'Not only is James Bond fictional, he's not a fair representation of intelligence' This was the week when a technology consultant tried to give people the FEAR by hacking Google Glass and suggesting that nefarious villains could use the tech specs to see and hear everything users do. Jay Freeman, also known by hacker handle Saurik, showed he had gained root access to Glass in a blog post and said that with …
James Bond has the income, lifestyle and so on of an intelligence officer of a certain social class, but apparently has the job of one of what Winston Churchill described as "the rough men", the NCOs from certain special regiments who might actually go around shooting people that the Queen's representatives took a dislike to.
Le Carre, on the other hand, can spend pages describing an intelligence officer spending weeks going through old files and make it sound riveting. He manages to turn the bit in TTSS where someone smuggles a file out of the Registry into a major drama.
Yes, Die Hard is misleading about police work. Sorry to spoil your day.
To reveal my utter levels of cluelessness, when it came out in Germany I was at one point standing in front of a cinema looking in my dictionary to find out what a "Hard" was. The truth did not emerge till I got back to the UK.
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