I have never, repeat never, seen the EBS completely stop a show for a weather warning. You are saying that a crawl, which always comes with an audio warning, is not going to get the attention of someone not watching, but changing the screen to gray and have a computer voice read will? How? They are either watching or not?
Yeah, nobody turns the sound all the way down on their televisions. Ever. The change on the screen won’t catch anyone’s attention or cause them to turn up the volume. And just because YOU PERSONALLY have never seen the EBS interrupt a show for a tornado/weather warning, doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.
Look, the point is, that child being abducted is more important than what you’re currently watching. If you’re so unaffected by the fact that an innocent child’s life is currently in danger and you might be able to do something to help that child, then pop in a damn DVD/video cassette. That way you won’t be bothered by the police asking you to do something more valuable with your time than whack off to Babewatch.
So saving many lives is less important than saving one life?
A crawl in the immediate vicinity is be better than a full-blown nation-wide alert for a kid in Louisiana.
And one kid getting kidnapped is a Bad Thing, not an emergency to the entire country.
Walks to firing squad
It’s situations like this that the Picture-in-Picture feature was tailor-made for.
Better living through technology!
Um…who said it was a “nation-wide alert?” Two states makes it, at best, regional.
How vague was the report? If it was something like, “6 year old girl missing, brown hair, wearing pink jumper… last seen with 36 year old man with brown hair, blue eyes, wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt” then I 'm not sure that really makes a useful alert. If they showed a picture of the missing kid, however, I think it’s worth interrupting for.
Kong’s right.
A vague description is at best, merely futile. At worst it’s scaremongering. I’d hate to be a parent with a kid who looks kinda sorta like the abducted child with stuff like that going over the airwaves.
Emergency services should wait until they have a photo or sketch of the missing child, and then only use broadcast in areas they suspect the kid could be.
Weather alerts are full-screen in Chicago frequently. As for crawls, you can ignore them and just watch the majority of the screen. Mind you, they should have given better information, though what you call “vague” wasn’t defined, so it’s hard to tell if perhaps you would be unable to identify the kids but other people might be.
The report was about three children (no description) missing and vehicle description. It was unclear if the vehicle was involved or not.
If they have pictures or something to show that could help, go ahead and break into the broadcast if there is a missing child in the area, not a county over. If the information does not include graphics, use a crawl.
It would be nice if they had a photo or sketch, but that could take hours, and hours could mean the difference between a safely-recovered kid and a dead kid.
Even a vague alert can be helpful, though, because it will (hopefully) cause folks to be aware that, for instance, a 6 year old girl has been abducted by a 40 year old man in a pickup truck. Even if that is ALL the info you hear, it’s enough to make you a bit more aware of the customers coming through your gas station or toll booth, or the traffic passing you on the highway.
Sorry about your show, Kong. That had to hurt. :rolleyes:
It was the episode Spock goes into Pon-far.
Uh, I’m not sure about where you live, but around here, you can be in a different county by car in a matter of minutes.
Wow. Well, no wonder, then. I mean, really. Have these law enforcement people no shame???!!
Well perhaps you should rant against vague descriptions, because a vague crawl is just as useless as a vague interuption.
You wouldn’t have a problem with a descriptive interuption then?
I find that for once I actually agree with William Shatner. “You people need to get a f***ing life!”
Did your tin-foil hat or your tooth fillings give you this message? Because I certainly neither said, nor implied any such notion.
When has there ever been a full-blown nation-wide alert for any kid? Why do you think a crawl in the immediate vicinity is be better? What if the abductor has been bright enough to leave the area where the abduction took place? Do you think a crawl is more effective than an audio-visual alert that interrupts programming?
Most law enforcement officers would tell you that if an abducted child isn’t found in the first few hours, the chance of ever finding them alive goes way down. Might this be construed as a Bad Thing AND an emergency? Time is of the essence and all that? Maybe it’d be a good idea to, oh, I don’t know, PUT OUT AN ALERT ON RADIO AND TELEVISION???!???! And again, who said the entire country was involved?
You are either a moron or a child abductor, or both.
Whoa! I’m the first to admit that Major Kong is talking like a moron here but that “child abductor” crack is beyond the pale. You should reconsider it.
OK-- so he’s a moron and not a child abductor; I should really have qualified my statement. What I was getting at was-- why would anyone be against telecasters interrupting programming to try and find abducted children? UNLESS he was a child abductor himself? And I think it’s safe to say that child abductors would prefer that Amber Alerts didn’t exist.
That being said-- even though I did allow for the option that he is merely a moron, it is over the line to suggest that a person I know nothing about is a child abductor. I take it back and apologize.
I now submit that you are merely a moron.
BTW, I was talking about hebesphenomegacorona in that post, but I think Major Kong is lacking itnellect also.
Just to throw some cites into the mix…
http://www.louisianaamberalert.com/ambertemplate.htm
I didn’t find any other cites for that claimed 100% success rate in the brief searching I did, so one may be skeptical of that, but there’s no doubt that the program works.
http://www.oag.state.tx.us/criminal/clu1102/clucov11.htm
That article also contains some caveats about overuse of the system, if some idiot wants to attempt to argue that watching Star Trek is more important…
http://www.chp.ca.gov/html/amber-en.html
That’s a small sampling of some 76 hits from Googling (“amber alert” +“success rate”).
Well, let’s figure an 8 year old child is abducted, who would die without the amber alert but otherwise live 70 more years or so. That’s 70 * 365 * 24 * 60 = 36.8 million minutes. If we further equate 10 minutes of Judge Judy with one minute of a child’s life, then we get a potential lifespan of 368 million JEMs (Judge Judy Equivalent Minutes.) If 1 in 50 amber alerts is “successful”, that puts the opportunity cost of each amber alert at 736,000 JEMs. Therefore, If the amber alert takes more than 7.4 minutes per 100,000 annoyed TV viewers, it’s in the interest of the common good to just let the kid die.
I don’t know what kind of TV ratings Judge Judy is drawing these days but it looks like we should not so cavalierly dismiss Major Kong’s argument.