“Real Genius” (80’s Val Kilmer flick) deserves some credit for realistic hacking.
To redirect the laser, they dumped the PROM, hacked it with a hex editor, and re-burned it.
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But can you drive a six inch nail spike through a 2x4 with your penis?
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?
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It’s from:
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Someone once came to me asking if I could recover data from an SD card (may have been a flash drive) that had held years of photos. She had asked someone else “How can I get all of my pictures off of this?” and they had told her to just plug it in and format it. Sure enough, all of her pictures were off of the drive (just not in the sense she intended). 
“Why would they call that ‘format’?! That sounds like it would just convert the pictures from the cameras format to the computer’s format or something!”
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Just because one doesn’t appreciate it in all it’s nuances, doesn’t mean one can’t enjoy it. I can barely program, but I find shows such as ‘CSI Cyber’ or movies including ‘swordfish’ are an insult to intellect and worse than the boredom of somebody typing commands on a terminal.
What was once a delightfully geeky show with the latest scientific research dropped in has become yet another relationship romcom. Yes I’m talking about you Big Bang. As the nun-like woman from GoT would say “SHAME SHAME”
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That’s true. But when a production is making the decision to invest millions of dollars, they want to make sure to get their money back. And (unfortunately for me) Sci-fi has never been a mainstream category, often the big budget “sci fi” movie is often a haunted house or an action flick that just happens to have an alien or a robot in it. Seems like hollywood believes that is the most “science” that audiences can stomach, and hearing the words “I don’t get it” is like the plague.
Did you see Interstellar? What a beautiful looking and amazing piece of sci-fi art, but was tarnished by the constant sci-plaining that hollywood felt was necessary for their mainstream audience.
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The overuse of narrative exposition is a constant problem in Hollywood and not just for sci-fi genres.
In my opinion, movies that include lots of exposition are just examples of lazy, formulaic writing.
What I like most about Mr. Robot is that it doesn’t intentionally dumb down the tech for mass consumption and makes up for it with excellent writing. Anybody can understand the tension and drama even if they don’t get all the techno-babble.
Of course it has it’s own problem with exposition but that’s more because of Elliot’s psychological issues than anything else. That’s when narration makes the most sense - to help the audience understand the internal motivations and conflicts that can’t be expressed thru character interaction.
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I don’t know if this is “A Thing,” or if my son figured it out, but his running joke for the past month or so is “delete system 32.” It’s his punchline for everything.
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I watched a couple of episodes, and while I enjoyed what I saw, I’ve never noticed so many commercial breaks as I did while watching that show. I don’t know whether the time between breaks was actually shorter, or it was just my frame of mind (or, more charitably, the show’s actually so gripping that the interruptions are more noticeable).
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It’s also fun to put such a command in a batch file and leave it on someone else’s hard drive as a joke, then forget to tell the next person when the computer is transferred to someone else (i.e., me in 1998)
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This is why I stream everything; commercials annoy the shit out of me now, like never before.
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It’s the youth version of this. “You’re lagging? Fix your ping by deleting system32!”.
A slightly less dickish version is to tell new players in online games that they’ll improve their playing by typing whatever the equivalent of ‘unbindall’ is into the console.
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Wow, I didn’t know people that watched commercial television in real time still existed, really, outside of the older crowd. I just download the show and watch it.
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Here you go.
Mr. Robot employs former FBI security consultant to legitimize the computer screen hacks.
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Well I’m in my 40s, but I was visiting my parents, who watch the show in real-time and wanted me to see it. But yeah, I guess I’m one of them…
I suspected as much. I keep telling my son (he’s 11) that it was funny the 1st time.
I also told him that the batch file I ignorantly clicked on (see above) wasn’t funny the 1st time.
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