But then when they were trying to find Bartlett, they just waltz right in to his sexual fantasy. You’d figure they’d have a “your commanding officer is looking for you, knows you’re in here, and this is the knocking, so save and exit the program and pull your pants up if you need to.”

They did point out that they would be breaking rules/regulations by entering the holodeck while he was using it, but from what I remember of the episode, he was absent from work, and wasn’t responding to intercom pings, so they went to see him personally.

They did need to use command codes to force entry, so it might not normally be possible for civilians.

Though with holodeck technology, it’s a wonder they even bother exploring the universe. That might be the most unrealistic part of Star Trek.

The Federation values real things, and people would get bored of fakery after a point. It costs you the same to take a trip to Vulcan as it does to walk into your holodeck and simulate a Vulcan sunset.

What about the Selectric Typing-ball?

You can never quite trust an organ you can’t see.

They might have confused it for a head transplant?

Although neither patient was alive at the time of the transplant.

I don’t know if a full brain transplant would be feasible, or even a good idea. Not only would none of their senses and motor nerves work for weeks while the brain and nerves re-established themselves, but they would be walking around in a dead person’s face, body and speaking with their voice. That seems genuinely horrific.

Yes, but they’ve got the advantage of having done it for longer, and not stirred the pot.

I honestly don’t think it would have been an issue for Microsoft if they just decided to sit on Internet Explorer instead of trying to push everyone into using Edge.

You do what the police do, and provide a proportionate response.

A gun is only to be used if you are in imminent danger of your life. A robbery is arguably not that, unless they’re trying to steal your organs or prostheses.

There’s a reason your average supermarket security guard doesn’t immediately whip out the Mini-Nuke the moment they see a shoplifter.

There’s also something to be said about the place you’re living in, where you’re to be terrified of stabbists and robberers the moment you step out-of-doors. Do you live in a hive of scum and villainy?

Larger than your average claw hammer or ball peen, at least.

Especially when it causes law enforcement to become so paranoid of the citizens they’re ostensibly meant to protect, that a mere hailstone landing on the car roof immediately causes them to believe they’re being fired upon.

That just sounds like a terrible time for everyone involved.

At that point, you’re basically turning the constabulary into soldiers.

Carry a large warhammer, like Thor.

Is it not the other way around? The stuff in the square brackets becomes the alt-text.

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Ah, that’s unfortunate, but understandable.

Particularly with the modding scene. You can’t exactly do a randomiser with the cartridge.

There have always been people like that, it’s just more noticeable now because the numbers are larger.

People still use MySpace and Digg, and there are people on Bluesky, Mastodon, here, etc.

I left Twitter for much the same reasons. All the replies are basically unusable now, because bots just pay to get put at the top of the sorting algorithm, and it’s now full of bait and spam, since the website formerly known as Twitter now pays for engagement, since that apparently worked out well for Quora (!).

They’re doing a Bradbury, in a way, kind of like Tumblr and Steam. Everyone else is shooting themselves in the foot.

Although the quality has noticeably decreased. The number of bots has shot up a ridiculous amount.

Lemmy is nice, but the content on it is quite niche. If you want something less tech-oriented, you’re generally out of luck, for example.

At least with Riker, we also know that it is a combination of the transport operator splitting Riker across two transport streams instead of the usual one, and a bunch of unique circumstances surrounding an ion storm. It’s only been done twice, from people doing the exact same procedure in exacting circumstances.

We also know that the transporter isn’t a simple clone and kill device, otherwise, their replicators would just utilise the same functionality, and we know that they lack the fine detailed resolution to recreate living matter, or computer chips with it, the result having telltale problems indicative of replication.

Scotty and Voyager would not need to rig up some hyper-complex loop procedure to keep people inside of the transporter otherwise. They could just keep the clone pattern, and put it into normal persistent storage. DS9 shows that that is possible to do that, albeit for a small handful of people per Cardassian space station. The transport accident in TMP would never need to happen, because they could just abort the transport procedure and recreate the clone from the sending transporter.

We also know that the transporter has some error correction capabilities. Scotty seemed reasonably convinced that it might have been possible to recall Lt. Franklin. Geordi disagreed, but more due to the level of pattern degradation, rather than a damaged pattern at all. Though fabricating half a person is almost definitely pushing the limits of those capabilities, it’s not impossible. Those imperfections and errors are implied to be what caused Transporter Psychosis in the early days. There do also seem to be variations in the copies that come out the other end. Both parts of Kirk came out different, as did both copies of Boimler. Riker may have been the same, but we don’t know enough to say for sure.

So, the matter used to reassemble is not the same matter that was disassembled.

Untrue, for the most part. We’re explicitly told that the matter stream is what gets transported, with the constituent matter being converted to energy, moved across, and converted back. Barclay is held at that junction where his matter starts converting to energy, and there’s a real concern that it wouldn’t be possible to hold him in that state for long.

He then doubles his mass by grabbing onto another person, which oughtn’t be possible if the transporter was cloning people, since the other transporter would not have received the pattern to reintegrate with. It’d just squish everything into a double-mass Barclay.

You say that, but the warp core is also pretty nasty stuff. Not only is it full of flesh melting radiation and coolant, but a slight knock will cause it to explode, at least on any ship built in the 24th century.

At least you can not use a transporter. You kind of scuffed if you’re on a warp core powered ship and it suddenly goes up in smoke.