Starship Troopers the movie. Basically, those were the stupidest and worst tactics fighting anything that wasn’t a troop of girl scouts, let alone bug like aliens that are super hard to kill and have spaceship tech. You don’t send unarmored and unsupported infantry into something like that and expect them to live. It was just a bad movie and really, really stupid tech that’s worse than our tech today.
Just about every futuristic war movie ignores artillery. Apparently the producers don’t think Our Heroes should be people who respond to their script cues with “WHAT?” 
Interesting thing – As I’ve mentioned in other threads, I recently obtained a copy of the 1964 Czech science fiction film Ikarie XB-1 (released briefly in the US, ludicrously retitled Voyage to the End of the Universe, which is how I saw it as a kid). Their starship was outfitted with lots of security cameras.
IIRC, the Japanese-American 1968 film The Green Slime had security cameras, too (they watch the titular monster on one of them).
And the space ship in The Quatermass Xperiment (released in the US as The Creeping Unknown) had a camera recording the interior of the space capsule, too.
so other countries didn’t seem to have a problem with cameras on their space ships and stations.
Multiple cameras from different angles, even. All neatly edited together in cinematic fashion with perfect sound & lighting.
Don’t forget Court Martial, where they had big brother level surveillance on the bridge, including “impossible” camera angles and closeups of the captain’s chair arm. (none of which we ever saw again) Don’t know if the entirety of the ship is covered that well, or just the important areas. I’d hate to work under full time high def recording.
It fits with the Earth in ST’s time being the aftermath of WWIII, but the Commies won. 
No one realizes there shouldn’t be that much monitoring.
Wouldn’t some kind holographic system allow such things? Apparently tricorders have this capacity too, since they can record and play back images from virtually any angle and distance.
Hmm. That would actually make sense. Just one recording to spy them all.
I’m predisposed to not accept such surveillance, after endless shows that have security camera footage that pans, tracks, and generally follows the person being watched. Or “security” footage that looks exactly like the scenes we saw earlier in the episode! And movies like Enemy of the State, where the spy satellite is not always looking at the correct angle, but can see the other side of the person being spied upon!
I always wonder what is powering these humanoid robots in present-day (or near-future) movies. You never see them taking a break for recharging. If there was a small, self-contained energy source capable of keeping a robot going all day long, that would be the default power source for everything! The entire world would be completely different.
As much as I like Harry Potter, the way technology is treated in universe is ridiculous. Basically Rowling decided to write a fantasy novel and everybody knows you can’t have technology in a fantasy novel.:rolleyes:
There were an impressive number of cameras on Talos IV in “The Menagerie”, as well as on the Enterprise bridge.
The worst offender here is AI, where one of the selling points of robot children is that real children need continual expenditure of resources, while a robot never needs anything more than the resources needed to build it.
Steve Austin’s (the $6MM, not the rassler) bionic limbs were supposed to have been powered by nuclear power packs. Theoretically, a decade or more of power. One could assume that he could have them because he was under government control, where an average Joe might be temped to sell them to the Libyans or something.
But now you got me thinking - did they run a power cord up to his eyeball? (And Jamie Summers’ ears?)
In fairness, I believe there’s a canon handwave for this. As in the Dresdenverse, high concentrations of magic in the Potterverse tend to mess with a lot of modern tech, rendering it useless in places with lots of witches and wizards. (I believe it came up in connection with using non-magical surveillance–electronic bugs don’t work at Hogwarts.) The magical community’s self-imposed isolation tends to concentrate their population, meaning that any place we see witches and wizards generally has enough of them that tech is likely to be unreliable.
While I appreciate that fantasy must make concessions for a good story, that is one sorry-ass wank.
Electricity doesn’t flow near wizards? Radio waves don’t travel? Light doesn’t go through lenses?
Sure, why not?
Magic, dude. Different rules. Vampires don’t reflect in mirrors: don’t even bother trying to make sense of it. It’s just the way the vampire-world works.
If modern sophisticated electronics are “allergic” to magic, well, so it goes. It ain’t a wank; it’s world-building.
More interesting are those situations where there are outright contradictions – and here, the Potterverse explanation still doesn’t work! Okay, a mage can’t use a telephone: why can’t he write a message on a piece of paper and give it to a (non-magical) clerk to be phoned for him?
An answer to the problem exists within the rules of the universe.
(There has got to be some way to capitalize on vampires’ non-reflectivity… Put a vampire between two facing mirrors, and you have just created a “dark bulb,” the opposite of a light-bulb…)
I’m not sure there is any actually reason for high tech in Harry Potter?
Muggles have the standard muggle tech for 1992 Dudley has a playstation.
What special tech might you envision?
Magic which is some innate natural power does not exactly exude future tech.
And since that community remains pretty cloistered, and has no real need for a lot of technological wonders, it is not terribly odd that they don’t have a lot of dealings with them.
And keeping somewhat isolated as they are, they would be more inclined to hold on to tradition and such, look at the Amish and the like for a real life example.
Why invent a better car for example, when you’ve no real use of a car at all.
Great thing about magic is it requires no high tech, and actually tends to work better with out it.
Vampyres do not cast reflection because the light passes through them. Soul Schoul, ever see a can of soda with a soul?
Now ignoring the part where that should render them totally invisible, i am not sure where to capitalize on it?
Was it Cardassian or Jem’Hadar? Cardassians being a 1984 society would have cams everywhere. Jem’hadar (since they don’t even have view screens for whatever reason) would seem like the kind of society that wouldn’t have cameras. Again dont ask me why. Maybe Jem’hadar see monitors like an old camera saw TVs.
Regardless, I would assume Damar had help or edited the tapes.
I feel like starting in on Harry Potter will just be the end of this thread. I highly recommend the brilliant FanFic (don’t be put off by it being a FanFic, it’s an extraordinary work in its own right) Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which, among many other things, relatively-gently points out many of the absurdities of the way magic is set up in the Potterverse.