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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!
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.
Sounds like a spell from Harry Potter. "Obscruction!" he shouted. He pointed his wand at professor Umbridge, who fainted instantly.
-- 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.
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
... InB4 : no, not all iPhone user are that stupid. (anticipating cunning remarks from self-declared "superior" android users)
It's true, though: No android user would call the cops while drunk and belligerent. We all leave such mundane tasks to unique hardware and software that we are free to develop in the open android ecosystem, unlike the pitiful iSerfs.
When I want to get my ass kicked by the cops, my BeagleBoard-based(runs linux, of course) automated kegerator sends me a text message when it hits a threshold deltaBeer/deltaT value. The IOIO attached to my phone uses its breathalyser sensor and firmware to verify my state of inebriation and then sends a GET to the local server that my custom libpigs interface provides. Libpigs dials 911 and uses the Google text-to-speech mechanism to read Markov-chain generated pseudorandom rants based on mashups of obscure punk that you wouldn't have heard of and the lesser known speeches of 19th century radicals until they show up.
Once the accelerometers verify that I'm getting beaten down, my phone automatically uploads to youtube and starts Googling for personal injury lawyers!
Well, she deserves it, so good for her.
-- Cheers!
Well, did the first-responders fix the phone or not? TFA doesn't say.
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.
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!
It is possible to have connectors as well as a user changeable battery and still be water tight.
I like being able to use Bluetooth. I wouldn't much like being forced to.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
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.
Why not? I can think of lots of people, most of them would be scientists though, rather than authors but I see no reason why people shouldn't be allowed amass vast wealth if they do something to better society. Especially if it's something like a book, where it's not exactly being greedy or anticompetitive and it's getting kids reading, that deserves lots of money :p
"The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing." - Arthur C. Clarke ~1980
http://humorfeast.blogspot.com/2011/11/man-arrested-for-calling-cops-police.html
The problem is people feelings.
:)
Whenever the debate over breakable phones happen, I inevitably hear the words "$ANDROID_PHONE _feels_ cheap and plasticy, like it's going to fall apart and Iphone _feels_ solid" I facepalm.
If I drop my phone our of my pocket, 1 metre onto concrete, HARDNESS IS NOT YOUR FRIEND. The more flexible plastic which has more tensile strength so it will adsorb the impact, not to mention the components that are meant to come apart (I.E. battery cover) which serves to dissipate the kinetic energy. Tensile strength is what will save a phone in an impact, the hard casing of the iphone works against it's durability. If only people stopped relying on their "feelings" and used their brains when considering survivability.
I've dropped my HTC Dream and Motorola Milestone. The back came off the Dream but apart from that, it still works fine. The Moto was the same the first time, but the second time the slider for the keyboad broke, the phone itself still works, no cracked screens of cases, but the keyboard will eventually come off. Haven't dropped my HTC Desire Z yet, I guess it's because nothing better with a physical KB has come out
I've got an old Nokia 6500 C, metal and plastic case, survived half a dozen drops. 3 years and still working.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Worthy of Slashdot, this is not.
Are you kidding? First definitive proof that the iPhone is not idiot proof? This is indeed news.
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
Ummm, why is the guy pictured in that link the same guy pictured in the iPhone story?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace