Only the Feds can move this slowly

Today's New York Times reports that Federal regulators have approved a plan to allow text messages to be transmitted to all cell phones in the US in the event of natural disaster, terror attack, or kidnapped child. The last line of the article says, "The service could be in place by 2010."

No doubt federal bureaucrats will spend the next few years creating flowcharts and finding a way to tax us for this service. As we all know, a federal project with a two-year time frame has a high likelihood of coming to fruition about the time cell phones are replaced with the next technology.

The wacky thing is, the process already works. What do they need to implement? I've already signed up at USGS.gov to get major earthquake notifications sent to my cell phone. The weather channel sends me storm alerts based on my zip code. And I don't really want to know every Amber Alert in the US (though I would likely subscribe to a service that broadcast Amber Alerts that correspond to my current GPS location).