jqubed

Florida?

It’s other passengers alleging she was actually already dead

I feel like BMW charging a monthly subscription for the heated seats in the car should’ve been enough to stop anyone from buying their new cars, but they continue to sell!

I had a G4 that I liked pretty well, until after about 18 months it inevitably stopped working well, like all my early Android handsets. My Pixel 2 was my first phone to make it to 3 years (although Google did have to do a warranty replacement 20 months in) and it was still good but stopped getting security updates. The Pixel 2 being good ironically lead me to iPhones. I looked at my stepdaughter using a 6-year-old phone that still got updates, still could easily get parts for repairs locally, and started to wonder why I was spending hundreds of dollars buying a new phone every couple years.

IIRC it was Verizon; Motorola and eventually a couple other manufacturers would sell the same phones under different names in other countries.

I know Verizon has to pay Lucasfilm to use the term “Droid” for their Android phones, back when iPhones were AT&T exclusives and they were using the slogan Droid Does, but I think Lucasfilm had also specifically trademarked/copyrighted/whatever the term. I remember projects like Trillian and Babelfish took their names from the Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide properties but I don’t think they did any licensing.

A friend of mine had a similar situation, although this was on a highway with someone driving slowly and weaving everywhere. The cops did show up after his call, though, I think while he was on the phone with the dispatcher.

I did that once when I was working at a small TV station as the local broadcast engineer. Phones were not my responsibility but there was no IT person at our location and they didn’t send anyone when they did a system upgrade, so I spent a couple late nights at the station dialed into a conference call on my BlackBerry since the Cisco phones weren’t going to work. I don’t know how many times I called 911 and got the Miami dispatch (I was 800 miles/1300 kilometers away from Miami).

Back when I had a Pixel 2 Google would look up the numbers that would call and if the number was associated with a business in their database then they’d show the business name with the caller ID (because cellphones in the US for some reason don’t show the names that would appear if calling a landline). My wife owned a successful bakery at the time and one day I got a call that showed up as being from one of her competitors. Curious, I answered the call, but it was just another scammer. This was fairly early in the days of scammers, so I called the number back and connected to the bakery, so I told them they should call their phone company.

I’m pretty sure the scammers just make up numbers, not caring if they’re active or not. There’s a fundamental flaw with the design of the phone system that they don’t require authentication. It’s absurd to me that this has been widely abused for close to a decade now and they haven’t changed the system to prevent this. It seems like it should be fairly straightforward to have a system that authenticates that a call comes from someone authorized to use a number.

They don’t show up as foreign numbers in the US, just random US numbers. I don’t answer any numbers I don’t recognize anymore.

!shirtsthatgohard@lemmy.world

!stick@sh.itjust.works