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From: MDP@SU-SCORE.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: WarGames
Message-ID: <3340@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 22-Jul-83 05:29:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.3340
Posted: Fri Jul 22 05:29:24 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 26-Jul-83 17:07:00 EDT
Lines: 42

From:  Mike Peeler 

    Let me start by saying that I enjoyed the movie.

    Since I make a point of evading reviews and previews
before seeing a movie, it did not occur to me, at the time,
that people would think the scenario was realistic.

    There is a big difference between "not impossible" and
realistic.  Interstellar space travel is not impossible.

    It is clear to me, in retrospect, why so many people,
even intelligent people, thought WarGames was realistic.
The setting is very much here-and-now.  Dr. Strangelove was
a comedy and plainly was not meant to be taken seriously.
Colossus was a fantasy computer buried under a mountain
somewhere, and it wanted to take over the world--faraway and
farfetched.  The home computer, on the other hand, is
commonplace, everyday, ubiquitous.

    "So," thinks Joe Average, "maybe they made the computer
a little too human.  Maybe the bit with the tic-tac-toe at
the end was a little hokey.  Home computers, though, I know
about them, and I read where a person can use one to dial up
the big computers.  Maybe it takes more cleverness than I've
got, to break into one of them, but I'm always hearing about
the clever 8-year-olds who know how to beat those things.
It could happen.  I bet it could."

    This kind of thinking stops being funny when Joe Average
turns out to be your congressman and he starts demanding to
know how come this kind of thing could happen.  He will end
up wasting his time, as well as that of his colleagues; they
will set up investigative bodies to report on "the sad shape
of the internal security of our country's national defense
organization" brought about by their reliance on computer
systems, for "as everyone knows, computers are inherently
unreliable".  Urk.

					Cheers,
					Mike
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