tornado warnings, missing children, crimes in progress, etc. The city insisted that these channels all be in the 'free, basic' part of the spectrum so that everyone would be able to listen to them, with or without payment for the premium channels (which they refer to as 'basic extended' (channels 25 and upward). Normally, they content themselves with putting stuff on channel 14, only going elsewhere when a dire emergency requires it, for example, the tornado spotted about a week ago, or about a year ago when the girl from Independence High School turned up 'missing' (which turned out to be a hoax). PAT]