Slashdot Mirror
Trapped Girls Call For Help On Facebook
definate writes "Two teenage girls (aged 10 and 12) found themselves trapped/lost in a stormwater drain in Adelaide, South Australia. The interesting point of this article that makes it Slashdot worthy, is that although the teenage girls had mobile phones, instead of calling for help using 000 (Australia's 911 number), they decided to notify people through Facebook. My guess is it was something along the lines of 'Jane Doe is like totally trapped in a stormwater drain, really need help, OMG!'. Luckily a young friend of the girls was online at the time and was able to call the proper authorities."
The girls were eligible for a Darwin Award and you took it away from them!
get me to australia!
"Two teenage girls (aged 10 and 12)..."
Teenagers just keep getting younger and younger these days.
Everyone knows that if you need to call for rescue, you use twitter.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
These girls couldn't even dial for help themselve... sad.
They might have gotten 112,076 "fans of teenage girls trapped in wells."
Actually, my wife was stuck in an elevator once and while her cellphone couldn't maintain a signal well enough to call out, she could text and email.
So it's not unthinkable to imagine that they had crap for voice reception but had no issues with a web connection, especially given that they were inside a storm drain.
Oh, and when did a ten-year-old and twelve-year-old become teenagers? (The answer: "not yet".)
ten and twelve do not end in "teen"
Darwin at work, foiled by luck.
help please contact the proper authorities
The lack of common sense is astounding. Why do I sense that this is becoming the norm the more social giants like Facebook, Twitter, and others gain more social power.
Or maybe its the fact that because of these social sites, peoples stupidity becomes more apparent.
I will admit, silly as it may sound, contacting rescuers via messaging in a non-critical emergency situation may not be a bad idea. It's more friendly battery-wise, where you may not get a chance to recharge a cell phone (in the sewers, for instance); and it can be less ambiguous than speech and more easily reviewed (although all the OMGs and missing vowels might prove problematic.
When I was young, my parents were terrified that I would prank call 911 (Canada's 911 number), so I don't know that I'd call 911 for anything short of immediate danger.
So, what did they post exactly? I really doubt they actually called for help and I doubt even more they wouldn't have called 000 by themselves eventually. It's not like they were dying or something, they were just lost.
0x or or snor perron?!
What were they doing in a storm water drain....?
Sigh. The stupid stuff people keep asking over and over.
To me, teenager always meant 10 and up. I don't know. Maybe the definition is different in Australia. (I'm from Adelaide, too, btw, where this took place. Adelaide is a city of just over 1 million people.)
What were they doing in a storm drain? I don't know, exploring maybe? We've had stories about underground urban exploration on slashdot before, and there's many sites out there on it, such as caveclan. (http://www.caveclan.org/). Their site appears to be down atm but it was about the exploration of tunnels in Melbourne and around Australia.
And yeah, as others pointed out; perhaps their signal wasn't strong enough to call but they could text or get data.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
"Two teenage girls (aged 10 and 12)..."
Teenagers just keep getting younger and younger these days.
They're naught-teen and twain-teen, respectively. Where is the mystery here, gentlemen?
Bow-ties are cool.
Much like the famous "ballsack conundrum" thread on fark... I'm stuck to my chair. I'm so very scared. Help. (Details In thread) "Need help soonish..."
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Everyone knows you should use Twitter for that... Duh.... :)
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Everyone knows that if you need to call for rescue, you use twitter.
"HELP ME! I am stuck and in real trouble and hurt real bad! I think my leg is broken, and I am losing a lot of blood. You can find me at"
Bow-ties are cool.
With the exception of possible poor signal strength for a phone call,
I fear for the future of my species.
Don't you need to be 13 to use facebook also.
Moss: Subject: Fire. Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to inform you of a fire that has broken out on the premises of 123 Cavendon Road... no, that's too formal.
[deletes text, starts again] Fire - exclamation mark - fire - exclamation mark - help me - exclamation mark. 123 Cavendon Road. Looking forward to hearing from you. Yours truly, Maurice Moss.
[sigh of relief]
I may be getting old having 28 years old, but I can strongly remember my parents teaching me the several emergency numbers for police, firemens, etc (these numbers were short but different some years ago in France). And it was far before I was 10 or 12.
I've had similar instances. There are certain areas around town here where a call just doesn't work, but a text-message can get through in either direction (you get all the "missed calls" texts but no actual calls). In some cases I've had more luck with (super-slow) email than voice calls too.
Generally a pipe has two directions you can travel, in and out. Ignoring the fact that walking into a pipe is a terrible idea and probably doesn't smell like rainbows and sunshine, I find that should one feel they are "lost" in a drain they should generally travel in the opposite direction they had originally chose to travel in. Clearly things get a little hairier when you start making turns at junctions but in that case, you asked for it. In either case, they should not have been deprived of the Darwin Award.
In the dark or in smoke it was a lot easier to keep your finger in a single digit on a rotary dial (once you'd found the right one obviously). The same probably applies to a lesser extent for touch tone phones. Its the american 911 system that I find odd , it just seems to be a number chosen at random or perhaps as a left over dial code.
Its well and good, but now that mobile phones have been regulated to have a mandatory "Emergency call" feature when locked. I can't even imagine how many false calls they get from this
What is scary is that my blackberry becomes pretty much useless without a battery pull after calling an 911. I'm guessing this is to let the user know when they have accidentally called 911, but its extremely annoying when you do call in a emergency and have your phone bricked afterwards.
They didn't have a cell signal and were leaching someone's wireles. Sounds good, right?
Just yesterday I was stranded after a wedding (it was a good wedding), without a car or cell phone. Let's just say it was a hell of a time. Anyway, long story short, I wake up one morning in a hotel room without any contact information and I have to let my family know where I am - except they all just got a new iPhone, have changed their number, and I have yet to remember it.
Guess where one of those phone numbers was? Facebook. I found myself a public terminal in the hotel lobby and got all the information I needed to be reuinted with my car, phone, and the road.
It is actually quite useful.
My stepmother was alone in the house and fell, breaking her tailbone. She managed to painfully drag herself across the room to the phone, which she used not to call 911, but to call a friend of hers from church. When she got that person's machine, she left a message asking her friend to pray for her. She then lay on the floor moaning until my brother happened to stop by the house and discover her several hours later. I never found out whether or not her friend got the message and prayed for her.
--Posted anonymously because the stupid burns.
WTF? 000 is Australia's EMERGENCY number. Would you also say "they drive on the left side of the road (Australia's right)"? In China thay use chopsticks (Chinese knives and forks)?".
There is a point at which explaining by Yankie analogies just makes it more confusing. Try to realise that everyone in the world does not speak English, play baseball, use Fahrenheit.... I'm sure most of the readers here actually can cope with that, and you won't bamboozle the ones who AREN'T American either.
10 and 12, teenagers? Uhm... not on this planet.
What were they doing in a storm drain?
Clearly they were playing Wolfenstein RPG and decided the sewer system was the only way to reach the castle in time.
Reply to That ||
...apparently everyone on the Internet can hear you when you scream.
Oh, and everyone will eventually find those naked pics too.
There may have been one very good reason for using Facebook: bandwidth.
The girls may not have been able to get a enough bandwidth to make a voice call, but easily enough for an SMS or other message type. Voice has to be real-time and uses several kilobytes of data transfer per second. Data can take all day to send a 1k message to Facebook, Twitter, ect...
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Last year I was in Rio de Janeiro, and an older gent had a heart attack (maybe stroke, or seizure) in front of my friend and I on the street. We were the only ones nearby, so the right thing for me to do was rush to the nearest pay phone (about halfway up the block) and try to dial 9-1-1. Afer the second try, it dawned on me. Different country, different emergency code.
one of the nice things about 911 is the 9 and the 1s are on different sides of the keypad, so if you call 911, you really mean to call it
Where there's a will, there's a way! :-)
In my office, we've had the police come by several times to the point where building management had to send an e-mail blast saying that we were going to get fined for accidentally dialing 9-1-1 and then hanging up. To dial out of our phone system, we have to hit 9. A lot of us have to get on conference calls which requires a 1-888 or 1-866 number. Well, some of my office mates would hit 9 to connect out, but for whatever reason they don't hear the dial tone, so they hit 9 again. (even though it registered the first time...)
Then for whatever reason, they would hit 1 twice (probably for the same reason why they hit 9 twice), connecting them to emergency dispatcher. They would immediately hang up, but by then it's too late. The dispatcher will automatically assume an emergency if you hang up, and a patrol car is sent to our office. We were told that if we accidentally do this again, to just stay on the line and to tell the dispatcher that it was an accident so that they don't automatically send police over.
I don't think we've had the problem since the warning, but I think it's interesting that despite the keys being all the way across the keypad, people still manage to dial 9-1-1.
Best "String" Ever!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EBfxjSFAxQ
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
This has been promoted somewhat - First, in Northern California, if you call 911 from a cell phone you will get forwarded to a central highway patrol dispatch center and immediately placed on hold from 5 to 10 minutes. I've called 911 twice from my cell and both times I was home before I got off hold. This will probably get fixed when the GPS locating mess gets fixed. Meanwhile, you program in as many non-911 local agency numbers as you can.
Second, as parent pointed out you may be able to text when voice won't get through.My county emergency services can *send* text messages in the event of a large scale alert but I don't know if they can receive them.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
911 has its massive downsides tho. if you need an outside line at college, you hit 9, if your dieling long distance you hit 1
so if your on campus calling home and hit 91 and then muck up and double tap the 1 your in a potential heap of trouble for misdiling 911.
Going back to rotary phones which went clockwise 0987654321 (except in NZ) 111 would be really fast to dial but it can happen accidentally too easily with a loose wire or something because it's just three pulses. I'm guessing but that sort of accidental dialing is why the British choose 999. It's very unlikely that a loose wire would generate 9 pulses at the right pulse rate even once let along three times. But ... it's slower so maybe the US took a compromise and went for 911. I suspect in practice that the time you gain with less dial movement would be lost moving your finger.
The Kiwi dials went clockwise 0123456789 so I guess we followed the Brits and choose 111 which is the same pulses as 999 elsewhere.
Australian 000 is an odd choice. I vaguely remember some problems long ago with toll blocking on phones also unintentionally blocking 000. That probably only happened with equipment not approved for Australia.
Well, you have to be 13 to have a Facebook account. They have Facebook accounts. So they must be 13, and hence teenagers, even if they're only 10 and 12. Seems perfectly clear to me.
I like to be modded up as much as the next person, but Insightful? Jeez, I was trying for Funny.
OK, so a carrier pidgin & facebook have a logo for their stories, but Ubuntu has to use Debian's?
Seriously, what do we need to do to get one added? And are any of the other distro's logos MIA as well?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
If you're going to insult us you could at least spell "Yankee" right.
If all you have to do is yank the battery out and power cycle it, it's not bricked. Bricked mens it would be rendered completely and utterly useless; a paperweight; a doorstop; a brick.
The only way to recover a brick is possibly disassembling and desoldering the flash chips, using an eeprom programmer to reprogram the chips, and soldering them back in,
On their way...
Haida Manga
Its the american 911 system that I find odd , it just seems to be a number chosen at random or perhaps as a left over dial code.
In the states, dialing the operator, dialing "0," in an emergency was drilled into kids for the better part of one hundred years.
"911" was easily recognized by AT&T's switching logic as needing special handling. The History of 911
The "9" may have been suggested by the British "999" system adopted in 1937.
I've been in lots of areas where my cell service wasn't good enough to support a voice call, but texting worked (albeit slowly -- sometimes it takes minutes to get the message out). I don't know that that was the case in this storm drain, but it could have been. Perhaps these girls were clever, rather than stupid. Given that the emergency services is not reachable via text messaging, they could have tried texting all their friends/parents/etc. to get someone else to get them help, but sending the message to facebook or twitter would reach a whole bunch of those people at once.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
My immediate reaction was facepalm. Really. I'm totally serious. When I read that I facepalmed, literally.
Tween's get lost.
Tweat/Facebook about it. TO THERE FRIENDS
Stupid Friend Tween freaks and calls ((000)911)) instead of calling other stupid tween to make sure they are ok.
Mass media run with it.
Come on guys. Can you go back to when you were a kid. Really. THE SKY IS FALLING THE SKY IS FALLING.
> "Two teenage girls (aged 10 and 12) found themselves trapped/lost in a stormwater drain in
> Adelaide, South Australia. The interesting point of this article that makes it Slashdot worthy"
as opposed to 4chan-worthy.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
---
Unless it's a prank call (and even then, you normally just get a ticking-off by an irate policeman from what I've read), when would any emergency-service make you PAY for its use ? Isn't the whole point of an emergency service to be there when you need it ? What the hell do you do if you can't afford an emergency service ?
:)
I'm guessing the whole 'paying' idea is a USA thing, although my apologies to the US for assuming that, if there's anywhere else that's so screwed up that they make you pay for essential services.
I've recently had very bad news in my family - in the space of two weeks, my uncle has been told he needs heart surgery, and my mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer. My uncle has been scheduled for surgery on 15th of this month, and my mother has put off her appointment (originally on the 11th) because I'm getting married on the 12th. She'll be going under the knife on 19th instead. My uncle will be missing the wedding, but we're going to stream it live so he can watch it in the UK, even if it is at midnight over there
I thank my lucky stars we're from the UK, because there's just no way our family could afford their treatment over here in the USA - my uncle's heart surgery would cost circa $175,000, my mother's cancer treatment and subsequent costs could come to circa $100,000. We've never had money - I was the first kid in our family to go to college for example, and I had to pay my way through that. We've always scraped-by and made-do, mother and father working, grandmother looking after the kids etc. Over here, I'm lucky in that I have an excellent medical insurance plan from my company, but my fiancee didn't have medical insurance until we met. She used to try not to visit a doctor, to self-medicate via a drugstore if something was wrong. I was horrified that someone would even consider that. Seriously and truthfully - I was aghast that a visit to the doctors wasn't just "what you'd do if you're not feeling well". It's just a no-brainer from my (and anyone from the UK, I suspect) perspective.
For her part, my mother gets personal visits in her home from the MacMillan nurse (cancer specialist nurses, there to answer any questions, give advice, as well as do the nursing stuff), and she has one of the best surgical teams in the country ready to operate when she gets back to the UK. All of this is standard-stuff, she pays her dues (in her taxes / national insurance contributions), and she has the peace-of-mind that comes from knowing she has access to excellent health-care whenever she wants it, without being suddenly landed with huge bills, and without any worry of 'recission' by a financially-orientated insurance company.
There's a lot I like (even prefer) about the USA, but the healthcare system is (from an outsiders perspective) a badge of shame. Everyone gets sick eventually, and everyone dies eventually. Any civilised country ought to recognise and cope with that such that people don't fall through the cracks. The NHS in the UK isn't perfect - you'll frequently hear Brits complaining about it - but it's head, shoulders, and torso above the system over here. I still pay my 'national insurance' in the UK, even though I live in the US - the cost is minimal (about £15/month), and I don't mind helping fund something today that I (or, say, a member of my family) might make use of tomorrow. To me, it's beyond belief that people in the USA fight *against* a similar system, but hey, each to their own. I don't get to vote over here so it's not as though I can do anything about it...
Bottom line: In the UK, health follows an almost burger-king like mantra - "you need it? You got it!" whereas in the USA, you're trusting your health and possibly your life to the same sort of company that screws you
Physicists get Hadrons!
It has to do with the NANP and how phone numbers are formed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NANP
911 (and 411) were reserved...
The Australian Telstra rotary dial payphone use to have the numbers in the order: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0.
So the "0" was in the same place as the "9" on for example the British phones.
As can be seen by the image - the "0" was also the easiest position to find on the dial by feel only - as it was next to the stop-guard.
http://www.worldpayphones.com/units/green2.jpg
My thirteen-year-old has been after us to allow her to have a Facebook account. Now, I can already hear the next pitch: "But Dad, it could save my life!"
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
The UK's use of 999 dates back to 1937 - well before telephones had keypads, let alone fitted in pockets. The number was selected in order that the mechanical dials on existing public telephones could easily be modified to allow the number to be called for free.
more info here
Australia's use of 000 dates back to 1961 - again, before keypads and mobiles.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
...and, of course, the point I totally failed to make.
With a mechanical dial (I remember them), it's next to impossible to dial 999 (or 000) accidentally - but it's pretty easy to dial either of them intentionally - even if you can't see the dial for whatever reason.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Next up, outsource your cry for help to Google or Amazon Turk. Why call 911 yourself when you can have the Internet do it for you?
Maybe they knew they had a better chance at getting a timely response from posting on Facebook than they would calling 911...
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Only (?) in English do the words that refer to that adolescent age group and the endings of the number words for 13 through 19 match up.
Good point. I'm glad you made it, in English, on an article written in English, to an English-speaking audience, about something that happened in an English-speaking country. Thanks.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
(I was going for funny, so hopefully that didn't sound too harsh. I'm not saying your point is incorrect or uninteresting – just fairly irrelevant.)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
While I don't really know why they decided to use Facebook in particular I can say I have been in situations where I was not able to place an audible phone call but was able to send and receive text messages because the system uses more redundancy and attempts to correct errors.
If they found themselves in a similar situation, unable to place a phone call to 000 they may still be able to use the SMS system to text for help. If their texts to their parents failed texting an update to Facebook is a rather intelligent workaround. Many 911 centers are starting to accept SMS texts for help for this exact reason.
If I was stuck in a storm drain, I probably wouldn't call 000 either.
Unless you can give them a street address, they will just laugh at you and hang up.
No, that's entirely sound. But trying to pick out (natural?) kinds based on words is a pretty silly idea from the start. It becomes even more painfully obvious when people realize that there is more than one language and `yours' and `theirs' don't always match up. And then trying to pick out (natural?) kinds based on conceptualisation in the first place fails as well, since there are multiple cultures, which may again have different views on the matter. :P I guess the question is whether 13-19 has some other, more sound basis. For instance, some important biological function being mostly present in 13-year olds, but less so in 12, 11, 10-year olds. Not that language is based on useful functions though. I agree that, in many cases, it is not.
:P
BUT, I would argue that picking out a range of ages based on two iterations of counting through all 10 of your fingers is a more natural and universal concept based on sounder and more natural terms than is the age range defined by the affix to numbers between 13 and 19 in English
I guess all of this is (though interesting) totally tangential. In this case calling the 10 and 12 year old `teens' is more appropriate than calling them `pre-teens' because then all the more inapplicable associations with `pre-teen' (still unable to operate computers, etc. because they are 5yrs old) may have been misapplied. Had the child been 15, or 17, or 19 years old the story would not have changed much. But had they been 5, and been able to work out the cell phone usage and facebook etc., that would have been amazing in its own right. So, in the context of this story, they fit more into the `teen' category, than the `pre-teen' category. Though, I guess here `children' may have been sufficient.
Whatever
In the US, dialing 211 has the same impact as dialing 911 to make easier for visitors from other countries.
No, that's entirely sound. BUT, I would argue that I guess all of this is (though interesting) totally tangential. In this case `children' may have been sufficient. :P
Whatever
(Yes, I just mis-quoted you horribly. I think I kept to the intent of your comment pretty well, though...)
More or less agreed. FWIW, in TFA the two girls were just "10- and 12-year-old girls". The person who wrote the summary chose to call them teenagers for some reason. (The submitter appears to be an Aussie... a few of the other Aussie commenters on here have also said they thought "teens" referred to 10-19, so perhaps it's an Aussie thing. Although, it might be regional too, because not all of the Aussie posters seem to be in agreement on the fact.)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Fee for being rescued around here in the US starts at $500 plus rescuer's time fees plus the ticket you're going to get for being a dolt on city property. By the end of it that call for rescue might cost you $5 or 10k.
Screw that, somebody throw me a rope and I'll give you a twenty and a good story.
In Australia, a call to 000 from a mobile phone will result in call charges. If the caller instead dials 112 (the international emergency number), the bill is picked up by the carrier. Also 112 can be used in areas where there is no mobile service.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
used to be 000 here not changed to 112 like rest of europe. when it was 000 lots of people accidentially called becuase getting an outside line is normally 0 and USA for example 001 -... so when people called from home they would forget to not hit 0 to get outside line
I thought it was Australia's emergency services number.
I know it will seem strange to you, but the 000 was first used before mobiles were invented. It has not been the problem you suggest.
As for driving on the wrong side of the road, we are happy to be on the side we are, as right handers when on horse back, one mounts from the left, (Throwing the right leg over the horse)which became the kerbside, so one mounted the horse away from traffic. Its important to be able to moount a horse safely you know. Samoa has actually this week seen the light and changed from
driving on the right to driving on the left.
As usual, the US will be several hunderd years behind the civilised world in this matter.(See metrication)
Intersetingly, the US copied the french in driving on the wrong side of the road. Driving on the right was introduced to France and its territories at the time by Napolean, just to spite the British.
See that key next to Z-it makes capitals which are an important part of the english language, as illustrated below.
I helped my unlce Jack off his horse.
I helped my unlce jack off his horse.
Funnily enough, I was in a motorbike accident myself before I came over to the USA. Nowhere near as bad as your own (I was very lucky) but I was in hospital for a couple of days, rode there in the ambulance, had police and fire trucks called out to the scene etc. There was no charge, and it didn't cross my mind that there would be...
:) and has only got a position as a long-term contractor; she would have had to pay her own medical insurance without any company aid, which (even with her income) is simply ridiculously expensive. If a well-educated well-to-do person can't afford medical insurance, something is rotten in the state of Denmark...
Any (every ?) government gets a lot of flak for pretty much anything it does - you can't please all the people all the time and all that, but at the end of the day, they're not trying to make a profit. Any private institution has to run all the same risks, spend all the same money, and also make a return on the investment. Normally I'm fully behind this as a great motivator for the company concerned, but when the easy option is to simply screw the "customer" in order to turn a profit, I'm not so sure.
In any event, the point of my post wasn't about people like you and I, with good medical insurance coverage. It was because I don't believe *anyone* should be concerned about medical coverage, even if that costs me something. That, I think, is a big cultural divide between the US and the UK on this matter, not just the public/private debate.
My fiancee is in fact more-qualified than I, she has a JD/MBA. However, she is still paying off student debts (another thing I didn't have to worry about in the UK, but that's another rant altogether
As far as the argument that you don't trust the government because of its past performance, it seems you do trust an insurance company, despite all evidence to the contrary of how they behave when you need them to pay up. Anyone who's been involved in a car accident would probably attest that (a) they screw you if they can, and (b) they screw you later by increasing your premiums, even if they somehow didn't manage to screw you via (a).
On top of that, Medical insurance agencies have come up with (c), a new evil: "recission". This is where they go back through your file looking for any possible (no matter how tenuous) excuse to retroactively cancel your insurance (even after payment has been initially made), leaving you with the huge bill that you might even have thought was already paid, and no possibility of getting any medical insurance in the future. I read of a case where a fall by the pregnant mother cancelled a policy by the adult daughter when the daughter developed vision problems at age 27.
I'm sorry, but that just sucks. Really. Really. Really sucks.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
...I kinda do this too? Just a bit different.
When I'm going into a remote and/or potentially dangerous area, such as in my canoe, hunting or hiking in state forests or other places, I'll make a post to my blog entitled "Where To Find The Body".
I post details about where I'm going, what I'm wearing, what I'm carrying, driving, doing, when I'm going in, when I can be expected out, when I should be declared LATE and who to call. I include a link to a GoogleMap and the local police/fire/rescue number.
With 200+ pairs of eyes watching, I've got a decent number of people who'll be checking back to make sure I've made an update saying I'm out safe.
[End Of Line]
mod abuse
New emergency number: 0118 999 881 999 119 725...3
Moss e-mailing the fire department Fire, exclamation mark, fire, exclamation mark, help me, exclamation mark... All the best, Maurice Moss
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
I am from Adelaide. What that particular article doesn't mention is that (a) this occurred at 7:30pm. Sunset was 18:00 that day and astronomical twilight (complete darkness) at 19:24. And (b) it occurred in Hackham. Think of your city, find the quarter that has the lowest socio-economic status and the highest crime rates, and imagine this occurring somewhere in that quarter.
Rather than whether they used facebook or rang 000, the crux of the local debate is what 10- and 12-year old girls were doing wandering drains at night in this area.
a few of the other Aussie commenters on here have also said they thought "teens" referred to 10-19, so perhaps it's an Aussie thing.
No it's not an Aussie thing. Everyone in Australia knows "teen" means 13-19.
If I've learned anything from Idiocracy.
You haven't. At least I hope you haven't. It is, well, idiotic.
Evolution works pretty much like this: People who are most adept to survive and breed in the current world do survive and breed. Idiocracy makes a statement "These days it isn't the smartest people, so our society is turning stupid and heading towards destruction." and that is where it goes seriously wrong. It feeds on the superiority that everyone who assumes "I'm smarter than most of the people." feels in addition to the "Things were better in the old days" -feeling. Easy prey.
First of all... Things were never better in the old days. Honestly, population never getting smarter on average but even ignoring that... We want technology to advance, that's all. For that, we need intelligent people with access to decent education (to get started. Even crappy universities are enough for that. I'm sure that the kind of people can find a library for more information about the subjects they are interested in). However, it's an absolute amount. What we care about is that 200 new Newtons are better than 100 new Newtons, not whether 0.001 or 0.002 percent of our population is the genius material.
With a lot larger population than it used to be and a lot easier access to education than ever before, we have just that. The highly educated breed mostly with each other so we are in a positive loop. Yeah, those with lower education breed even more but really, we don't need to think about that. We don't care what percentage of the society consists of the "more intelligent sect" (ugh, I hate to say those words), only that it is growing in the amount of people. Only reason to care about the percentages would be to say "Well, people will be more intelligent voters" but we have never been anywhere near of that happening.
And know what? It is happening and working. Science is progressing. Visit a website called Slashdot some day. Just today there was an article that Japanese company is renting affordable exoskeletons for civilians!
In addition, high average IQ isn't the goal of our society. It's just one way to get there. What we want is to be happy. To have fun. Why do the "ignorant masses of idiots" breed with each other so much? Because they want to. They think they'll enjoy their lives more the way they live them. So it's awesome that they are doing that. Even if the progress of science were to slow down, our society could still improve by people becoming more happy.
And if everything else happens through worst case scenarios (IE: Progress of science slows down and we really, really need that to become more happy), "free market" will take over as long as there won't be any breeding restrictions or the like. Very intelligent people are needed a lot but they are less common so they are respected more, get more money, get laid more... The reason why university education isn't as valued now as it used to be is not just because the level of education isn't what it used to be (a claim I would also be willing to challenge) but because it is so much more common. Of course it is valued less now.
wow. i cant believe how stupid some of the people are these days. i mean come on. what if someone wasn't on facebook? it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out the best choice is to call 911. the internet isn't always working right. so why depend on it to get your message to someone in an emergency? had their friend not been on facebook at the time they would have probably just stayed down there.
This shows how much our society has progressed in these news years of wonderful technology. Why wouldn't you just phone-a-friend. FB could be seen as a reliable source to people in problems. It just goes to show how far our society has come due to the problems and concerns of how we are more concerned with face book than the worldly downfall because of nukes and our economical situation that the world is depending on.
Storm drain Matilda, storm drain Matilda,
Storm drain Matilda is facebookin' me,
She's trapped, yeah she's stuck,
But callin' the blue heelers failed,
Storm drain Matilda is facebookin' me.
When I first read this I couldn't help think how ridiculous it was that these two girls got on Facebook to call for help instead of calling their version of 911 ; but after thinking about it and reading some comments it kind of makes sense because it was possible that they might not have had signal to call or text anyone. So the next best thing would have been to E-mail or get on the web.
Sad but true... most insightful thing I've heard all day.
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
A notification has been sent to "911 Emergency Response". The user must accept your friend request before they will appear in your friends list.
[meanwhile, the victim dies because "911 Emergency Response" is actually "sleeping in today and not going to class cuz last night was so crazy omfg".]
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Since we have made these types of technological advancements over the past several years, does anyone know if 911 is keeping up with the times and accepts text messages or if there is any plan for it? (Not just for "hostage situations" but also for people who are physically unable to talk/listen on a phone.) Can 911 trace your cellphone to a general location using either GPS or just cell-tower triangulation? etc...
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Yargh, we got that so much we changed the access code.
Actually, it's the same in norwegian: tretten (13) to nitten (19)
Ofcourse we use a different word, namely tenåring.
In swedish the word is tonåring, and the words are from tretton (13) to nitton (19).
Some other countries, for instance Denmark, just use the word teenager to mean 13-19.
Harald