That’s also asshole design. Most people are behind some form of nat. It’s especially egregious for customers of ISPs who use CGNAT.

Yeah the sad part is that, really, the best we can hope for is a post mortem. Rescue is almost impossible in this situation.

The fact that everyone treats Golem-Picard as True-Picard felt to me like confirmation that, in the ST universe, what makes you you is your mind. Memories, thought patterns, etc… I know it was tv-show hand wavery but the fact that no one mourned the death of their friend, or really ever once questioned the validity of the golem taking his place bothered me a little.

I wonder if there’s a technical manual out there that tries to explain it. It seems like energy manipulation is something startrek tech excells at.

In practice, I agree with you. The transporter scans, disintegrates, and reconstructs the thing being transported. But when the thing being transported is reconstructed at a subatomic level it is effectively identical.

I can imagine the society we see in startrek having already worked through the moral and philosophical implications. I would have loved to see that addressed in an episode tho.

I always thought the least believable part of transporters was that they worked without a pad on both ends.