# things movies get wrong about your industry **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 18, 2009, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181 "2009-06-18T15:31:21Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2009, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/81 "2009-06-18T23:43:20Z")
I was just mentioning this to my wife the other day. In Hollywood (ID4, Star Trek, almost any espionage show), the good guy figures out how the bad guys’ electronics work in a few minutes, and then disables them with a computer or a piece of wire. It doesn’t even matter if the system was made by an long-dead alien race from another quadrant of the galaxy. In **MY** world, I just spent an entire week surrounded by test equipment and computers trying to get a new IC (chip) to work, and I had the documentation from the manufacturer right there in front of me… ---
**Author:** ![Cardinal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cardinal/32/4000_2.png) [@Cardinal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cardinal)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/82 "2009-06-19T03:19:36Z")
It’s not my area of expertise, but every time someone implies that there’s a pattern to “blue wire, yellow wire, red wire…” in the madman’s bomb, it blows the illusion for me. This guy is an evil genius and he can’t think to make an unusual choice in insulation color (as if there’s a published convention for wiring madman bombs in the first place). ---
**Author:** ![Gatopescado](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gatopescado/32/5711_2.png) [@Gatopescado](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gatopescado)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 3:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/83 "2009-06-19T03:50:03Z")
Can we just say, “Movies are Bullshit” now and finish this thread? ---
**Author:** ![Sir\_T-Cups](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ed655f/32.png) [@Sir\_T-Cups](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sir_T-Cups)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/84 "2009-06-19T03:55:00Z")
I’m gonna second the “college life” movies. Having just left it, massive parties are WAY overdone in the movies. The biggest ones I went to still had to pretty much shut the doors and blockade the windows for fear of cops just rolling in complaining about the noise. Also college movies apparently don’t have neighbors who might call the police, or other people in the dorm who might _want_ sleep, and finally…EVERYONE parties right? ---
**Author:** ![Dallas\_Jones](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dallas_jones/32/3277_2.png) [@Dallas\_Jones](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dallas_Jones)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 4:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/85 "2009-06-19T04:00:06Z")
> [@mj\_2](#): > > I’m positive there are no less than three characters from Office Space that work in my building. So, sure there are things wrong even with that movie, but the characters are dead on. Office Space doesn’t count because it was an actual non-fiction documentary on lower/middle management in the '80’s. I could swear it was based on my real experiences. ---
**Author:** ![otorophile](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/3ab097/32.png) [@otorophile](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/otorophile)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 4:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/86 "2009-06-19T04:34:35Z")
> [@IdahoMauleMan](#): > > A serious professional pilot, transporting passengers or cargo on a point-to-point route, would never jeopardize the safety of the flight by giving away his/her ‘outs’ in case of engine loss. Sorry, I don’t really understand what this is saying. Also, I had to turn off **21** after the MIT math classroom scene about 10 minutes in. It was just too much. ---
**Author:** ![gaffa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e68b1a/32.png) [@gaffa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gaffa)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 5:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/87 "2009-06-19T05:35:00Z")
> [@Sir\_T-Cups](#): > > I’m gonna second the “college life” movies. > > Having just left it, massive parties are WAY overdone in the movies. The biggest ones I went to still had to pretty much shut the doors and blockade the windows for fear of cops just rolling in complaining about the noise. Also college movies apparently don’t have neighbors who might call the police, or other people in the dorm who might _want_ sleep, and finally…EVERYONE parties right? [_Real Genius_](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/trivia) on the other hand based [a lot of the incidents in the film on real events at Caltech](http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Hills/7350/misc.html), showed students studying and only had one wild party. And the second Matrix film showed Trinity using an genuine security exploit. According to t[he IMDB trivia page for the film](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0234215/trivia): Trinity uses a genuine hack to get into the Matrix. She uses Nmap version 2.54BETA25 (an actual port scanning tool) to find a vulnerable SSH server, and then proceeds to exploit it using the SSH1 CRC32 exploit from 2001. On rare occasions, Hollywood gets it right. ---
**Author:** ![Sauron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce7236/32.png) [@Sauron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sauron)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 1:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/88 "2009-06-19T13:11:03Z")
> [@otorophile](#): > > Sorry, I don’t really understand what this is saying. Pilots want as much cushion as possible when flying, especially when transporting people or cargo. They’re not going to randomly buzz mountaintops or beaches just for the thrill of it. They want as much opportunity as possible to get out of a bad situation in case something goes wrong, which almost always means they’ll fly higher than 50 feet above the ground. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 2:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/89 "2009-06-19T14:09:01Z")
Well… it’s my former industry, but I always have got a laugh out of how fast the TV forensic analysts and computer wonks find stuff on “suspicious computers”. As in, they “hack in” to the bad guy’s megacorporation email system with a laptop, and magically, five minutes later, they have THE smoking gun email. It don’t work that way folks… for big companies, electronic discovery is time intensive, labor intensive and expensive. Even with some of the newer things, you couldn’t just rip through a single hard drive that fast and search & identify emails like that- figure on an afternoon at a bare minimum to do that. And if you’re talking about a corporate system with millions or tens of millions of emails (or even hundreds of millions), you have to divide and conquer, because your tools won’t handle that big of a volume in a reasonable amount of time. Factor in the time it takes to just move that much data anywhere, and you have weeks of time. ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 2:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/90 "2009-06-19T14:24:39Z")
> [@Irishman](#): > > Space Industry. You’ve probably memorized those complaints. Physics just doesn’t work that way. One of my biggest complaints about _Apollo 13_ is that for the use of the LM as a lifeboat and the resequencing of the startup procedure for reentry (to limit the drain on the LM battery) was presented as being done _ad hoc_ by Ken Mattingly and one engineer. In fact, when it was reported that Apollo XIII was in trouble hundreds of Grumman engineers and technicians (who had worked on the LM) drove back to work unbidden and immediately pulled out the existing extengency procedures for the LM. Another minor niggling detail about films involving modern spacecraft is the pernicious use of “explosive bolts” in every separating mechanism. In fact, except for a few ground secured emergency connections, separating bolts are almost never used on modern spacecraft and rocket launch systems because of the low reliability, lack of redundancy, unconfined shrapnel, and high pyroshock impulse imparted to the vehicle which requires component isolation or qualification to prohibitively high environments. Mechanically actuated separation nuts (either caged or self-restraining to prevent FOD and contamination) are used for some applications, but most major joints are held together either with some kind of frangible rail (an aluminum extrusion with a groove through the middle containing flexible detonation cord that splits the rail in half) or a clamping v-band with some kind of redundant guillotine gun cutter to sever the restraining bolts or links. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/91 "2009-06-19T14:36:49Z")
I am a statistician for a large credit card company. I work in a gigantic skyscraper with thousands of other employees in my company in downtown New York City. If you blow up the tower, you will still get your bill at the end of the month. ---
**Author:** ![Intergalactic\_Gladiator](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/intergalactic_gladiator/32/112_2.png) [@Intergalactic\_Gladiator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Intergalactic_Gladiator)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/92 "2009-06-19T15:17:42Z")
As an Intergalactic Gladiator I have to say that all of those “aliens invade Earth” movies are way off. Do you think an advanced species is going to travel halfway across the galaxy just to anally probe some farmer in Iowa? ---
**Author:** ![The\_Tao\_s\_Revenge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/73ab20/32.png) [@The\_Tao\_s\_Revenge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Tao_s_Revenge)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/93 "2009-06-19T15:47:01Z")
> [@Tapioca\_Dextrin](#): > > I work on an oil rig, so my answer is also “Yes” > > The only thing moveis get right is that, um, er, hang on … sorry, drawing a complete blank here. You mean you don’t get sent by NASA to save the world from comets with nuclear devices? ---
**Author:** ![Tapioca\_Dextrin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Tapioca\_Dextrin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tapioca_Dextrin)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/94 "2009-06-19T15:49:56Z")
OK, they got that bit right 😃 ---
**Author:** ![The\_Tao\_s\_Revenge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/73ab20/32.png) [@The\_Tao\_s\_Revenge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Tao_s_Revenge)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/95 "2009-06-19T16:01:20Z")
> [@Push\_You\_Down](#): > > I feel like ID gets a bad rap for this. > > This is clearly an advanced alien species…Is it that crazy to think their computers were smart enough to automatically link up with an Earth computer. It’s the aliens systems doing all the work making itself backwards compatible. You’d have to assume the computer systems use the same communications frequencies, number bases (computers use base 2, but quantum computers could use higher bases), character encoding, network technology, packet encoding, and protocols. Also you’d have to assume the aliens never discovered encryption, and security access procedures for protecting vital systems, such as shields controls. Your argument seems to be the advanced computers figure all that out, but that makes about as much sense as the universal translator,and it still doesn’t explain why these very intelligent computers let Jeff take the shields down. Transformers is also guilty of this, but less so. Supposedly advanced earth technology is based on discoveries from the frozen body of Megatron. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/96 "2009-06-19T16:03:46Z")
> [@Intergalactic\_Gladiator](#): > > As an Intergalactic Gladiator I have to say that all of those “aliens invade Earth” movies are way off. > > Do you think an advanced species is going to travel halfway across the galaxy just to anally probe some farmer in Iowa? Hey, don’t knock it 'till you’ve tried it. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![astorian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ad7895/32.png) [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/97 "2009-06-19T16:06:41Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > One of my biggest complaints about _Apollo 13_ is that for the use of the LM as a lifeboat and the resequencing of the startup procedure for reentry (to limit the drain on the LM battery) was presented as being done _ad hoc_ by Ken Mattingly and one engineer. In fact, when it was reported that Apollo XIII was in trouble hundreds of Grumman engineers and technicians (who had worked on the LM) drove back to work unbidden and immediately pulled out the existing extengency procedures for the LM. > Stranger In fairness, I remember that, shortly after the movie came out, Ken Mattingly said almost exactly the same thing you did. He really WAS working on possible fixes, but he wasn’t improvising. He said, as you did, that hundreds of experts were working on the problem and bringing him suggestions to try out. The people involved in the Apollo 13 project generally liked the movie, but what ALL of them complained about was that the movie didn’t show the SCALE of the operation, that we don’t get a feel for just how MANY people were at work on the mission. But from a movie maker’s standpoint, I understand why it’s more efective to concentrate on a few key individuals than to dart around from one nameless engineer to another to another. Getting Jim Lovell may have required brilliant work from hundreds of Ph. D’s, but you just can’t show the contributions of all those people on screen. ---
**Author:** ![Cisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ccd318/32.png) [@Cisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cisco)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/98 "2009-06-19T16:07:22Z")
> [@Intergalactic\_Gladiator](#): > > As an Intergalactic Gladiator I have to say that all of those “aliens invade Earth” movies are way off. > > Do you think an advanced species is going to travel halfway across the galaxy just to anally probe some farmer in Iowa? No, they’d form a [band](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwar) and make some really killer music. ---
**Author:** ![Push\_You\_Down](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/push_you_down/32/9095_2.png) [@Push\_You\_Down](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Push_You_Down)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/99 "2009-06-19T16:20:45Z")
> [@The\_Tao\_s\_Revenge](#): > > You’d have to assume the computer systems use the same communications frequencies, number bases (computers use base 2, but quantum computers could use higher bases), character encoding, network technology, packet encoding, and protocols. Also you’d have to assume the aliens never discovered encryption, and security access procedures for protecting vital systems, such as shields controls. > > Your argument seems to be the advanced computers figure all that out, but that makes about as much sense as the universal translator,and it still doesn’t explain why these very intelligent computers let Jeff take the shields down. > > Transformers is also guilty of this, but less so. Supposedly advanced earth technology is based on discoveries from the frozen body of Megatron. Actually my point has always been in that movie with all the other ridiculous shit going on… Really!?! People get pissed about THIS plot point? Considering we know nothing about the aliens or their tech, it’s silly to harp. It’s like arguing about how unicorns and wizards would interact with the real world. We know ourside of the equation.. but we don’t know shit about shit about unicorns and wizards. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Tao\_s\_Revenge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/73ab20/32.png) [@The\_Tao\_s\_Revenge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Tao_s_Revenge)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2009, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181/100 "2009-06-19T16:32:23Z")
> [@Push\_You\_Down](#): > > Actually my point has always been in that movie with all the other ridiculous shit going on… Really!?! People get pissed about THIS plot point? Considering we know nothing about the aliens or their tech, it’s silly to harp. So your argument is with this whole thread? They’ve got a glaring security hole in their shield controls the size of which not even Microsoft could produce. They apparently can figure out how to talk to alien computers but they can’t properly lock down their shield control systems from unauthorized access?? It really hurts suspension of disbelief. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-movies-get-wrong-about-your-industry/500181.md?page=6)