What technical inaccuracies in scifi stories annoy you the most?

As a biologist, with a PhD in microbiology, I urge everyone to vote for "Every dangerous disease has a cure you can cook up in the lab if you could just have [amount of time needed to make the plot exciting]!" Sci fi writers really take the fun out of my lab work!

My background is in photo editing and manipulation. Anytime I see someone reading a license plate off of someone's pupil from a security camera by typing in "enhance" I want to punch a hole in my TV.

Gotta agree with Guy there, I hate it when they find a perfect reflection of the killer in the eyeball of the victim from a picture from a cellphone, just by zooming in!

If only!

It's one thing to point out absurd si-fi inventions (I'm with you on the lab work, and digital enhancement) But, in Sunshine, they didn't 'restart' the sun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film)#Scientific_accuracy
There was q-ball that was causing the sun to not burn as brightly. Granted that a q-ball wouldn't have been captured in the first place due to the sun's density, it is still a realistic goal to break up one (considering they also had a multistage atomic that consumed one half of the nuclear material on Earth).

So no, they were glossed over the fact that they were after a q-ball because the audience is alittle dim on the existance of such bodies.

Where is the choice for ALL OF THE ABOVE?

They're all bad. The CSI 'photo enhance button' too. I hate that every hacker has to fly down tubes or whirl around giant CGI cities of information on their tiny 1990's laptops, but when the hacker is being traced the government's giant computers just use a flat map of the world with a dot 'tracking the connection'.

A few I would have liked to see:
-Electricity is slow and visible, crawls across water, people
-Opening a locked door by destroying the control panel
-What should be explosive decompression is really just a strong wind
-Aliens from far away galaxies speak english, understand Earth-specific vocabulary
-Any sort of sudden space ship motion causes sparks to fly out of everything
...I could go all day

I am always bothered by how flawlessly computers work, and especially how intricate the UIs are. I am also surprised at how fast everyone's network or ISP connection, especially wireless network connections. Most mere mortals are stuck using a Mac, a PC, or a Linux distro laptop, and while they've made great strides in stability and speed, come on...

Perhaps not sci-fi specific, but I particularly hate the frequency in movies of how two falling objects (i.e. people) fall at different rates. The "rescuer" always catches the first faller without doing anything special.

I love the contrived UIs in movies and TV shows.

There are two methods for "hacking into" a secure system. The first involves guessing passwords.

To do this, the "hacker" must make two incorrect guesses followed by a third guess, which is always correct. When he/she enters an incorrect guess, the words "ACCESS DENIED" must flash across the entire screen in very large type, using the root window's graphics context in violation of every rule of tasteful UI design.

The second method for hacking into a secure system involves the brute-force method of trying many, many passwords very quickly. There are two ways of doing this:

1. Have a fancy universal dongle which can immediately assume root access to any OS through some kind of magnetic interface--just stick the box on the computer, push a button, and you're good to go. Or,

2. Carry around with you wherever you go an installation disc containing a custom password-cracking application. If you haven't written such an application yourself, you can get it from a mysterious genius, idolized within the underground "hacker" community, by impressing him/her with your nascent coding talents.

Both the magnetic dongle and the custom app use the same password-cracking algorithm: generating a rapid series of random fixed-length strings which happen to be the same length as the password. (The length of the password can be determined based upon the amount of time you have before the world blows up or whatever.)

Because this algorithm solves passwords on a character-by-character basis, it's good design practice to display the characters in large type (using the root context), each character contained in its own individual box.

Now, whenever a user enters an incorrect password, the secure system transmits a helpful data packet letting the user know exactly how right or wrong his/her guess was. This is what allows the dongle/custom app to determine when a character in the random string matches a character in the corresponding position in the password string.

Whenever this occurs, that character becomes "locked in" and no longer changes. One by one, the remaining characters get locked in until, at the very last possible moment, the password is cracked and the explosion/missile launch/virus release is averted (to do this, the "hacker" must enter "ABORT"--which is such a useful command-line instruction, its recognition among operating systems is universal).

how come you travel thosands of parsecs and the first alien you encounter is able to speak proper English with idioms and all?