How realistic are replicated food + the holodeck?

[CommodoreKong]

CoveTom said:
^ In "The Mind's Eye," when Geordi is getting ready to attack in the cargo bay, you can hear Picard talking in the background. I believe he says something about the cargo transporters always introducing a minor flaw or somesuch into the cargo it transports so that it can always be traced back to its source.

With cargo that would work fine, but I would think that if a person tried to transport through a transporter so programmed, a seemingly minor imperfection introduced could have dire consequences.

I would imagine that a cargo transporter would have a fail safe built in to prevent it from causing a minor flaw in something that's alive.

 

[cultcross]

FordSVT said:

Brannigan said:

Photon said:
Don't know but those Universal Translators drive me bananas.

Never a glitch, always translates into the king's english-perfect. Geez

I still maintain thats for our benefit. If it was real, the language the characters are speaking is something completely different and not neccesarily English (despite what TOS said in numerous episodes). I mean if we went back to the early 1800s and spoke English to someone who spoke English of that day, it would be like hearing a foreign language. Sorry to meander off topic.

The 1800s? Different slang and a few minor things but the 1800s wasn't THAT long ago. Go back to the 14 or 1500s and you'd have more of a point, though you'd still be able to get by with a bit of frustration.

The English of the 1400s
"Freres and feendes been but lyte asonder. For, pardee, ye han ofte tyme herd telle"

Some frustration?

One could also make the argument that the information/communication age, high literacy rates, and the emergence of English as a truly world-wide lingua-franca might help to slow down it's grammatical change. New words and slang would of course continue to develop, but language is more likely to be "backwards compatible" in the future, at least more than it's been historically.

This is a fair enough argument, and Star Trek often implies that English has stamped out all other languages on Earth as a means of daily discourse. But such a change would in fact speed up the change in language, not slow it down. And the communication and information age serves more to ensure quicker broadcast of lingual change than it does to suppress it. Especially coupled with the fact that we would be meeting hundreds of new races and seeing hundreds of cosmic sights we didn't have a word for. The things which make a language change the most are outside influence of other languages (Such as the Norman invasion) or setting up the language in a new environment or in new circumstances (Such as the exploration of the New World). Creating not just a global language but one needing to describe a hundred literal new worlds, would change it immensely.
It is highly likely to me that the language spoken by the hero characters in Star Trek would be as hard to grasp as Chaucer to us, and that their languages well as alien ones are being "translated" for the audience.

 

[Capt. Vulcan]

Maybe replicated food isn't perfectly replicated on purpose. Like maybe the replicator adds vitamins and removes saturated fats and whatnot, while trying to keep it as close to the original as possible?