My favorite example of this type of goof was in a book – John Sandford’s Winter Prey*. The protagonist took a magnifying glass to a newspaper halftone and saw the incriminating detail, whatever it was.
Know what you see when you put a glass to a halftone? DOTS. Not more detail. DOTS. A halftone is an optical illusion. It would be like using a magnifying glass on that “Magic Eye” art.
Somebody recommended Sandford to me, and that was the book I chose. I never read another one.
Uv Kourse. All hail the AS/400.
SGI. That’s it. I always go “S… thing.” and forget they exist. Of course, they don’t, now. Well, Chapter 11.
And I was thinking, actually, that considering the lead programmer was a loony, he might have bashed a vocorder into working… he named the computer after his lost son, right? And Apple did have common, defined-interface vocorders. If I wanted to do something like that, in that era, I would have grabbed one off a ][ and just written something for the interface.
Now, I’d call that a bit of a stretch, and probably as much ‘movie magic’ as the blinky lights, but on the larger scale of the entire hacking thing… movie was pretty accurate as to technique and equipment, if lacking in detail and glossing over bits. Which is what movies do.
I don’t see why you should be surprised. It says “impossible” right in the movie’s title.
People who write software often deal with a command line prompt. True, it’s rare that it’ll take up the entire screen, but even contained in a window, I do quite a lot of work from the command line.
OK, touché. I talk to lawyers who say law is nothing like what’s in the movies (or on TV). Movie fights go on until the combatants are bloody and exhausted but police experts say most street fights last one punch. Geographic cues are messed up. Just about everything, in fact, is wrong. So I’ll just retract my OP. 
But as far as human behavior, I have been around long enough to know that you can describe almost any behavior, no matter how bizarre, and it’s happened.
On the later Star Trek shows, the crew of the Enterprise do a lot of welding. So much, that they need a flux capacitor.
Are you sure about that? There’s a difference between resolving something the size of a newspaper (the usual example object that people mention in this connection) and resolving the text on the newspaper
The green-text command line in The Matrix was entirely forgivable, for several reasons:
-Neo is a hacker
-The world in which Neo’s computer exists is not the real world; it’s inside the Matrix - maybe Microsoft doesn’t exist in the simulation.
-The green-text thing is everywhere else in the movie, representing the fabric of the Matrix, so it’s stylistically quite consistent to see it on Neo’s monitor.
It doesn’t bother me when I see satellites in movies that can read a license plate. It does kind of bother me when they have a commercial for the US military that shows a satellite zooming in until you can see the eyes on a fly. It’s pretty clear to me, a person who specializes in special effects, that it’s just supposed to be a dramatization, but I don’t think I’m their target audience and I don’t think it says “computer images simulated” anywhere. Not that the US military’s satellite technology isn’t impressive in real life, I just think it’s false advertising.
Other ones: In the movie “Silence of the Lambs” Hannibal says “Don’t bother tracing the call, I won’t be on the line for long enough.” I’m no expert, but it’s my understanding (I think I read it on the Dope) that tracing a call is instantaneous. Wouldn’t that be a great way to catch Hannibal at the end? “You can’t trace the call!” “Uh, right. You got us, we have no idea where you are” (meanwhile, they just traced his exact location.)
I saw an episode of Law and Order (or something) the other day that had the most ridiculous internet BS I’ve ever seen on TV. They were tracking down child porn customers online, and not only did they find someone whose account had been used because his identity had been stolen (what are the odds? It’s happening to everyone, I tell ya!) they were able to monitor the chat conversations of their suspects in real time, and display it in the form of an AIM chat window. That whole episode was so unrealistic and corny in so many ways, it almost felt like a comedy.
To me, that sort of thing isn’t about suspending disbelief and presenting us with the impossible.
It’s lazy storytelling, taking cliches that the audience (generally) don’t think are even fun anymore and turning them into movie tradition. On those grounds, I condemn them. But not because it’s impossible.
Since we’re talking techie moments of doubt concerning M:I III - er. The fellow scales the wall at the Vatican, eludes the security camera. Okay, why not, they must have security cameras at the Vatican - somehow, I bet the one to elude is not the one that’s so freaking obvious, but never mind. He changes costumes, becomes one of the visiting clergy. Okay, good. Passes into the real inner Vatican offices; passes… the war room / main security office. WHAT? They have such a thing in the Vatican? Why?
The woman operative stylishly zooms in with her sports car, then “crashes” a high-rollers reception at the Vatican. What -? I mean, I suppose it’s not impossible, but it did seem slightly out of character for the place. Or maybe it is impossible. In that case, never mind.
OK. That was good.
Speaking of War Games, one of the thing that pisses me off about that movie is that the computer eventually decides to try every single launch code to launch the missiles. The problem is that it gets the code one digit at a time, when in real life it would get the code all at once (picture trying every combination on padlock…you wouldn’t get one number at a time, you’d get the whole answer all at once when the lock opened).
The current limitations for Keyhole Satellite imaging (providing the sky is cloudless) is approx. 10cm per pixel, meaning for every resolved pixel you are seeing a 10cm square block of image. With that resolution you can tell whether or not a car has a license plate, but you cannot read it.
Enemy of The State has got to be the worst offender of movies like this not only for satellite imaging, but in store cameras and every other type of imaging device currently on the market.
My particular favorite was a moment when two NSA agents are monitoring (via satellite) Gene Hackman and Will Smith on the roof top of a building talking to one another.
Agent 1: “Who is this guy? He’s not looking up into the camera.”
Agent 2: “He’s smart.”
Yes, he’s smart, because everyone else walks around all day long with their face pointed toward the sky
I’ve always found it humourous that folks choose to complain about a little girl identifying a **IX OS in Jurassic Park.
A movie about humans interacting with dinosaurs.
Which were cloned into modern day existence.
Using ancient incomplete strands of DNA.
Taken from the blood in insects stomachs who happened to be fossilized in amber.
Yeah, the OS thing really stands out as the belief thief there…
You might be able to discern a licence plate at that resolution, but only if you were at a very low angle. Anything less than 45^o and 10cm would be just to low to see a plate. And of course at 45^0 you would be looking through so much atmosphere that you wouldn’t have 10cm resolution.
The real problem with the OP however is the size of the footprint. While we can generate images with 10cm resolution we can only do so for an area of a few square metres. You would not be generating images of entire cities in real time that you could then zoom into. You could generate a picture of a city at that scale by splicing together millionsof images of a few square metres, but it would take weeks and probably months to process. You couldn’t possibly use it to locate a car in real time.
LOL. This thread reminds me of the nerds on the Simpsons who are always talking about itchy & scratchy cartoon foibles.
Doug: In episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy’s skeleton like a
xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he
produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we to
believe, that this is some sort of a [the three nerds chuckle]
magic xylophone or something? Boy, I really hope somebody got
fired for that blunder.
I’m with garygnu, you aren’t going to get realism in movies. Movies are designed to give a fake reality, not explain real reality.
Its been documented that a spy sat , was able to distinguish a womans bra size, by the shadow that she cast on the ground.
Declan
You must have really hated Enemy of the State then. Remember when they take an image of Will Smith’s shopping bag from a shop’s CCTV camera and then use “technology” and “computers” to rotate it through 180 degrees, to try to work out what’s inside it? That scene makes me cringe every time I see it.
Oops. Should’ve read the whole thread before jumping in there. Apologies.
Still, while we’re on the subject, what really bugs me about films is that no one ever says “goodbye” before hanging up the 'phone. Also, people almost never lock their cars (although they do generally have to unlock them to get back in!). In what world can you leave your car unlocked on a London/New York street, and come back to it several hours later to find it totally unmolested?