It’s even worse than that. In Court Martial, there is a security camera focused on Kirk’s chair arm switch panel that apparently runs continuously. Remember, in every one of the 79 episodes, that camera was recording. To the point, is that the only panel that is heavily monitored? What else is subject to constant recording?
And in TNG, those com badges track you every where. For all the invasions of privacy the characters live with daily, why doesn’t the computer continuously monitor everyone’s location, to at least the point of “are they still on the ship”? It would be trivial to have the computer silently monitor everyone, piping up only when something significant happens, like “Alert! Captain Picard is no longer on the Enterprise.”
By the amount of Big brother surveillance the Federation uses, it supports my contention that, in WWIII, in the battle between American Freedom and Soviet-style totalitarianism, the Soviets were the ones that won. hence “no money” in the future. “When Communism is perfected, everyone will have everything they want.” Good, let’s go to the Holodeck!
Yes, you may not be able to correlate the GPS data with a map where the app on your phone needs to load the map data using a cellular data connection. But if you’ve already downloaded the map data for a given region, the phone’s GPS signal will work just fine to overlay onto it for directions.
I’ve had to pre-load my maps onto my phone while traveling in mountainous areas (e.g., back roads of the Scottish Highlands). I even lose cellular data/connections not all that far from NYC, just going around Harriman State Park about 90 minutes north.
Maybe he was using “Medical Records Library” as a euphemism. And what he really meant was he was going to do the Star Trek equivalent of google it on a mobile device in the bathroom.
At the end of Hitchcock’s Rope, Jimmy Stewart says something like “You’re both going to die!” and fires a couple of rounds out the window. Then you hear a bunch of background talk as concerned New Yorkers spring into action at the sound of gunshots and (rather quickly) the police show up. Lots of that would probably not happen today.
The Lady Vanishes - “Uh, I have a Miss Froy here registered as checking in to this train number in the database, so I don’t know why these people are pretending she doesn’t exist.” Meanwhile, two guys go to icc-cricket.com and discover the match was cancelled, and Miss Froy emails folktune.wav to Whitehall.gov.
Probably it was the cell service that didn’t cover. The practical effect is the same (or worse, since I couldn’t use the phone to call for directions).
Where people have gotten into trouble is in areas where there is no map data available, or where the data is incomplete or incorrect. For a number of years I routinely drove on a stretch of highway where for 20 miles or so my standalone GPS showed me as driving off-road and pointed me toward an area where there used to be a highway, but was now part of a wheat field.
It’s not that the device receives no signal, but if there’s no good data for the area you’re in it the same effect.
I am having a bit of difficulty in understanding how that relates to following statement from the OP
Whether there is no GPS signal or the maps haven’t been updated or you didn’t preload the map or you’re using a phone app in an area of poor cell service, in the end it doesn’t really matter - it’s not impossible, or even that difficult , to get lost in 2020 even though GPS technology exists.
> A running gag in Play It Again Sam was Tony Roberts’ character always calling on
> the nearest pay phone to let his office know where he was and how to reach him on
> said phone. Without that his character basically has no funny bits in the movie.
First, it was usually a landline phone in the apartment of Woody Allen’s character, not a pay phone, that Tony Robert’s character used. Second, it’s not necessary for that character to be using a landline at all. I’ve seen a version of the play in which the character used a cell phone in all the cases where he was on the phone. I also just searched YouTube and found another version doing the same thing. It only took a little rewriting of the play to turn that character into one who was always using his cell phone. The problems that that character had with his wife (Diane Keaton’s character) weren’t really about him being on the phone all the time. His problem was that although he loved his wife very much, he spent so much of his time handling his business that he had little time to interact with her. He frequently went on out of town trips for his work.
In the later scenes, he comes back from a trip to talk to Woody Allen’s character to tell him he thinks that his wife is having an affair, not realizing that Woody Allen’s character just spent the night with his wife. He’s miserable about how badly he’s treated his wife. Woody Allen’s character realizes that his friend really does love his wife, and he can’t break up their marriage. The final scene, just like the one in the movie Casablanca, consists of Woody Allen’s character telling the wife that she should stay with her husband. If she did break up, she’ll regret it, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of her life.
So modern productions of the play can either be period productions with landline phones or ones set in the present with cell phones.
Nearly the entire cast of Revenge of the Nerds or Porky’s would end up in jail.
Murphy Bown and Mary Tyler Moore would probably be living comfortably on the sexual harassment and discrimination suits that would follow just a few of those episodes.
And of course the whole darned plot on that one is now anachronistic–“Someone left a baby on my doorstep and claims my late husband is the father? Hm…I could hire the eccentric and notoriously expensive detective Nero Wolfe to launch a lengthy and laborious investigation to find the baby’s mother in order to indirectly determine the likelihood that my late husband was the father. Or, I could just find an old hair brush that belonged to Richard (with at least one complete hair follicle still lodged in it) and have that tested against a sample of the baby’s DNA.”
You can still get lost with GPS, but you can’t get as lost. Even without map data, your GPS can still tell you that you’re 100 miles southeast of your destination. So let’s say you’re on a north-south road: Take it north. Somewhere between 60 and 80 miles, look for a crossroad, and take it west, and so on. It probably won’t be the quickest route, and you might have to do a little backtracking, but it’ll get you there.
It’s only a problem if you do the cheap sitcom thing of Turn Right Now, and so you veer off into a cornfield.
There’s a ton of works set in New York City or California where somebody is able to legally buy a gun and take it home the same day, which hasn’t been a thing since the early 90s with background checks and mandatory waiting periods.
You’ll also notice a lot of shows prior to the 2000s had bad guys able to beat the tar out of cops and get basically a misdemeanor out of it at most. Every episode of Walker Texas Ranger had bad guys who get into fights with chairs or pool cues against Texas Rangers that today would be felonies, as opposed to just letting them go as happens in the show.
I watched an old Columbo a few years ago in which he tailed his suspect to the airport to see if he actually got on the plane. There was no line at the metal detector. Columbo breezed through, set it off, and just flashed his badge to the guard and kept going. I doubt that would fly with the TSA. (I’m not sure if that would have worked in the 1970s either or if the writers took some artistic license there). But either way the whole plot line about following the suspect to the airport without being noticed wouldn’t work, because they’d both end up stuck in line at the security checkpoint for like 10 minutes, where the suspect would likely notice Columbo in line behind him.
Some rich woman who is swept away by some man…knows nothing about him, marries him, Tragedy ensues… I would hope anyone eloping with some hot piece these days would check him or her online,
