Unlikely Hollywood computers

[Anonymouse]

- or "I'm sorry, Dave; I'm afraid I can't do that."

This post is purely for fun, whilst I wait for a Windows 8 drive to be cloned - I'm going to dual-boot 8 and Linux Mint as an experiment. The 2TB SSD has been split 2/3 Windows, 1/3 Linux - which, my research shows, is plenty.
I had a brief irrational panic when neither laptop could deal with the drive - oh, it could detect it, to be sure, and I knew from CrystalInfo and Device Manager that it was there. I just couldn't give it a drive letter and hence couldn't format it.

What to do, what to do? Send it back and try again? This, I reflected sourly, is business as usual for me - I couldn't just format the drive and split the partition, oh, no, not me. No, I had to do troubleshooting and research first!

Then logic kicked in. Clearly it was working, it could be detected, just not recognised. A bit of research led me to Disk Management, which I used (on my Admin account, JIC) to create a simple volume. After that Windows detected it quite happily. I split the partition, and both read as okay.

I don't remember the cloning taking this long the last time I did this. Allegedly there are 10 hours to go (up from 8!).

Anyway. The fun bit:

2001:

Even by today's standards, HAL was insanely powerful - a logical extrapolation of 1960s computers, or so Clarke thought, but a computer that could understand context - and read lips? Dr. Chandra would've needed mad skillz to pull that off.

Swordfish:

Oh dear. Stanley Jobson was another one. While there are virus creation tools, the graphical interface was again ridiculous - if it were so simple to use, the bad guys wouldn't have needed him at all.

Alien:

How can you type, even touch-type, on a blank keyboard?

Superman III, the worst offender:

Seriously, if cracking was so simple to do - and again the payroll system was so freakin' powerful to take the phrase 'channel all half-cents into expense account' and understand it, it should've been single-handedly running NASA! - then anyone could've done it, and would have!
When I first saw it on TV I was doing an HND course, and I was offended by the simplicity of the process...I only realised a couple of years later that they couldn't show the actual process - a) because it would take up too much screen time, b) few of the audience would get it, and c) because some bright spark would DO it!

Having said that, though it isn't anywhere near that straightforward, it is possible. It's called the salami. To explain:

When employees are paid, the amount's always odd due to rounding errors, inevitable in a digital system. Accepted business practice (trans.: this is the way they do it, so suck it up) is to round down to the nearest significant figure - otherwise you might be paid, say, £502.7686754. Obviously they can't do that, so it goes down to £502.76.
Note down to £502.76, not up to £502.77. In theory the £0.0086754 is absorbed by the company - such a tiny amount can't go anywhere.

Unless it's told to.

But all these tiny fractions still exist in the payroll system. Therefore they can (by programming) be channelled, gathered together...and suddenly, especially for a big company, the amount starts adding up very quickly, very substantially. The kicker, however, is that unless they do a (very expensive) audit trail to follow the money (come back, Sam Vimes, all is forgiven!), it won't even show as an error - because all those amounts are still there. All the books balance.

BTW, this has been done.

ST:TNG:
Again, the computer is crazily powerful. In "Hollow Pursuits", Geordi asks for all substances that can't be detected by standard scans; there are 15,525 of them. Narrowing it down, Geordi adds the filter of stability in an O-2 atmosphere - 532. Then he asks about the ability to alter the structure of glass. 5. "On screen at this station!"

In other words, 'display on the nearest station to me the 5 substances which can't normally be detected, which are stable in O-2 and can alter glass'. To interpret that context given no less than 4 filtering criteria (this station, undetectable, stable, glass)...no, it's not possible.

Yet.

Doubtless there are others. Feel free.

(A-HA! That's context, i.e. 'feel free to name others'! Let's see OpenAI do that!)