[truantbuick]

To all appearances, this looked like an actual kidnapping. For myself, I'm happy to receive an amber alert on my phone even if it sometimes ends up being a false alarm. About your point of "productivity", I can't really say, but I'm skeptical that it's worth measuring such a tiny disruption to a day even if it affects millions of people.

It's more annoying to me when they issue Amber Alerts for fairly low risk non-custodial parental abduction cases. I could easily see that making the whole system less effective if they deploy it for such cases.

[lotsofpulp]

Waking up someone during sleep is not a tiny disruption. Year's ago, the whole house was woken up in the middle of the night between 1AM and 3AM or something, and I remember the next day, everyone was trying to figure out how to turn off the alerts.

This was the alert:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/ambert-alert-ph...