In Independence Day, one often mocked scene in the movie is when Jeff Goldblum uses a regular ol' macbook to hack into the alien ship and disable with a virus.
The obvious question is, how the hell did they do this?
It's simple. They cut a scene out (God knows why) where it was explained that ALL of our modern technology - Computers, microchips, everything - was all reversed engineered from the crashed fighter. Hence why Goldblum was able to hack into the alien ship. He knew the code already.
Once you know this fact, those entire scenes make sense.
Edit: As I just learned, this scene WAS shot and it was added to later versions of the movie (Including the DVD release, but the ORIGINAL Theatrical release and the VHS release did NOT have them.

just saw this on Reddit

5/28/2014 1:42:14 AM

My first guess was a thread about Independence Day; my second was a request for an "ID for a movie."

Anyway I always guessed that they had just done research on the crashed fighter, but not that they had reverse-engineered a whole new technological infrastructure from it.

5/28/2014 2:15:15 AM

Are you trying to tell me an expert in chaos theory, the inventor of the teleporter, and a cable repair man all rolled into one can't figure out a little alien software program?

5/28/2014 8:21:22 AM

i was gonna say, i'm pretty sure i've seen that exact scene in the movie when i've seen it on tv.

and that's the only place i've ever seen it. don't own the dvd. didn't see it in theaters.

5/28/2014 9:01:50 AM

Apparently really important things like that get edited out of movies all the time.

5/28/2014 9:41:08 AM

5/28/2014 10:11:01 AM

Gotta rewatch it now.

5/28/2014 1:56:04 PM