What modem does he have? Quite FAST for 1996..

Spoilers, etc, yada yada.

When the protagonist checks his email, first of all, his mac laptop boots amazingly fast, and automatically runs the email software very quickly - almost as if it was already loaded. Well, maybe it was just a screensaver with a password protection.

But then, the email downloads INCREDIBLY quickly, considering that it features a long, high-resolution (at least 640x480, or it would look much blockier) video, with good-quality sound with no compression artifacts whatsoever (just slight color banding due to 15 bit color or less - and a bit lower framerate than is comfortable for the eye), so it can't even have been compressed much (which would be insane, considering this is 1996, the age of the slow modems - and yet people are supposed to send each other uncompressed videos?)

Of course the 'auto-run/display attachment' option, if such even existed in 1996 (not because it couldn't have technologically, but because it would have been so stupid a feature, inviting viruses and trojans into your computer), would probably not have been used by anyone with even a little bit of intelligence (and we are supposed to think the protagonist is intelligent), and in any case, deserves a mention just because of how weird and how unusual it is to not even see the email, email list, or anything of the sort, or to have to even make a choice whether to read the email or not - when did you EVER see email act like this in real life? Even in 1996?

But the modem speed astonishes me. The 56.6k modems didn't really become popular until very late 90's, maybe in 1998 or so.

So my question is - WHAT kind of a modem does this guy have? That video file, no matter how well it is compressed, would HAVE to take at least a couple of dozen MB (MegaBytes) - and it didn't even look compressed, and it was high resolution, and so on. So it's safe to assume that before DivX and other efficient compression technologies, what was available in 1996 would have needed at least 100 MB for the 640x480 video with high quality audio.

Another thing is that it would have been incredibly troublesome to send a 100 MB file (whose name and file type was never specified, which is also peculiar, because it most certainly always is with email attachments, or the computer won't know what to do with it) in 1996 as an attachment - heck, it's even troublesome NOW (just try it)!

The upload would have taken as long as the download.

So, if he had a state-of-the-art (in 1996) 36.6 kbps modem, let's see what speed the email attachment actually would have downloaded.

36600 bps - bits per second, right? That many BITS per second.

Eight bits form one byte. So each second, 36600 / 8 bytes is sent. This is 4575 bytes. That's roughly 4.5 kiloBytes (kB) per second.

So in ten seconds, that's 45 kiloBytes, and in sixty seconds (a minute), that would be six times that, which is 274.5 kB. That is, roughly 275 kB.

(Btw, I am using the non-American way of using the dots and commas with numbers, so this may be a bit puzzling to Americans (for more reasons than one))

275 kB per minute is 16.5 MB per hour.

Are you starting to realize by now that it'd have been completely impossible for him to download that kind of an 'email' that quickly? I hate hollywood computers and movie OS's.. I hate, I hate, I HATE them.

Anyway, to download that 100 MB would have taken him about _SIX_HOURS_, not "two seconds"!

These ridiculous things in movies.. why can't ANYONE EVER show realistic computer using in movies? And don't tell me The Matrix does it right (or it's sequels), because no one's monitor would ever display what Neo's monitor was displaying in The Matrix - it certainly looked like a movie OS, not a real OS whatsoever. That's NOT what real computer using (usage?) looks like, especially if you are a 'hacker'! Aargh!

Now that the mainstream knows how the email works (I know, they don't really know), or at least what it usually looks like to receive email AND attachments, everyone should be questioning this part in the movie, and realizing how STUPID the moviemakers are!

AARGH!

Anyway.. had to rant a bit, but man, it's just SO STUPID! (said in the voice of the karate sensei in UHF)

In real life, it would have taken the kidnapper 6 hours to UPLOAD the video, and 6 more hours for the protagonist to DOWNLOAD the video! And I don't even notice that the email software launches any player, like 'quicktime', everything just starts playing so unrealistically automatically..

It's HARD to suspend your disbelief for a movie, when this kind of stupidity ruins it completely. This was worse than a spoiler to me.. I'd rather have had a spoiler.