Computers can do ANYTHING, Right?

I watch watching CSI last night and realized how badly computers, what computers can do, and technology in general are portrayed on television.

It's bad enough that a few weeks ago I was watching a rerun of Law and Order, and a hacker hacked into a system from an IP address that started with the number 327. I dismissed this as a safeguard though -- much like the 555 exchange that's used for telephone numbers on film and TV. If the IP address has no chance of being real, geeks who sit watching TV waiting for the chance to launch denial of service attacks on IP addresses they see on TV will have their evil h4x0r plans foiled.

Enough about that though. So last night on CSI, the uber technical crime scene investigator jumped on his trusty computer (you really can't tell if it's a PC or Mac) and imported a still image from a security camera of a crime scene. In the image the suspect could barely be seen. He was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses and the best image that could be gotten was a really bad side view. He pulls up this image in his trusty software package and an hour later -- voila! The profile has turned into a full frontal view of this person and matches exactly to what the actual person looks like.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that privledged people have high-tech software that will allow them to fight crime but this is on the same level as the x-ray glasses you could buy out of the back of Mad magazine. Give me a break, in under an hour too? And to top things all off -- during the entire process of manipulating the image, the mouse was never touched. To be honest, I'm not even sure there was one there. The keystrokes that were used resembled that of typing a letter, or a chat session maybe, but not manipulating an image. But he was typing fast, maybe that's how it got done so fast?

No wonder I have users here at work that think their computer can do their entire job for them, and when their told that it can't do certain things, they seem puzzled. On TV, a computer can do anything you want.