Pop the face off the keypad and jumper a couple of wires. Door pops open. Help yourselves to some weapons or chemicals or whatever you were after.
In that sort of secure facility all the keypad is doing is sending the code to a physically secure control box somewhere on the other side of the wall which decides whether or not to open the door after consulting a computer somewhere else. Sure, there are still all-in-one units, but they’re for low security rooms inside the facility after you’ve already been cleared inside.
Which reminds me. Hot wiring a car. Reach under the dash and pull out a bundle of wire. Cut/strip the ends of a couple. Drag them together a couple of times to strike some sparks and off you go! No. Just no. That’s almost as much fail compressed into 15 seconds as hacking passwords mentioned earlier.
Perhaps a little bit off the topic of movie scripts, but thinking about cars and parking and such, it occurs to me that nowhere is lack of realism more blatant than in TV ads. Not talking here about ads intended to be offbeat, creative or interesting, I’m talking about gratingly stupid.
What occurred to me, for instance, was the ad for a car insurance company I’m sometimes forced to endure, where some buffoon has just crashed his car in the middle of the night and calls the Cheerful Insurance Lady at 3:00 AM at the 24/7 call center. In real life, the person picking up the call would be grouchy and half asleep, totally pissed about having to work the night shift and hoping that her desk nap won’t be disturbed by yet another drunken idiot who drove his car into a telephone pole. But not in Advertising World.
In Advertising World, this person greets the idiot driver like a long-lost brother, and runs through a gamut of emotions worthy of an Oscar, first expressing deep concern about whether this total stranger and incompetent buffoon might have sustained a Personal Injury, then emoting dramatic relief on hearing that he is OK, and then bouncing into business with the kind of ebullient cheerfulness that in the real world can only be induced by powerful drugs.
The claim is of course processed within seconds, with the kind of relentless cheerfulness hitherto unknown in the insurance business at any time, let alone at 3 AM. And we know it only took seconds, because for some reason the Cheerful Insurance Lady has a gigantic clock ticking away immediately behind her. And the cheerfulness is apparently contagious, because the incompetent buffoon is now happier than anyone has a right to be who has just crashed his car into a telephone pole. In fact he is happier than anyone has a right to be who has not just won a major lottery jackpot, and he is barely able to restrain himself from dancing a little jig of joy while the thing that used to be his car is visible in the background as a steaming pile of rubble.
That’s more or less how I remember the ad. Precise details may vary, but that’s basically the supposedly persuasive angle of it.
Movies about television newsrooms or news coverage NEVER EVER get it right. Just a few -
Live wireless cameras - Until very recently, live cameras had to be cabled to a live truck to send out a live feed. Yet, one movie/tv show after another showed a photographer rushing to the scene with nothing more than a camera and immediately feeding a live picture.
Breaking laws to get exclusive video - “Nightcrawler” was a particularly egregious example of a news photographer illegally entering a home to get video of a crime scene. No station ANYWHERE would air that video. They’d be heavily fined and possibly lose their broadcast license.
References to ratings periods - More than once I’ve seen it referred to as “sweeps week” - “Bruce
Almighty” is one example. Sweeps periods last a full month (30 days to be specific) and nobody who works at a television station would make that mistake.
“Money Monster” portrayed a gunmen taking over a news studio during a live broadcast. No station or network would ever stay live in that situation. They’d immediately cut away no matter how many people the gunmen threatened to kill.
The one that gets me is the way that law enforcement gets someone’s PC, and in a short period of time (like maybe an hour or so), suddenly have this perfect looking smoking gun email chain.
First, you typically have to remove the hard drive, hook it up to special write-blocking hardware, and make a bit-by-bit image of the drive so that you don’t wreck the actual evidence. This takes a good while (hours, probably), because you’re typically doing it via USB connections, so even with a USB 3.0 drive at 480 mbps, you’re still drastically slower than the drive’s native speed, even if you’re using an older 1.5 gbps SATA drive.
Then, once you have that drive image, you have to use specialized software(like say… EnCase or FTK) to scan every bit and catalog everything it finds- deleted files, parts of deleted files, existing files, etc… This takes a long time as well.
Finally, someone has to go in and actually eyeball what the cataloguing software finds, and determine if it’s relevant to the case.
In some cases, especially ones involving emails, the email archive files are found via the cataloguing process and then indexed with a dedicated email indexing software package that can combine and reconstruct email threads from multiple sources- individual clients and servers to get the complete picture.
So while it’s possible for Abby to get someone’s hard drive and do what she does, it’s probably something that’ll take her the better part of a 12 hour day, not something that Gibbs brings back at 10 am, and Abby’s showing McGee the email chain at 2 o’clock. At that point, they’d probably still be in the middle of imaging the drive or indexing it.
If the computer isn’t set up with any kind of dedicated e-mail security, the email archive files can be pulled from the standard directory used by Thunderbird or MS LookOut or whatever. If it is set up with any kind of half-decent e-mail security, the e-mail files will be encrypted and the investigators are SOL unless they can get the owner to cough up the password or they had already been conducting surveillance long enough to install spyware to scoop up the password.
Bad guy needs a file. Or good guy needs a file that proves all powerful EvilCo is drowning kittens and kicking puppies. This file is on a super secure server that’s not attached to an external network so it can’t be hacked with the leet password cracking tool. So our crook/hero has to pry the face off the keypad and jumper some connections to unlock the door to get into the server room to steal the physical disk.
A: Unless you’ve got inside info about where the server is physically mounted you’re not going to have any clue where the drive is to steal.
B: The file isn’t going to be on one drive. It’s literally physically going to to be spread over anywhere from 5 to 16 drives in any sort of corporate IT installation. One drive gets you the equivalent of a random handful of stuffing from the shred bag. Even odds on top of that that it’s going to be encrypted.
Not only that, but security is just not that lax. I’ve been through security at 30 Rock. No way the guard is sleeping on duty. And it’s quite simple to feed back in the video to the studio monitors so the gunman thinks he’s still live (Murphy Brown did this correctly.)
Cancer. With drugs these days, you do not spend hours after chemo vomiting. (Unless you’re allergic to compazine, which a fellow BC survivor was :(). Yes, you lose your hair…but for some reason, the eyebrows and eyelashes remain on the actor. :dubious:
Actually in real life that person picking up the call on overnights is likely to be in India or the Philippines. The Operator from India is a well established Trope, but you rarely hear about the Philippines.
Which is a shame, because overall Filipinos have less of an accent and are more easily understood. Also, Filipinos are more apt to get Western cultural references, as they are big consumers of it.
Building on ivylass’ post, it’s not just chemo. Someone could be poisoned and half-past dead, but give them the antidote and they are competing in an Iron Man triathlon 5 minutes later.
Then there’s the fact that in Real Life one doesn’t simply send a sample to a lab and say “look for anything that could possibly be there” and get a convenient report.
Doing the whole “Charge 360! Clear!” routine on a patient who has flatlined. Asystole is not a shockable rhythm. Also, the amount of people who survive after needing CPR in the middle of the sidewalk is like 2%, and it’s not that much better in a hospital. Or their brain is totally gorked.
Also, hemophilia should never be used as a plot device because they always get it wrong. Hemophiliacs are in no real danger from superficial cuts. Inheritance has nothing to do with incest. Any injury is not a hopeless cause–there is medicine for it. But said medicine is not a bottle of pills that lies just out of reach as the person turns into a puddle of blood, it’s IV infusion. And while women technically can have hemophilia, it’s so rare as to be virtually nonexistent.
I’m curious, how cold does it get where you folks live?
Where I live, it gets colder than Genghis Khan’s mother-in-law and only fools don’t warm up their vehicles good and proper (not calling anyone here a fool), for the sake of the vehicle’s happy parts.
So, you either sit in your vehicle and wait, dreaming of Antarctica, or you go back inside and watch YouTube videos for 10 or 15 minutes. If you’re really clever you let the heat melt the ice on the windows for you.
Scene: Hapless non-tech finds bomb set to go off in 5 minutes. Phone call to tech-expert back at HQ.
I found a bomb! How do I disarm it?!
Describe what you see.
There’s a timer. And a circuit board. And 6 batteries on the right side!
Do you see a blue wire?
Yes!
Don’t touch the blue wire. The bomb will detonate. Find the green wire.
Okay. Got it.
Cut that one. Cuts wire Two seconds left on still timer.
So all villainous bomb makers use the same build guide? Or get the same do it yourself bomb kit from ACME? Why weren’t those in the Heathkit catalog?
I remember the bit in Batman: Assault on Arkham where Batman is disarming the Joker’s dirty bomb. Inside is a note: “Cut the red wire”. All the wires are red.
This trope caused me undue issue for my first 3 treatments. I thought that throwing up 5 times a day for several days after chemo was something I would just have to get used to…nope. Turns out there’s drugs for that.
However - to slightly edit what ivylass said - not all chemo drugs cause hair loss - it depends on what drugs you’re taking for what cancer. Breast cancer chemo pretty much always does, so does leukemia I think, but I’ve still got mine and my mom didn’t lose hers from the treatment for cervical.
