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Robbers Scared by GTA
HellSpam writes "Some robbers tried to burglarize a poor old lady and her 3 grandsons. Her grandsons happened to be playing Grand Theft Auto:San Andreas, and the sounds of the police from the game scared them away! From the article: "The police in the game were saying, 'Stop, we have you surrounded. This is the police.' The burglar, unknowingly, thought this was the actual police and panicked ... being apprehended by PlayStation." Now, no more saying games are bad for you..."
the grandsons beat the shit out of the poor burglar..
A man ran in, pointed a gun at me, saw that I was playing Daikatana and ran off screaming.
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I wish the 3 kids then all picked up baseball bats and laid into the thief
before taking off with his car and finding hookers.
What is the point of the word "burglarize"? "Burgle" means exactly the same thing.
This sounds abit too much like something from the film "Home Alone" doesn't it?
This was back in March according to the article so GTA:SA wasnt out yet! (must have been a previous one) The story is in the news because they just got sentenced to around 5 years each - kind of like a darwin award they're gonna get the piss taken out of them in jail.
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Are you sure that he didn't die laughing at you?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
From the article: "Back in March, Sandy Wilson was taking care of her three grandsons when a group of men attempted to burglarize her home, pointing a gun at the kids.".
So back in March, it couldn't have been GTA:SA
that he was in the US.In our small country , England , the Govt would charge the old lady , for scaring the burglar.
On a serious note , this is a very big issue.Unlike the US , where the rights of home owners using force against burglars are quite clear , in the UK this is a grey area.Home owners can use reasonable force only and that is decided by the courts.
Wanted : A Signature.
Yeah, you beat me to the chase.
I recall the line was in both of the previous games, so really it could have been GTA3 or vice city.
*or* if you wanted to take the newspaper literally, it might have actually been GTA for playstation.
+5, Truth
The verb is 'burgle', and one who burgles is a burglar.
You don't call a burglar a 'burglarizer', do you?
Cripes!
Especially as seeing she's a poor old lady.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Please, stop making words up, it's worse than boswollox
Of course burglarize is a word. Before you criticize someone's grammar maybe you should read a dictionary.
Somewhere in America:
Operator: "Hello, this is 911, how may I help you?"
Citizen: "HELP! I've been bloody burgled by two tall guys with fags and they are making off!"
Operator: "Is this some kind of a sick joke? Call when you have an emergency. "
There was a knock at the door, he opened it a crack to answer it (he was in his boxers). The door was forced open and he was pinned to the floor by a bunch of heavily armed cops!
It seems a neighboor had heard somebody yell "Everybody get down!" followed by some gun shots, put 1 and 1 together and came up with 3...
Thanks, I'm here all week.
God help us all
I guess today is a passable day to die.
It's a perfectly cromulent word.
I'm looking for a video game that randomly says "Thank you for ordering the Anniversary Special Bouquet. It will be ready for pickup shortly".
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
"I'm gonna give you to the count of ten to get your ugly, yella, no-good keister off my property before I pump yer guts full of lead. One... two... TEN!" *ACKACKACKACKACKACK* *pizza guy runs away all scared*
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Dude, this totally happened! This guy at work, he has a cousin who goes to school with one of the kids in the story. And he swears it really happened this way!
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Dont own only one gun. Or one knife.
"Officer, he broke in, and had just picked up my other gun and i was forced to shoot him!!"
Same goes for knives. THe only problem is, sadly, you can no longer just beat the crap/wound someone breaking into your house, you have to kill them to make sure you dont get sued or arrested.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Using old english suffixes on your verbs doesn't make you one whit smarter when you have zero english comprehension skills.
The grandparent was referring to the fact that the Brit would have dialed 999 and not reached emergency services at all.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
>Some robbers tried to burglarize a poor old lady and her 3
Why are old ladies always poor? Do non-poor ladies never get robbed (they should, they have more money).
The burglars who ran away are suing the owners of the home, the children, and Sony for causing them excessive job stress.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I usually wouldn't do this, but since:
... being apprehended by Playstation."
1) The article is only 4 paragraphs long, and
2) At the time of my reply, this moron has been modded to +3 Insightful,
Galveston County Asst DA Michael Elliott explained, "The police in the game were staying, 'Stop, we have you surrounded. This is the police.' The burglar, unknowingly, thought this was the actual police and panicked
and also
Police arrested the four men. Samuel Woodrow received a five-year prison sentence this week. Ronnie Farris is serving four years. Lucas Griffin got probation. And Zachary Brandenburg's trial is in January.
It's one thing for a -1 post to say things like "wah, wah, wah, what are you talking about, this is stupid, i bet it's a hoax" but when people are burning real modpoints, it's just a travesty. Travesty I tell ya.
Most likely the burglar didn't get scared of the sound from GTA because it sounded like cops. When he heard the sound he probably just figured out someone was at home and decided to escape. Burglars want to do their business alone... not when the house is packed with people.
I demand the Cone of Silence!
The story is a funny little urban anecdote, but that's it. Burglers get scared off by a lot of things - and they usually don't rob houses while there are people in them so any sign of life can often scare them off.
If this is news then I'm now waiting for a sensationalist story about a startled burgler or even a policeman on a routine call hearing the audio of some game character making a threat or seeing a high resolution gun pointed at him on a big screen and returning fire, hitting a kid.
911 was chosen as it is 9 pulses followed by 2 (seperate) pulses.
000 would be 30 pulses (with a break between sets of 10).
911 was originally implemented when the majority, if not everyone, still had pulse dial.
It was a combination which was thought to prevent misdials.
So I'm trying to figure out... where did the person who posted this story get the idea that it was definitely from the San Andreas edition of GTA?
I haven't played any of the GYA games... is the sound effect being referred to by this story only in the SA version of GTA or something?
Certainly if it _was_ GTA:SA, then the story's a fake because I understand it wasn't available back in March.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Aliens were trying to abduct my grandmother, but I was playing Halo and they heard me operating the Scorpion, so they ran away.
People always complain about the extreme of laws but never seem to have the intelligence to ask why these laws are there.
The laws in question deal with two things. So called self-defence and playing your own judge.
There was time when property owners (the upper class/royalty) had plenty of rights. Steal or even just be on the land of the local landlord and you could be killed by his guards. Punishments was whatever the local lord saw fit to deal out.
This has changed. Now it is up to the police and court system to punish crimes.
Do criminals have rights? Well the problem is who defines who is a criminal? Is a peasant catching a deer to feed his family a criminal? Well yes and off with their head.
Nowadays we prefer the courtsystem to decide guilt and punishment. Sometimes this results in "unjust" decisions but what every intelligent person has to ask themselve is what would the alternative result in. Would you allow force to protect a car from being broken into?
My car is parked on parking lot and you standing next to it causes the alarm to go off. Luckily I got my gun and under your jobbo rule I blow him away. Oops turned out you just bumped my car with your elbow while opening your own. Oh well. At least your family has the right to shoot people who trespass on your grave eh?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If you actually RTFA you will see that this happened last March. Grand Theft Auto:San Andreas was not even out yet. Had to be either the orginal GTA or GTA: Vice City.
What worries me is that if an ammendment can be legslated away "for the public good" what about the others? There are plenty of other ammendments that are troublesome, and the government has made attempts in the past and now to curtail.
If they legslate away the second, then that's great prescident for them to say "We need to get rid of the sixth ammendment. Look at all the drug dealers and evil doers that get off on technicalities because of their scumbag lawyers. The defandant doesn't need a lawyer, they just twist the truth. Our Great and Noble prosecutors are only concerned with the truth, so that's all that is needed. Don't worry, this won't be abused, it just helps make you safe."
I mean you can argue that basically any ammendment should be done away with to make us safer. In a perfect world, that'd be the case. If the government were composed of perfectly noble beings, than none of these rights would be necessary, because all they do is et in the way of the conviction of the guilty.
However, that's NOT the case. Governments are corrupt, all of them, to some degree because HUMANS are corrupt. There are next to no examples of perfectly noble human beings. So things like the Bill of Rights exist to control that, and to protect people by ensuring the government can't do whatever it wants.
About 7 years back our house was nearly broken into. At the time I was an IRC junkie (running my own network and all). We used to play this wav file that had a guy screaming WAKEUP!!! and we would play it frequently late at night to get each others attention.
:)
For some reason all the thief did was open the window. For some reason he didn't go any further. Our best guess is when he was breaking in he heard a wave file yelling WAKE UP!!!!!!!!!!
Ian
There is no way they could find that out unless the criminal had an IQ of 70 and then he's lucky to get out of the house with pants on.
Most criminals are not Lex Luthor. Why do you think there are so many dumb-criminal stories? They really are stupid for the most part. I had one thief (or thieves) fail to steal my Mustang because they jimmied the door and pulled the ignition lock cylinder but then couldn't start the engine. The thing was the key switch had broken and it was so expensive to replace that I had rerouted the wiring to two easily visible/traced switches for ignition and starter. They aren't real bright.
Surely somebody who burgles is a burglator.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
The US government has already overstepped their constitutional bounds, and all our guns didn't stop it.
If the American people cared, the US government never would have overstepped its constitutional bounds, and we wouldn't have needed to use guns in order to stop it. And if the American people don't care, all the guns in the world won't make a difference.
The Founding Fathers wrote a good constitution, and a great bill of rights. They ensured that we'd be able to speak out and vote to control the government, and that the rights of minorities would be protected as well. There's only one thing they couldn't do. They couldn't insure that we Americans actually care. If we don't care, none of our rights and none of our restrictions on government will make a difference.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Good to see George W. Bush partaking in the Internets.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
...to get GTA:San Andres since it was not available back in March when this attack happened. I would guess it was more likely GTA3 or GTA:Vice City.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I suppose they might have been spooked by the thought of more people in the house. But it seems unlikely. On the other hand, the whole incident was very unlikely to happen.
Where on earth would you live that someone wanting to steal your DVD player and the $50 worth of cash in your dresser would actually bother to bring a gun with them? If they come in and realize you're home, they just going to leave. Plus, try it in my house and you're going to get a jaw full of rottweiller teeth in your leg.
I just find it odd that even though property crime rates are about even in both Canada and the U.S., you see the following difference in homicide rates:
Homicide (per 100,000)
Canada: 1.9
U.S.: 5.6
That's even though Canadians are more urban, less pro-life, less fire-and-brimstone religious, just as multi-cultural, and own almost as many guns (about 70% of the U.S. rate of ownership - though it's admittedly hard to find exact rates).
Does anybody have ANY idea why the homicide rate is so much higher in the U.S. than other industrialized nations? I mean a real intelligent idea? Canadians and Americans just aren't that different, so why the huge difference in this one area? If someone could figure it out, the U.S. could stand to stop 10,000 homicides per year. If each life is 1 million dollars (per insurance rates), thats 10 billion in savings every year!
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain