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Man Calls 911 To Fix Broken iPhone
tekgoblin writes "For some reason Michael Skopec of Illinois thought that calling 911 would get his broken iPhone fixed. It got him arrested instead. From the article: 'After the five calls were made police traced the calls to his home in Illinois where they found him drunk and belligerent. He was arrested because he would not follow the police officers orders. It has yet to be made clear what he was actually trying to accomplish by calling 911 to get help with his iPhone. Although he was arrested he only faces misdemeanor charges and has to be in court next week.'"
A broken iPhone really is an emergency! That means I can't play Angry Birds!
...the guy that called the cops to help him break into a bank.
Let's play what's more sad!
Which of the following is more sad?
1) A man calls 911 to fix a broken iPhone.
2) Slashdot decides to report on a man calling 911 to fix a broken iPhone.
Stay tuned for the answer after this commercial break.
The article was short on details.
I could see it not being that he was truly calling 911 to fix his phone, but rather the screen was locked. While I don't have an iPhone, my phone does allow 911 calls if the screen is locked, so I'm guessing the i-thing is similar. If he was too drunk to remember his unlock code he may have drunkenly hit the emergency call button multiple times.
Of course that's still pretty stupid sounding, but not as bad a confusing the police with a Genius Bar.
Worthy of Slashdot, this is not.
... InB4 : no, not all iPhone user are that stupid.
(anticipating cunning remarks from self-declared "superior" android users)
NO TEXT
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
who is ron paul and why should i care to read about his 89 seconds on slashdot? it is about as much on topic as TFA junk.
Kyocera makes a phone that can be run over by a car and still work. Casio makes a phone which can be dropped and submerged for hours and still work. Motorola makes a Android smartphone which is dustproof and water-resistant. Apple makes a phone that breaks if it falls of a table. There's no reason that Apple's products need to be so fragile.
The first generation of rugged phones was based on a rigid frame surrounded by rubber. That adds bulk. The future may be to give the printed circuit board, display, and battery some flexibility and make the case out of Kevlar, with sapphire-over-polycarbonate for the screen. Then the whole phone can flex a bit without damage.
The next step is to get rid of the holes. It's time for connectorless phones. Modern phones have Bluetooth, WiFi, and CDMA/GSM radios. Add inductive charging and you don't need any connectors. Then the whole unit can be watertight. This beats putting in water detectors that invalidate the warranty.
"obscruction" of justice? News sites should spell-check..
Seriously, why does this man's face have to be all over the internet for something as little as what he did? I hope for him he isn't looking for a job or something like that.
-- Cheers!
I don't understand what's so important about a drunk man dialing 911.
Break resistance does cost more than the very lowest of the "Does it boot? Most of the time? Ship that fucker!" school of engineering; but the reasons for the vulnerability of contemporary iDevices and their ilk pretty much come down to what people want, however dubious their priorities.
They want very slim, they want shiny, they don't want bezels, they want max battery life without increasing thickness. Boom: You have a phone whose case and chassis are a mixture of glass and metal practically calculated to crack and/or transmit shock to circuit boards(at least the Android units tend to only be entirely glass on one side...). Absolutely nothing to give you an elastic collision, no replaceable exterior sacrificial components(remember those now-traumatically-retro Nokia units, whose entire outer casing was a slightly loosely fitting ABS+Polycarbonate replaceable shell with a bit of crumple space between it and anything important? That design probably added more mm to the phone than certain modern devices have; but it meant you could drop the thing, crack the fuck out of it, pick it up, and get a new shell for $5 at the nearest seedy kiosk.)
The people who care primarily about durability are, unfortunately for them, not quite large enough a market to get the really good stuff. They do pull Real Serious Cases for iPhones, and reasonably ruggedized variants of some of the more widely model-numbered Android designs; but the ones done from the ground up to be rugged tend to be a bit retro.
There are many other things to post on science, hardware, tech, linux other than people calling 911 to fix broken iphone. really of all things iphone is so important. WTF has happened to /. . You're just posting stuff related to apple stuff for clicks n traffic. I'm so disappointed.
mass media corps are hand picking presidential candidates and you have absolutely no problem with that - got it.
Get tae fuck
Obviously the problem has NOTHING to do with the iPhone or its owner. The issue is why the 911 system is badly designed that this happens.
An emergency system like 911 really needs a solid and intuitive user interface that will prevent errors like this.
I look forward to the introduction of i911 on the upcoming iPhone 5.
Three Squirrels
Oh look, another paid advertisement on Slashdot disguised as 'news'.
Maybe we can turn this thread into a thread about something more interesting. For instance, I always wonder how humans managed to make very straight lines when in the beginning all they had was sticks and stones.
-- Cheers!
Man must have followed my advice here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=13319755&postcount=483
Well, did the first-responders fix the phone or not? TFA doesn't say.
This would be a textbook example of why the ability to use technology should be administered. That along with procreation. This guys parents should have been sterilized.
The true absurdity of this story is that in the US non-violent drunk people are being arrested for petty stuff like that. Fine the guy and be done with it.
Could have been as simple as trying being braindead about dialing 611 for the AT&T support.
People this stupid should really just be executed on the spot. The rest of us would just be so much better off.
He's some dirtbag who thinks that freedom should be for everybody - except for pregnant women. Those, he believes the state should force into involuntary servitude.
He's an OBGYN. He won one of his early elections because he had delivered just about every baby in a county:
DATABASE WOW WOW
If someone calls 911 and it's not an accident (phone dials when in pocket, etc), and there is no emergency, there should be a fine associated with that, attached to the user's phone bill.
The 911 system is swamped with stupid calls which costs us money in man hours.
a $500 fine times 5 calls would mean a hard lesson to be learned. But he would learn it pretty damn quick. What's this - a $2572.58 phone bill... That would hurt much more and kill stupid calls like this much more quickly than being arrested for a night.
How exactly is this news for nerds?
In what possible way is this serious news of a technical nature, or anything that would interest the sort of people this website is supposed to be aimed at?
This should at the very least be in the Idle section.
Come on Slashdot Editors, do your job properly!
wrong.
This article should not be front page on slashdot
I'm more pissed off than confused as to why this made /. Maybe I'll diall 911 to find out why...and subsequently find my story on this site.
It is likely that he tried to call 911 to carrier-unlock his iPhone 4. This is apparently necessary with the Gevey Sim Unlock technique.
The apologist is strong in this one. The police of course don't know the difference between but dialing and someone harrassing 911. They can't just show the difference because these messages are recorded.
Really, to often slashdot posters just try to find an excuse for everything no matter how silly.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Here is the pertinent quote;
"He was arrested because he would not follow the police officers orders."
He was not arrested for making the calls; he was arrested for being a drunken idiot when the police responded to the multiple 911 calls. They may have even taken him into custody for his own protection if he was that drunk.
he should have called 911 when they robbed him and took his money and gave him that piece of crap. Now THAT should be a crime.
Worthy of Slashdot, this is not.
Are you kidding? First definitive proof that the iPhone is not idiot proof? This is indeed news.
News at 11!
How did he call 911 if his iPhone was broken?
Here we don't have emergency calling when the phone is locked (at least not on iPhone). So it would not happen as easily.
People do get drunk here too, but calling emergency is so well hidden in our phone system that it would be hard to do for a drunk guy.
What a dumbass...
This proves that people who buy iPhones are too stupid to live.
Proof that people who buy those things have a very low I.Q. Luckily for us natural selection will come sooner or later and hopefully people like that will not survive another generation lol...
...that these stories are made up for to press as 'public education' stories to keep them aware of the seriousness of 911 call and reduce time wasting calls. Cheaper than public information campaign.
Ron Paul won something? What will his followers do now?
I dont know who said it , but there is an idiot born every minute?
First? Google/Bing/Yahoo the topic ;) The uneducated masses are entering the tech world-all we can hope for is that some/most will think and get educated...
Maybe he should speak a little louder then.
He's a US Presidential candidates who believes that having unpolluted land and food that is fit for human consumption are privileges, not rights, and that the government has no business interfering with businesses' God-given rights to dump waste wherever they want.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
especially when you do something as genius as this guy.
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.148698001828171.22455.100000639155856&type=3
Drinking everyday for Mr. Skopec.
Visit my Forums?
I don't see a problem here. This makes perfect sense. Who else are you going to call?
Government Runs 911 Emergency Telephone Line --> Corporations Run the Government*
*See lost IPhone Police Response.
911 call you!
don't drink and iphone
Don't use it like that!
He coulda used this.
https://market.android.com/details?id=us.quadrant2.arrested&hl=en
Idiot proof? The iphone got a drunk moron in jail.
Maybe I should fear siri now...
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Worthy of Slashdot, this is not.
Worthy enough for you to comment on it, innit?
If his iPhone was broken, how did he call 911? I call shenanigans!
Now now. If consumers want unpolluted land and food, they'll just buy their food from companies that will voluntarily produce safe, healthy food. Even though we'll have no reliable way of knowing whether FoodTech's "Safe Healthy Meat" is real meat, or the leftovers the pigs wouldn't eat.
It has yet to be made clear what he was actually trying to accomplish by calling 911 to get help with his iPhone.
Does it matter? He was drunk. He wasn't actually trying to accomplish anything.
iPhones don't get drunk morons in jail... drunk morons get drunk morons in jail!
I ran the IOS 5 beta. Whenever I checked for updates after the official IOS beta came out, I was told that my phone was up-to-date.
A few weeks afterwards, I went to use my phone and it was locked with some kind of "can not connect server" error. I could only make 911 calls. I had to connect my phone to a computer and completely restore it. At the time I needed to make an important phone call. I ended up making the call two hours late due to this problem.
I could easily see a drunk guy accidentally dialing 911 because of this.
Needless to say, I will never buy another another iPhone, and I will strongly discourage anyone from using an iPhone beta. My cell phone is my primary communication device, and I refuse to pay money for any phone that would disable itself without any form of warning whatsoever.
No, I will not work for your startup
...if his iPhone was broken, how did he make the call?
I think he just misread the Gevey Sim Unlock instructions.
You're not actually supposed to talk to the operator!
are these when passing apple fanboys can post trash at will to /.
See :19 on the YouTube player here http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=tAFJUcLaYSg#t=22s hahaha "Medication woohooo"
iPhone calls 911 to fix broken you!
From the manual for the cell phone:
You should never rely solely on any wireless device for essential communications like medical emergencies.
Remember that everyone who doesn't have a landline phone, or worse yet, wants to dismantle the public switched telephone network.
If you have an emergency, you want to have an non-IP landline phone! Or a good life insurance policy!
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!