People Hate Canada's New 'Amber Alert' System (www.cbc.ca) 325
The CBC reports:
When the siren-like sounds from an Amber Alert rang out on cellular phones across Ontario on Monday, it sparked a bit of a backlash against Canada's new mobile emergency alert system. The Ontario Provincial Police had issued the alert for a missing eight-year-old boy in the Thunder Bay region. (The boy has since been found safe)... On social media, people startled by the alerts complained about the number of alerts they received and that they had received separate alerts in English and French... Meanwhile, others who were located far from the incident felt that receiving the alert was pointless. "I've received two Amber Alerts today for Thunder Bay, which is 15 hours away from Toronto by car," tweeted Molly Sauter. "Congrats, you have trained me to ignore Emergency Alerts...."
The CRTC ordered wireless providers to implement the system to distribute warnings of imminent safety threats such as tornadoes, floods, Amber Alerts or terrorist threats. Telecom companies had favoured an opt-out option or the ability to disable the alarm for some types of alerts. But this was rejected by the broadcasting and telecommunications regulator. Individuals concerned about receiving these alerts are left with a couple of options: they can turn off their phone -- it will not be forced on by the alert -- or mute their phone so they won't hear it.
Long-time Slashdot reader knorthern knight complains that the first two alerts-- one in English, followed by one in French -- were then followed by a third (bi-lingual) alert advising recipients to ignore the previous two alerts, since the missing child had been found.
The CRTC ordered wireless providers to implement the system to distribute warnings of imminent safety threats such as tornadoes, floods, Amber Alerts or terrorist threats. Telecom companies had favoured an opt-out option or the ability to disable the alarm for some types of alerts. But this was rejected by the broadcasting and telecommunications regulator. Individuals concerned about receiving these alerts are left with a couple of options: they can turn off their phone -- it will not be forced on by the alert -- or mute their phone so they won't hear it.
Long-time Slashdot reader knorthern knight complains that the first two alerts-- one in English, followed by one in French -- were then followed by a third (bi-lingual) alert advising recipients to ignore the previous two alerts, since the missing child had been found.
Some context (Score:5, Informative)
Thunder Bay is 870 miles away from Toronto by road. This is equivalent to setting off an amber alert in Pittsburgh or Washington because of a missing kid in Florida.
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In my home country of Denmark you can't go 870 miles in any direction from any point in the country without ending up in another country altogether.
Or the ocean.
I suspect this is true for a lot of the smaller European countries, though I can't be bothered to pull up a bunch of maps to check for certain.
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Indeed, the contrast is stunning.
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In my home country of Denmark you can't go 870 miles in any direction from any point in the country without ending up in another country altogether.
Or the ocean.
I suspect this is true for a lot of the smaller European countries, though I can't be bothered to pull up a bunch of maps to check for certain.
And still the Danish equivalent alert system can be alerted for a single city at a time.
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For comparison, in Australia it's possible to go 870 miles in a straight line without leaving the cattle ranch [wikipedia.org]. Canada is a little bigger, but Australia has a lot more nothing between things.
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The only countries in Europe with such long straight line territory seem to be Sweden, Norway and Russia. Also Turkey, but its in their Asian part
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In Canada, driving 800+ miles is considered a day trip, unless you live in one of the big cities and never really travel. Same with the US. People really don't grasp the size of north america, and just how far people travel. Often, it's cheaper to drive from ontario to alberta through the US(call it 3-4 days) with fuel and hotel rentals then it is to fly(call that a 4200km drive), a flight could run you $600-900 even with 2mo reservations, driving? $300 if that. It's hilarious to hear european truck driv
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Ukraine is to small, the longest distance I managed to find (google maps distance tool) was about 800 miles.
Turkey only reaches this in its Asian part.
Greenland doesn't really count as Europe as its NA.
You also missed Sweden and Norway, they are quite long in their N-S axis
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Well, technically Greenland falls under Danish government now that you mention it.
Re: Some context (Score:2)
We got that Amber Alert in Montreal too, and thatâ(TM)s another 6 hours further by car than Toronto. Admittedly, we only got it on the radio, but thatâ(TM)s because the Quebec emergency system failed totally when tested a couple of weeks ago.
Re:Some context (Score:5, Informative)
Why is it so hard to get the location for the alerts down to something narrow enough to be useful? I like the idea of the system, but the implementation is so bad that it's useless.
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Bzzt. The correct answer is statism, progressivism, regulatory overreach, and bureaucracy.
Re:Some context (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine you are a very concerned public official in charge of this system, and you get a police alert for a missing child. You know that the child has probably just gotten lost, but may have been abducted - it happens, usually following an ugly divorce in which one parent gets custody. The child has been missing now for 24 hours - the time taken for the parent to notice they didn't come home from school, call the school, let the school search and check their records, call the police, have the police send an officer over to collect full details, organise a local search, and finally conclude that the child should be declared potentially abducted and an amber alert issued.
I ran that through the trip planner on Google: An abductor on the run, unable to use air travel but also willing to forgo sleep in their deperation to escape a search area, can do that in 27 hours drive time. Achievable if they take a bus part of the journey, or try for a desperation-fueled thirty-hours-without-sleep day. So that is actually a perfectly reasonable search radius.
There is an obvious problem with this: When the 'reasonable search radius' includes more than half the country, alerts are so frequent that people quickly learn to ignore them. Child abductions are very good at terrifying parents, but actual cases of children harmed are very rare - that's why they make headlines when it does happen, further fuelling the fear.
Re:Some context (Score:5, Interesting)
The last alert I got was for an abduction that had taken place two hours prior, in a city that was an 8 hour drive away. A little after 9 P.M.
The odds that I might happen to see the described vehicle were zero. Since then, I have seen news reports of abductions where people in my general area might have potentially seen the vehicle, but I didn't receive an alert.
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The odds that I might happen to see the described vehicle were zero. Since then, I have seen news reports of abductions where people in my general area might have potentially seen the vehicle, but I didn't receive an alert.
Yep. When you couple the alerts you don't get (any useful ones, IME) with the alerts you do get (which couldn't possibly have anything to do with you) then the whole thing becomes a shit-show. I disabled all alerts a long time ago (my rom lets me) and I'm much happier for it.
Maybe if I start doing a lot of freeway miles, I'll turn them back on, but that'd be the only way.
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The last alert I got was for an abduction that had taken place TWO HOURS PRIOR, in a city that was an 8 hour drive away. A little after 9 P.M.
Re:Some context (Score:4, Interesting)
You know that the child has probably just gotten lost, but may have been abducted - it happens, usually following an ugly divorce in which one parent gets custody.
Haven't suspected custody battles been explicitly exempted from the Amber Alerts? Also I think you've missed out on the recent paranoia, it's notice the child is missing - or even potentially missing - and go straight to panic, better safe than sorry. Even in my day I'd say the longest period out of touch between dinner and supper would be 3-4 hours at the most, if I didn't show up for school or didn't get home from school the panic would start much sooner. I mean I could hang out with a friend, but then they'd call from their house to my house and tell where I was.
Maybe my parents could be out and about a whole day without being in touch with an adult, but not me. These days any child that's mature enough to be left unsupervised for any longer period of time usually has a cell phone too, so if you're too young to have one or isn't answering they're both reasons to start a search sooner. Of course there could always be an outlier somewhere but I imagine the vast majority start <2 hours after they got lost.
For the Amber Alert to be useful the child must be visible which only happens if the kid is still going along with it, if it's drugged or tied up in the trunk/back of a van it hardly matters how wide the alert goes. And it'll only take so long before the kid realize you're not giving him/her a lift home, so practically I doubt it's useful for more than say a one hour radius. You also have to consider that you will be blasting it on TV, radio and online news. How many people do you really need to nag by text message? I'd probably go with like a 50 mile radius at most. Potentially even less.
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Even in my day I'd say the longest period out of touch between dinner and supper would be 3-4 hours at the most, if I didn't show up for school or didn't get home from school the panic would start much sooner.
Different cultures and times have different norms, I think. As long as I were home by the time matching my age, it didn't matter whether I was out the entire day without giving notice.
There were Rules, like no swimming without at least one person staying ashore, or no getting into cars unless driven by parents of friends, and if there were an Event like a family dinner, I'd be home in time to clean up before then, but by and large, we kids were allowed to go missing for the day, and expected to be able to
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This is a sample of helicopter parenting. It is not good for the kid (don't learn how to evaluate risk or to take risk), it is also not good for the parent (never learn to trust their kid).
There are other effects described here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://www.psychologytoday.co... [psychologytoday.com]
https://www.psychologytoday.co... [psychologytoday.com]
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But do the amber alerts do anything if there are too many of them?
If you receive a few per day, virtually any kid you see is probably going to match at least a couple of the reports you got in the last week. Should you report every case of a kid crying to the police as a possible sighting? After all, there was an amber alert.
Re:Some context (Score:4, Insightful)
But do the amber alerts do anything if there are too many of them?
Of course they do. Crying wolf desensitizes people, but the sheer amount justifies larger appropriations to certain departments.
And direct-to-phone communicaton like this alert system allows the phone companies and law enforcement agencies a pretext for a pen register of the IMEIs of phone capable devices that don't even have a subscription, as long as they're powered.
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may have been abducted - it happens, usually following an ugly divorce in which one parent gets custody
In which case the child is either in no danger of harm at all, or they're about to participate in a murder-suicide for which the abductor isn't going to drive 800 miles.
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An abductor on the run, unable to use air travel but also willing to forgo sleep in their deperation to escape a search area, can do that in 27 hours drive time. Achievable if they take a bus part of the journey, or try for a desperation-fueled thirty-hours-without-sleep day. So that is actually a perfectly reasonable search radius.
Holy crap the conclusion you reach is not even remotely related to conditions in your assumption.
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> The child has been missing now for 24 hours
Amber alerts are issued immediately, not days after.
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Oh, not very effective then. I've never seen amber alerts here for that kind of situation.
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Wha? I've driven Thunder Bay to Toronto in one go. Twice. It's about a 15 hour drive, no desperation required.
If you're in Thunder Bay, which is really kind of a smallish town by most countries' standards and you want to get out, there's really only one highway and two ways to go: west to Winnipeg and south to Toronto. Of those options, south would be way better for losing yourself in the crowd. So if the kid had been missing for more than eight hours or so, an alert in southern Ontario wouldn't be comp
Re: Some context (Score:3)
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Re:Some context (Score:5, Informative)
I live in Washington state. A couple of years ago we got an Amber Alert related to an abduction in California - somebody thought the guy might choose to head north, so they apparently set them off along the entire I-5 corridor.
I disabled them on my phone long before that, but you still see them on freeway signs and whatnot.
The idea behind Amber Alerts isn’t a bad one, but the implementation is rubbish - probably because it’s driven by emotion rather than a rational look at what might actually help.
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> driven by emotion rather than a rational look at what might actually help.
Just like gun control.
Re: Some context (Score:2, Insightful)
And like gun control, it overwhelmingly only effects people who are not the sort of people who are the real problem.
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> driven by emotion rather than a rational look at what might actually help.
Just like gun control.
Just like gun rights, you mean.
Gun control proponents are quite often objective, looking at statistics like data from other Western countries that tightened control like the UK and Australia, instead of appeals to feelings and heritage. Sure, there are knee-jerk reactions for gun control too, but those are fewer, and not nearly as pervasive as the irrational feelings-based "from my cold dead hands" crowd.
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"Western countries" like UK and Australia do not have a large amount of African or South American populations. You will notice as populations of these southern hemisphere types increase, crime increases.
You have apparently never been to the UK.
20% of the UK population identify as non-white, and in London, only 45% of the population is "White British". It's hard to find any metropolis in the world with more cultural diversity than London. Or one where your life is in less danger from murder.
How is UK's gun ban working for London's stabbing rates?
Quite well, actually. Compared to the total number shot or stabbed before with the number shot or stabbed now, the risk has gone down.
And given a choice, I'd take a higher risk of being stabbed or sliced over being sh
Incompetent government with good intentions (Score:2)
Another example of stupid things the government does with good intentions. Same people who voted to ban dihydrogen-monoxide I bet.
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Think of the Children, Reductio Ad Absurdum (Score:5, Insightful)
Coming soon: child-in-a-hot-car alerts, child-accidentally-saw-someone-naked alerts, child-missed-school alerts, child-using-drugs alerts, child-feeling-depressed alerts, child-feeling-repressed alerts, child-defying-authority alerts, child-attempting-suicide alerts, public-child-funeral alerts, government-overreach alerts, government-collapse alerts, and finally no alerts once children are starving in a lawless land.
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Good intention, incredibly bad implementation (Score:3, Insightful)
Likely get downvoated but whatever. As a Canadian, fuck this. Ottawa does _not_ speak for the rest of Canada, despite what Trudy wants the world to believe. This is yet another example of it.
The Amber alert is _frequently_ abused by couples as part of their own internal marital problems. Thankfully not all reports get full blown Province wide alerts but enough do go out. It wasn't enough to plaster them all over highway signs and the media, oh no.
I don't care about your marriage problems. What I do care about is their continuing to implement frameworks used for totalitarian control. Even in Canada we have already tested using these systems to "alert" the public about crimes. Warn me when an actual emergency - say a power plant going into melt down - happens. Otherwise fuck off.
Re:Good intention, incredibly bad implementation (Score:4, Funny)
On behalf of the Canadian government: Sorry.
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i just bought a new Samsung Galaxy S9 plus (Score:2)
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and was driving home with the phone still in the box it came in, and it did not even have a sim card in it yet and the damn thing kept making noise like those Emergency Broadcast System warning sounds you hear on TV & radio, so i get home, take the phone out of the box and turn it on (it was off and getting those warnings)
To confirm, are saying that the phone was actually powered off (and not just locked / screen blanked) and was still receiving alerts and making noise? By "actually off" I mean specifically choosing the "power off" function from a menu (and not just a brief press on the power button.) If true, silly Amber alerts aside, this is a serious issue / accusation for a phone with a non-removable battery.
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The was however a recent legal case that said that the sender of a message could be responsible in the case where the recipient was involved in a collision due to distracted driving. I suddenly changed my mind about that ruling, I now think I've found the perfect place to apply it!
"imminent safety threats" (Score:5, Insightful)
The CRTC ordered wireless providers to implement the system to distribute warnings of imminent safety threats such as tornadoes, floods, Amber Alerts or terrorist threats.
One of these things is not like the other... one of these things is not the same...
I'm not sure what kind of flawed logic you need to consider an "Amber Alert" (which basically affects a single child) to be a safety threat anywhere near on the same level as natural disasters. Many "terrorist threats" may be false or localized, but even those affect many more people than a single child.
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I'm not sure what kind of flawed logic you need to consider an "Amber Alert" (which basically affects a single child) to be a safety threat anywhere near on the same level as natural disasters.
What makes you assume that's what they're doing? It's not the level of butt-puckering that's the same, it's what you do that's the same — get the word out. With that said, it would be nice if there were a different sound for amber alerts that aren't immediately life-threatening that a) doesn't go off when you're asleep and b) doesn't sound like an air-raid alarm.
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But where's your limit for getting the word out?
Child missing, check.
Escaped convict, check.
Drunk driver on the freeway, check.
Ghost driver on the freeway, check.
Crash on the freeway, find alternate route, check.
Heavy traffic, find alternate route, check.
Big sale on diapers at Wal-Mart, check.
A missing child is terrifying - for that child and that child's immediate family. The rest of the alerts or on Catastrophic Disaster level for an entire area, not a single household.
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I don't want to get the word out. The alerts are stupid. 90% of the time it's one of the kids parents withholding the child from the other. The kid isn't in any danger.
The child is in danger. Even if the kidnapping parent isn't acting erratically enough to directly endanger their lives, child abduction is itself harmful [healthyplace.com]. We don't need to create more fucked up people, there is no shortage of them already.
But again, I don't need to be woken up at 3 am to be notified that someone might have a child on the freeway. I'm not on the freeway. What year is it? They should be able to send alerts only to active phones, in a case like that; ones which are moving!
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Statistically it's way more than 90%.
On average in the entire country of Canada there is about one child a year abducted by someone they don't know. If Amber alerts were only used for this, and only in a reasonable radius, you'd only get one about once a decade or even less.
On par with the US system (Score:2)
Really? (Score:2)
I'm more surprised that you're all familiar with such alerts.
The day I recieve one of these, I will not only disable it (or ditch the phone for telephony entirely and go full IP and mute everything else), I will file a formal complaint and initiate a lawsuit if they just say 'tough'.
My country surely has the same facility but unless it's literally 'London is radioactive, stay the fuck away' it shouldn't be used. And people say *we're* a police state. Honestly, you could trigger outright riots and vigilant
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> The day I recieve one of these, I will not only disable it (or ditch the phone for telephony entirely and go full IP and mute everything else),
This is actually what I do. Due to the high cost of cell service in Canada, I have a cheap data only plan meant for tablets, and I use voip for voice.
I still got the alerts.
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A child missing warning has almost NOTHING to do with public safety on the scale you're talking about.
That child's safety, yes. But I don't want a text every time he crosses the road not at a crossing, walks along the top of a wall.
It's an ENTIRELY different thing to flood alerts, tornado alerts, etc.
We just don't have missing child alerts like that in my country. They are on police-force websites, missing-child sites, people copy/paste them to Facebook if they're local, but unless it's something incredib
Shameful (Score:2)
Molly makes an excellent point. It's well known that kidnappers are restricted to a 14.9-hour radius, and any alert should be strictly localized to users within that range. It makes NO SENSE to err on the side of covering an overly broad geographical area. If anything, only the 2 or 3 people nearest the event should even rec
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By your logic, due to the prevalence of airplanes and travel to other countries, whenever a child goes missing anywhere in the world, all cell phones in the entire world needs to scream out an Amber Alert to their owners.
French and english (Score:2)
Canada have this two officials language, even if the Alerts was send in French. Butg since the people managing the system are racist against french speaking people, the vocabulary in the Alert and the grammar was so off that none of the french speaking population CAN NOT read the thing supposed written in french that was send.
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To be fair, they probably had trouble fitting the French version into the allowable message length. ;)
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Mind your own business.
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Why ? because you don't know french youself don't make you a french expert.
English people living in Canada are the most racists people when it come to canadian speaking people.
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Oblig Futurama [youtube.com].
Amber alert is BS here too (Score:2)
amber alert is overreaction bullshit (Score:2)
in any country. Next to stopping for pedestrians on quiet streets, stroboscopic seazure inducing school buses. Red lights on school buses stopping six bloody lanes of traffic for no real reason.
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Red lights on school buses stopping six bloody lanes of traffic for no real reason.
The reason is incompetence of the school district. One should design school bus routes to minimize traffic disruption, which is hazardous anyway.
Not a Big Problem (Score:2)
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Seems to be a huge failure in the design of the system.
SMS is a bit of a nasty kludge. The messages themselves exist inside call setup packets that your phone needs to send and receive anyway. It wasn't originally intended for the sending of text messages -- it was merely a packet that needed to be sent and received, but where most of the packet data was empty, and so someone had the bright idea of putting message data in there.
This presents a number of problems. It's not exactly efficient. There is no guarantee of timeliness or message order. You can't me
Needs an Opt-Out (Score:2)
Any system like this needs an Opt-Out option. I'm way the heck out in the mountains. Virtually none of these warnings are relevant to me and I can't do anything about them. All they do is waste time. Weather events I'm well aware of and always prepared for. Missing kids aren't going to be anywhere near me. All this system does is waste resources, piss people off and lower their attention threshold such that real warnings will get ignored.
Nationwide Amber Alerts (Score:2)
The initial implementation of the US system had the same problem, Amber Alerts in places that were irrelevantly distant from the crime. This is a bug that has been worked out.
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...This is a bug that has been worked out....
Not really. I still get alerts that are not relevant to me.
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You're getting alerts from how far away, exactly?
In order for an Alert System to be useful... (Score:2)
Alerts usually do nothing but cause panic. (Score:2)
I live in the northeastern US, and earlier this week we had a series of bad thunderstorms that spawned a few tornadoes. The cell carriers saw fit to send out a mass alert (with alarm) to tell people there was a tornado warning. The problem was that by the time they sent this out (and the fact that they sent this to places an hour or more away from where the actual tornado threat was) most of the threat had expired - but that didn't stop idiots from running to their cars the second they got the alert. The lo
Not much better here in the U.S. (Score:2)
Cellphones now useless for intended purpose (Score:3)
Submitter here. There was so much more I wanted to put into the submission, but didn't have room for.
How would you feel if somebody took away your $100 or $1000 cellphone and gave you a dedicated pager that only worked for alerts? Pretty bad, right? The primary use cases for cellphones are
1) making/receiving phone calls (dohhh)
2) listening to built-in FM radio (if your model has one)
3) listening to music or podcasts in storage
4) listening to streaming internet music
5) receiving messages when at meetings
Given that the alert sound is *DAMN LOUD*, and cannot be turned off easily...
1) So you're in a phone call and holding the phone up to your ear, or using earphones/earbuds... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
2) FM radio requires earphones/earbuds, so that the wire can be used as an FM antenna... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
3) You're listening to pre-recorded music or podcasts... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
4) you're listening to streaming internet music... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
5) You're at a meeting, or at a movie, or at church, or whatever with your phone set to vibrate-only "meeting mode"... AND THE DAMN LOUD KLAXON GOES OFF
From https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/heal... [nih.gov]
> What is noise-induced hearing loss?
> Every day, we experience sound in our environment, such as the sounds from
> television and radio, household appliances, and traffic. Normally, these
> sounds are at safe levels that don't damage our hearing. But sounds can be
> harmful when they are too loud, even for a brief time, or when they
> are both loud and long-lasting. These sounds can damage sensitive
> structures in the inner ear and cause noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL).
Fortunately, my phone has the option to be forced down to 3G-only. Since the Canadian alert system is LTE-only, that protects me. The other options are rooting the phone and/or flashing LineageOS on it.
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I believe that you might have a point. SMS systems usually queue the messages 1 by 1, 1 for each recipient and seem to lack the broadcasting ability required hence the need for a parallel broadcasting system. Otherwise, a special "emergency flag" on SMS, usable only by authorized sender, would have been sufficient.
For the Canada system, this was announced a few mouths ago with great hype and watching the press releases and TV, I couldn't have guessed that what is happening today would have somehow happened.
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The TV emergency broadcast system has the problem that it can only reach those who have the TV turned on.
Which is why one of the emergency siren codes is "important message, listen to radio/TV". During the cold war, we were drilled in these, but these days, I would wager that nine out of ten people can't tell what any of the siren codes mean.
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Same here. I don't allow my phone to demand my attention. It doesn't matter the reason.
Nothing gets to make noise on it, and nothing gets to pop up on the screen except calls and texts from the small number of people I've given the number to.
I can't wrap my mind around how 99% of the population allow their phones to dictate and interrupt their lives. I'm not interested in what an algorithm thinks I should be paying attention to. I'm not interested in what most people think I should be paying attention to. I
Re:No opt-out is evil (Score:5, Funny)
Why are you not thinking of the Children? Are you some kind of sociopath?
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Because people are instinctually inclined to be very fearful for the safety of children. If there are not sufficient real threats to satisfy this need, they exaggerate the tiniest of risks or imagine entirely new ones.
We joke a lot about how "think of the children" are the magic words to get even the worst-written of laws to pass, but we joke about it because that approach actually does work. Some officials did the calculations and decided the applying a minor inconvenience for around 80,000 people* is just
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I'm curious, though.
Say someone is kidnapped two days before their 18th birthday. Still a child, so the entire country goes into a panic.
Then two days later it's said child's birthday. They're now a legal adult. Does the country relax because there's no child in danger anymore?
Re:No opt-out is evil (Score:5, Insightful)
You are beginning to understand American culture.
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Yes.
You are beginning to understand American culture.
Sad but true.
American culture has a very strong need to quantize and pigeon hole everything, with a goal of reducing everything to binary decisions. It's either or. Gradients must not be allowed to exist, and "sound judgement" is to be avoided - it opens up for lawsuits.
Follow the letter, even if stupid, and you're safe.
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Because there was that one time where that one photogenic kid of photogenic parents got kidnapped and killed but could have been identified and saved (maybe!)
if an alert about the missing kid had been rammed down everyone's throats *and* a politician was running for re-election and needed a PR win, so he helped pass a law thanks to weepy photogenic parents crying in committee meetings.
Plus, in addition to wanting to track us the next thing high on the government's list is being able to broadcast propaganda
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Whether you like the kids or not, there's the basic principle of, "If I have to pay for these damn things then I'm at least going to fucking keep them"
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Whether you like the kids or not, there's the basic principle of, "If I have to pay for these damn things then I'm at least going to fucking keep them"
Not just that, but "I'm not paying this crazy person to raise my kids". If your differences with someone you've got kids with are so great that you feel you have to separate, you probably think very very little of your partner. (Watch who you knock up next time, sparky.)
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On the bright side, it will probably save billions of autobody work per year.
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The cost of backup cameras is insignificant in modern cars.
Just about every car already has an LCD display and the tiny camera they install for the backup view can't cost much at all.
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Isn't the whole point of divorce liberation from the harpy and the brats?
At least you're not bitter.
"abducted" (Score:2)
He was abducted by his mother. Be on the lookout for an 8 year old boy with his mother from a town 15 hours away.
I have no clue how anyone who doesn't personally know the family would be able to pick this pair out from a text alert.
I can only imagine they may have wanted to be sure domestic airlines, car rental companies or bus lines were aware that these two might be getting out of town. Surely there must be a better way.
Re: (Score:2)
I should add, the stupid alert may have *actually* worked. The kid was found in a coffee shop. Maybe mom bought him some donuts and said goodbye when EVERY PHONE AROUND THEM started going off.
Re: (Score:2)
Remember. VIGILANTISM IS ALWAYS WRONG.
Except when children might be missing. Then... everyone should stop everything and hunt them down!
Re: (Score:2)
Re:No opt-out is evil (Score:5, Insightful)
There are not enough pedophiles to present any meaningful risk to me or my family.
My children are more likely to be abused by members of my own family.
My children are more likely to be run over walking home from school.
My children are more likely to be shot by my own gun in the family home.
For fuck sake everyone, gain some perspective!
Re: (Score:2)
I have a phone that isn't sold by any carrier in the country, and is not listed as being compatible with this system. I still got the alerts.
On the bright side, mine doesn't appear to respect the government mandate that you can't turn them off because I have settings to do just that. (Except for "presidential alerts" whatever that means in a country that does not have president) but I have turned off amber alerts. (Unless of course the government is actually sending all alerts as "presidential") we'll see n