A former Harris County, Texas, 911 operator has been sentenced to jail after being found guilty of hanging up on “thousands” of citizens calling in emergencies.

Crenshanda Williams will serve 10 days in jail and face 18 months of probation for the crimes.

Williams was busted after it was found that she had an abnormal number of calls that lasted less than 20 seconds. Investigators discovered that she was systematically hanging up on people.

In one noteworthy incident, Jim Moten called 911 to report two vehicles racing on the same highway stretch where fatalities had occurred weeks earlier. Before Moten was even able to explain his emergency to Williams, who answered, she told him, “Ain’t nobody got time for this. For real,” and cut off the call.

Moten reacted in court documents, saying, “If someone calls in to report an incident whether the person feels this is an emergency or not, you should have time for it. This is a person that probably doesn’t need this job.”

Another incident that caught the attention of law enforcement was when citizen Hua Li called 911 while Williams was on duty. After walking into a store and hearing yelling that there was a robbery going on, Li witnessed a suspect with a gun and recalled five to six gunshots being fired.

Li ran to his car and called 911 while driving away. According to court documents, Williams answered Li’s first call and immediately hung up. When Li called a second time, Williams answered, “Houston 911, do you need medical, police or fire?” He responded, “This is a robbery.”

Williams sighed and hung up on the caller a second time.

On Li’s third 911 call to report the incident, he reached a different operator and was able to report what he witnessed. By the time officers arrived on the scene of the robbery, the store manager — a father of four who was expecting his first grandchild — was found dead.

Following Williams’ sentencing, Assistant District Attorney Lauren Reeder said in a statement: “The citizens of Harris County rely on 911 operators to dispatch help in their time of need. When a public servant betrays the community’s trust and breaks the law, we have a responsibility to hold them criminally accountable.”

Enlarge / The Samsung Galaxy S8+. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

While Samsung's newest flagship, the Galaxy S9, is just hitting the market, last year's flagship, the Galaxy S8, is getting some love, too. Samsung and its US carrier partners are finally upgrading the Galaxy S8 to Android 8.0 Oreo, a version of the OS that came out six months ago.

Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint are all pushing out the update now, with no word yet on updates for the AT&T or unlocked US version.

Most of Google's engineering efforts on Android 8.0 came in the form of Project Treble, a massive overhaul of the underlying Android bits to modularize the OS away from the hardware, which should lead to easier updates. Due to the complexity of this change, this is mostly meant for new devices that were built with Oreo in mind and is not coming to most upgrading phones. The rest of the changes are nice-to-have things like a revamped notification hierarchy, and a lockdown on background processing.

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Nope.

Could the act of ordering a “McMuffin” be less dignified than it already is? Yep, says Kate Batchelder. Significantly less. I wouldn’t need money today, [the cashier] explained, as I had been randomly chosen for the store’s “Pay with Lovin’ ” campaign, the company’s latest public-relations blitz, announced Sunday with a mushy Super Bowl TV […]

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Shutterstock/Sarah Frier Photography

A couple days after Netflix and Comcast fought in public, the two companies, who are supposed to be partners, are at it again.

Three days after Netflix CEO Reed Hastings publicly opposed Comcast’splanned acquisition of/merger with Time Warner Cable, one of his lieutenants has done the same thing: Ken Florance, the company’s vice president of content delivery, published a blog post complaining about the way Comcast treated its streamsbefore Netflix agreed to a commercial deal in February.

And not surprisingly, Comcast* has responded with its own blog post, accusing Netflix of being less than honest about its motives.

Normally at this point we would note that all this makes for entertaining blog reading, and leave it that. But Comcast has upped the ante, by accusing Netflix of something extraordinary: The cable company says the video company sabotaged its own streams prior to the transit deal the two companies reached earlier this year.

Here’s what Comcast wrote in its post: “As at least one independent commentator has pointed out, it was not Comcast that was creating viewability issues for Netflix customers, it was Netflix’s commercial transit decisions that created these issues.”

That’s a reference to this March 21 post by industry analyst Dan Rayburn, where Rayburn said that Netflix had done “stuff they have done behind the scenes to make matters worse” — namely, sending their traffic to Cogent, a broadband provider that worked as a middleman between Comcast and Netflix, even though Cogent didn’t have the capacity to handle Netflix’s traffic.

“In reality, the blame could fall on Netflix for continuing to send traffic over a link they know is congested, when alternatives exist in the market,” he wrote.

Rayburn’s argument echoes one that Comcast officials have made in private, this fall, but haven’t said publicly before.

Now it’s out there, and it’s kind of amazing: If the accusation is true, it means that Netflix shortchanged some of its customers, for reasons that aren’t quite clear. If it’s not, it means that Comcast, which has to be on its best behavior as it tries to get the federal government to bless its Time Warner Cable deal, has made a damning charge in public that it can’t back up.

Who’s writing the next post?

*Comcast owns NBCUniversal, which is an investor in Revere Digital, the parent company of Re/code.

ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) — Investigators will try to determine Saturday if a woman who died while riding a roller coaster at a Six Flags amusement park in North Texas fell from the ride dubbed the tallest steel-hybrid coaster in the world after not being properly secured by staff, as some witnesses accounts contend.

Patrons leave Six Flags Over Texas park as the Texas Giant roller coaster was shut down after an adult woman fell to her death Friday, July 19, 2013 in Arlington, Texas. (AP)

The accident happened just after 6:30 p.m. Friday at Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington. Park spokeswoman Sharon Parker confirmed that a woman died while riding the Texas Giant roller coaster but did not specify how she was killed. Witnesses told local media outlets that the woman fell.

“She goes up like this. Then when it drops to come down, that’s when it (the safety bar) released and she just tumbled,” Carmen Brown of Arlington told The Dallas Morning News. Brown said she was waiting in line to get on the ride when the accident happened.

Brown said she also witnessed the woman being strapped into the ride.

“They didn’t secure her right. One of the employees from the park – one of the ladies – she asked her to click her more than once, and they were like, `As long you heard it click, you’re OK.’ Everybody else is like, `Click, click, click.’ Hers only clicked once. Hers was the only one that went down once, and she didn’t feel safe, but they let her still get on the ride.”

Six Flags expressed sadness over the death and said it was temporarily closing the section of the park around the accident site. It didn’t say how long the area would be closed. A message left for Parker by The Associated Press was not returned.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends during this difficult time,” the park’s statement said.

The Texas Giant reaches 14 stories high and has a drop of 79 degrees and a bank of 95 degrees. It can carry up to 24 riders. The ride first opened in 1990 as an all-wooden coaster but underwent a $10 million renovation in 2010 to install steel-hybrid rails before reopening in 2011.

Brown said she was next in line behind the woman and saw her being strapped into her seat next to her son.

“We heard her screaming. We were like, `Did she just fall?’” Brown said.

Arlington police Sgt. Christopher Cook, the department spokesman, referred all questions to Parker. No other details were available.

In another amusement park accident Friday, a boat on an Ohio thrill ride accidentally rolled backward down a hill and flipped over in water when the ride malfunctioned, injuring all seven people on it. Operators stopped the Shoot the Rapids water ride after the accident, which occurred on the ride’s first hill, the Cedar Point amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio, said.

In 1999, a 28-year-old Arkansas woman drowned and 10 other passengers were injured when a raft-like boat on the Roaring Rapids ride at Six Flags overturned in 2 to 3 feet of water about 200 feet from the end of the ride.

Six Flags Over Texas opened in 1961 as the first amusement park in the Six Flags system. It is 17 miles west of downtown Dallas.

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