I guess it is partially stubborness, because we've dropped the many advantages my system has on yours, I guess I've already won;-P
I am curious as to tissue or temporal specific promoters in plants. I'm guessing you don't know of any either. The lactose promoter would be good if you were going to make diesel from your small intestine, but of course that's not what you were suggesting, so you'd need a specific promoter, which may or may not be known. Like I said: another layer of complexity that's not an issue with microbial based methods.
So when they award the nobel for "Thinking up potential ways to make diesel fuel but not actually doing it" I'll be getting most of it, you'd get maybe an 8th. I WIN!
attaching the expression of genes to only certain parts of an animal or under certain times/ environmental changes is old hat. the guys who won the nobel prize this year for chemistry discovered how to manipulate the expression of green fluorescent protein:
Not the same thing as what you're talking about by a long shot. Shimomura got it for discovering the existence of the protein, not expression. Tsien won the award for greatly advancing our understanding of the mollecule and improving it's signal strength, not expression.
Chalfie I believe won it for his pioneering technique of using GFP expression to study expression systems. You put the code for GFP under a sequence you think is a promoter, the cells that are lit up are cells that use that promoter to drive expression.
In other words, he discovered a technique that would give you the tools to see if you had the promoter you're talking about, but does NOT itself allow you to express what gene you want where and when you want it. Promoter hunting is not a trivial thing and generally requires first that you have a native gene whose expression you want to mimick.
Again, I'm not a plant biologist, so I don't know of the state of plant promoters. In vertebrate cell biology, some good global promoters are known, while fewer tissue-specific promoters are known. Do you know a tissue specific plant promoter that would be suitable and has it been characterized in a useable plant (IE not arabidopsis?)
furthermore, you could have the plant's diesel production pathway exist only in certain parts of the plant, or expressed only at certain times during the year. attaching the diesel making genes to genes that express only in certain parts of the plant, or express only at certain times of the year
Yes, but again, you'd be adding a whole layer of complexity there: regulation of transgenes. I'd be suprised if we currently knew how to do that with plants. It would not be an issue with microbes. And any way of collecting the weeped diesel would require much more complex systems than a vat, which is what would be needed with my system.
or forget all of this, and go with what nature gave us: a fungus that makes diesel inside trees. naturally amp up the production of diesel via genetically engineering, or tried and true horticultural methods that we have used to have giant apples and corn ears, and collect the diesel like we collect maple syrup: stick a tap in and let it drain off. you could have orchards of trees, where instead of dates or pears, you get diesel leaking into buckets
Well, I think you'd still have efficiency problems. The fungi aren't producing enough diesel to use, you'd have to concentrate it more. You'd again have the harvesting problems.
First of all, let me say I didn't actually mod you troll, that was a joke. Even if I had, my commenting on it would have undone my mod, you can see the moderation is still there, so I can't be the one who did it.
this is not a radical or broken concept on my part, the production of something that the creature consumes itself
Right, the fundamental concept isn't broken, but I think there are clear problems with the system that would at least need to be worked around.
of course, a plant that produces cellulose support tissue that is degraded by its own cells is a horrible mutant that wouldn't make it 6 days in the wild and would look like a stunted deformed pile of oozing plant diesel pus. who cares? if it makes diesel.
I did say inefficient, which is why one would care. If you're going to the trouble to make a transgenic organism to make fuel, you'd want to make it as efficiently as possible, rather than wasting your efforts.
The biggest problems I could see would be making a line rather than a dead end. The plant that digests its own cellulose would likely be unable to reproduce: the fungal genes would be digesting the nutrients intended for the plant embryo (I think, I'm not a plant biologist, this is speculative.) And that's if it were viable at all, a plant embryo with the fungal genes might die because the cellulose of the seed was being used to make diesel rather than growing the plant to where it could make more cellulose. You point out that many of our crops are not able to naturally reproduce, but I'm pretty sure that corn does, and any efficient way of doing your plan I would think would have to as well.
Those are problems that could be adressed if the fungal genes were regulated. Naturally the plant's endogenous systems don't immediately eat the cellulose just as your body doesn't immediately break down the fat as soon as it's produced, but it is another huge layer of complexity, one you wouldn't need if you were to go with microorganism culture.
A further issue could be that these hyrdrocarbons may interfere with a plant's viability directly. Obviously they're not native to the plant, it could be toxic to it.
Another problem with using plants is that you'd then have to harvest the diesel from the plants, presumably spread out over a field, then separate it out from the plant material. And how much diesel could a plant store? With microbes, you can grow them in a vat, and could conceivably siphon off diesel-like extract while maintaing the culture. At the very least, harvesting would be more difficult and less efficient by using live plants. It would be more steps, not fewer.
furthermore, your pointing to want to put it in a bacterial vat for degradation is completely missing the point of the excitement over this find: the point is to have LESS steps in your product of biodiesel. we can already put raw cellulose in bioreactors and produce new and exciting chemicals via bioengineered bacteria.
From TFA: "First, the cellulose must be broken down into its constituent parts â" sugars bearing carbon â" and then those pieces must be synthesized into more complex hydrocarbons. Both steps have proven difficult to do without applying large amounts of heat, pressure or chemicals... What's exciting about the Gliocladium roseum fungus, however, is that it can both break down cellulose and synthesize the liquid fuel."
Again, no expert, but it sounds like what we can do now is break cellulose down in a vat, but then we have to make the fuel-like hydrocarbons from that. This fungus does both automatically for less energy. Doing it all in a vat would in fact cut out the most difficult step of putting it back together. Your way does too, but introduces the new problem of harvesting the weeping diesel INTO a vat, along with the problems of reproduction, viability, and having to do more complicated genetics.
Better idea: let's engineer grass to express tetrahydrocannabinol (active ingredient in pot). It might not win a nobel, but it would probably win some type of award from "High times," and would make mowing the lawn a more enjoyable chore.
AC is almost correct, it's an economy joke, not a "I have to drink more to forget" joke. It's more confusing to others than I anticipated. A 6 pack has more alchohol but also costs more. I'll get around to changing it eventually.
I marked him troll. I am a wahabbi living in venezuela, and I summer in Russia where I volunteer for the local young men's neoimperialism association (YMNA). I was upset by the "blowhard" comment, but what really stung was the implication that I didn't deserve all the billions I've been getting.
Not to mix a joke with a serious point, but his point number two of "put them in a plant that expresses the diesel in an easily harvested format" seems a bit off. The genes take cellulose and break it down, wheras plants make the cellulose to make themselves. It would probably be rather inefficient to have the plants digest themselves. I think it would be easier to come up with a culture system to feed non-foodstock plant material into bacteria engineered to digest the cellulose.
What would be truly a shoe-in for a nobel would be if you could engineer a 2 microbe system, one to make cellulose from photosynthesis, the other to digest the cellulose, either in tandem to continuously produce fuel or after some harvesting. Naturally I have no idea as to the feasibility of any part of that, so don't blame me if you you're a venture capitalist and this idea goes nowhere.;-)
Uh... I'm honestly not sure if you were serious or making a very subtle joke. I think muscle memory is actually a product not of muscle itself but the neurons controlling it. In which case, yes, this could be controlling the conditioned pathways that cause "muscle memory." I'm pretty sure this is not the same myosin that makes up your muscles, so it's not directly the sarcomeres that could be doing anything like this. In any event, the myosin in your muscles are arranged in a different configuration than endosomal transport.
There may be some receptor change at the neuromuscular junction, in which case you would expect Myosin Vb to be involved in that, and THAT might also contribute to "muscle memory."
Short answer that should have been at the top: I'm not really sure but I don't think so.
Cause and effect is clearly an issue, but let's be honest, if they got rid of the third amendment today, nothing would actually change, the military has no interest in making or even asking you to give soldiers room and board. My point was merely that the forefathers did not give us a plan that would remain 100% relevant forever, as today it has only historical significance.
Right, which is just one of many reasons I'm not running for congress! Idly talking about "Man, someone should change that" is, of course, much much much easier. I'd vote for someone who was all about getting rid of it, but yeah, I can't see any realistic circumstances in which the electoral college is going away, and it's a darn shame.
One would have to be grossly inadequate in one's history education to think strong central power will not eventually fall into the hands of less than savory folk. And it is at those times that you wish the firewall of State power had not been eroded by idealistic ninnies such as yourself.
One would have to be pretty immature to stoop to that level of personal attacks just because someone else disagreed with them. Where's all this anger coming from? Sure, you may deeply disagree with me, but this is just empty discussion. There's really no need for name-calling.
Anyway, your argument falls apart when you realize state governments are already populated by idiots because there is no scrutiny. Voters barely care what their national representatives and senators are doing. Oops, am I ranting incoherently again?
I don't buy that logic, it assumes that there are more votes to be gained by convincing your own base to get up off their lazy asses than there are by convincing independants that you're their guy. I don't think that's very realistic, I would hypothesize that it would still be more effective to get the moderate vote than to just get all of your own party to vote for you.
It's also worth pointing out that the electoral college focuses the emphasis on state VS state, and the only civil war we've had thus far is state VS state, not right VS left.
Well, this is clearly nonsense, as they never did that, and given that all the Signers of the Constitution *knew* that Washington would be elected, never would have, even from the start. Further proof that Vox Wikipedia Non Est Vox Dei.
And it's striking that Washington was the ONLY president who was not part of a political party (wiki tells me Tyler was expelled from his party, so that's technically another one, but that's a strange event and from wiki anyway). I doubt the forefathers expected that there would always be one clear choice like washington, which is why they weren't expecting anyone to get a clear majority of the votes and were expecting the senate to pick the president usually.
YOU need to take a reading comprehension class
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How We Used To Vote
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I was saying two things. One: it's not infallible, and does need to be changed occasionally. Two: one of the things that should be changed, now, is the electoral college system.
Nothing about how we should junk the whole thing. Nothing about it being trivial. Nothing about it should be easier to amend the consitution. Nothing about getting rid of the second amendment.
Calm down.
Re:Cue the "where are MY games" whining
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The Gym Arcade
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· Score: 1
Right, but it's proof that your statement "This false idea that the hardcore are all anti-casual gamer is a bunch of bullshit pedalled by internet trolls," is not correct. There ARE people who call themselves hardcore that are upset at what they call "casual."
Those people are idiots who are not representative of the gaming community, I agree, but you can't tell me they're not out there, because they are.
To get rid of the electoral college, you would have to get rid of the States.
That's absurd nonsense. It never actually worked out that way, again because the founders' crystal ball didn't work. They foresaw presidential elections as always being decided by congress only because they didn't foresee parties and a clear majority every time. By your standards, the states are already destroyed because they don't actually elect the president because with the two party system, there's always a majority.
The reality is that the people are voting for the president, but indirectly, through a system that distorts the value of their vote based on geography.
I personally don't see much wrong with destroying states anyway, as they tend to be made up of even worse politicians. In practice, there's less scrutiny on them and more room for them to engage in corruption and incompetence. Keep in mind that state legislatures were the ones that passed the Jim Crow laws, are where women's rights are being peeled back the most effectively, and are one of the places creationists have had sucesses in their attack on evolution. But that's beside the point. Popular vote will not change anything as far as states go.
One of the big problems in the US is not that we do not elect the Federal President by popular vote, but that so many people who insist on offering their opinion on how we should change the system have no bloody clue how it currently works.
Keep in mind that faithless electors have played a very trivial role, especially in recent times. The only real difference between a popular vote and the current system is that each citizen's votes will be equal. A Wyoming citizen should not get a better vote than a Californian citizen.
Re:Cue the "where are MY games" whining
on
The Gym Arcade
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· Score: 1
This false idea that the hardcore are all anti-casual gamer is a bunch of bullshit pedalled by internet trolls.
Go to gamefaqs.com sometime, the wii boards, if you honestly think it's a hoax. If not, then I have to applaud you on the spinjob there.
Frankly, if you want to disagree with the Founders, at least attempt to reason at a similar strength as they did. The i-pod in your pocket doesn't give your ideas any extra merit.
It's actually a nomad jukebox, the discman-sized one, thank you very much.
The strongest reason is that the primary reasons I've heard for it's existence in the first place are no longer concerns. One idea was that you needed an electoral college because someone could get the nomination of a party and fool the nation, especially since back in the drafting days, most citizens wouldn't ever see a speech by the canidate. As I've heard it, the thinking was that electors would be able to change their minds to reflect the best interests of the nation if upon coming to washington they realized the citizenry had been duped and the candidate was bad. In modern times, this has not really happened.
The wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)#Origin_of_name) has a different interpretation than the one I remembered from gradeschool: that the electoral college was supposed to merely nominate canidates for congress to choose, because the forefathers didn't realize elections would come down to two canidates, meaning someone would always get the majority.
So their reasons appear to have no strength and are based off of false predictions.
Against the electoral college is what is for me the most convincing argument: that it makes the "One citizen one vote" ideal a joke. Citizens in less populated state have more of a vote than citizens in more populated states. Three times now, that has meant the candidate who more citizens voted for did not get the presidency.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait... what obama story? Did something happen?
I guess it is partially stubborness, because we've dropped the many advantages my system has on yours, I guess I've already won ;-P
I am curious as to tissue or temporal specific promoters in plants. I'm guessing you don't know of any either. The lactose promoter would be good if you were going to make diesel from your small intestine, but of course that's not what you were suggesting, so you'd need a specific promoter, which may or may not be known. Like I said: another layer of complexity that's not an issue with microbial based methods.
So when they award the nobel for "Thinking up potential ways to make diesel fuel but not actually doing it" I'll be getting most of it, you'd get maybe an 8th. I WIN!
attaching the expression of genes to only certain parts of an animal or under certain times/ environmental changes is old hat. the guys who won the nobel prize this year for chemistry discovered how to manipulate the expression of green fluorescent protein:
Not the same thing as what you're talking about by a long shot. Shimomura got it for discovering the existence of the protein, not expression. Tsien won the award for greatly advancing our understanding of the mollecule and improving it's signal strength, not expression.
Chalfie I believe won it for his pioneering technique of using GFP expression to study expression systems. You put the code for GFP under a sequence you think is a promoter, the cells that are lit up are cells that use that promoter to drive expression.
In other words, he discovered a technique that would give you the tools to see if you had the promoter you're talking about, but does NOT itself allow you to express what gene you want where and when you want it. Promoter hunting is not a trivial thing and generally requires first that you have a native gene whose expression you want to mimick.
Again, I'm not a plant biologist, so I don't know of the state of plant promoters. In vertebrate cell biology, some good global promoters are known, while fewer tissue-specific promoters are known. Do you know a tissue specific plant promoter that would be suitable and has it been characterized in a useable plant (IE not arabidopsis?)
furthermore, you could have the plant's diesel production pathway exist only in certain parts of the plant, or expressed only at certain times during the year. attaching the diesel making genes to genes that express only in certain parts of the plant, or express only at certain times of the year
Yes, but again, you'd be adding a whole layer of complexity there: regulation of transgenes. I'd be suprised if we currently knew how to do that with plants. It would not be an issue with microbes. And any way of collecting the weeped diesel would require much more complex systems than a vat, which is what would be needed with my system.
or forget all of this, and go with what nature gave us: a fungus that makes diesel inside trees. naturally amp up the production of diesel via genetically engineering, or tried and true horticultural methods that we have used to have giant apples and corn ears, and collect the diesel like we collect maple syrup: stick a tap in and let it drain off. you could have orchards of trees, where instead of dates or pears, you get diesel leaking into buckets
Well, I think you'd still have efficiency problems. The fungi aren't producing enough diesel to use, you'd have to concentrate it more. You'd again have the harvesting problems.
First of all, let me say I didn't actually mod you troll, that was a joke. Even if I had, my commenting on it would have undone my mod, you can see the moderation is still there, so I can't be the one who did it.
this is not a radical or broken concept on my part, the production of something that the creature consumes itself
Right, the fundamental concept isn't broken, but I think there are clear problems with the system that would at least need to be worked around.
of course, a plant that produces cellulose support tissue that is degraded by its own cells is a horrible mutant that wouldn't make it 6 days in the wild and would look like a stunted deformed pile of oozing plant diesel pus. who cares? if it makes diesel.
I did say inefficient, which is why one would care. If you're going to the trouble to make a transgenic organism to make fuel, you'd want to make it as efficiently as possible, rather than wasting your efforts.
The biggest problems I could see would be making a line rather than a dead end. The plant that digests its own cellulose would likely be unable to reproduce: the fungal genes would be digesting the nutrients intended for the plant embryo (I think, I'm not a plant biologist, this is speculative.) And that's if it were viable at all, a plant embryo with the fungal genes might die because the cellulose of the seed was being used to make diesel rather than growing the plant to where it could make more cellulose. You point out that many of our crops are not able to naturally reproduce, but I'm pretty sure that corn does, and any efficient way of doing your plan I would think would have to as well.
Those are problems that could be adressed if the fungal genes were regulated. Naturally the plant's endogenous systems don't immediately eat the cellulose just as your body doesn't immediately break down the fat as soon as it's produced, but it is another huge layer of complexity, one you wouldn't need if you were to go with microorganism culture.
A further issue could be that these hyrdrocarbons may interfere with a plant's viability directly. Obviously they're not native to the plant, it could be toxic to it.
Another problem with using plants is that you'd then have to harvest the diesel from the plants, presumably spread out over a field, then separate it out from the plant material. And how much diesel could a plant store? With microbes, you can grow them in a vat, and could conceivably siphon off diesel-like extract while maintaing the culture. At the very least, harvesting would be more difficult and less efficient by using live plants. It would be more steps, not fewer.
furthermore, your pointing to want to put it in a bacterial vat for degradation is completely missing the point of the excitement over this find: the point is to have LESS steps in your product of biodiesel. we can already put raw cellulose in bioreactors and produce new and exciting chemicals via bioengineered bacteria.
From TFA:
"First, the cellulose must be broken down into its constituent parts â" sugars bearing carbon â" and then those pieces must be synthesized into more complex hydrocarbons. Both steps have proven difficult to do without applying large amounts of heat, pressure or chemicals... What's exciting about the Gliocladium roseum fungus, however, is that it can both break down cellulose and synthesize the liquid fuel."
Again, no expert, but it sounds like what we can do now is break cellulose down in a vat, but then we have to make the fuel-like hydrocarbons from that. This fungus does both automatically for less energy. Doing it all in a vat would in fact cut out the most difficult step of putting it back together. Your way does too, but introduces the new problem of harvesting the weeping diesel INTO a vat, along with the problems of reproduction, viability, and having to do more complicated genetics.
I'd also like to point out that genetica
Better idea: let's engineer grass to express tetrahydrocannabinol (active ingredient in pot). It might not win a nobel, but it would probably win some type of award from "High times," and would make mowing the lawn a more enjoyable chore.
AC is almost correct, it's an economy joke, not a "I have to drink more to forget" joke. It's more confusing to others than I anticipated. A 6 pack has more alchohol but also costs more. I'll get around to changing it eventually.
I marked him troll. I am a wahabbi living in venezuela, and I summer in Russia where I volunteer for the local young men's neoimperialism association (YMNA). I was upset by the "blowhard" comment, but what really stung was the implication that I didn't deserve all the billions I've been getting.
Not to mix a joke with a serious point, but his point number two of "put them in a plant that expresses the diesel in an easily harvested format" seems a bit off. The genes take cellulose and break it down, wheras plants make the cellulose to make themselves. It would probably be rather inefficient to have the plants digest themselves. I think it would be easier to come up with a culture system to feed non-foodstock plant material into bacteria engineered to digest the cellulose.
What would be truly a shoe-in for a nobel would be if you could engineer a 2 microbe system, one to make cellulose from photosynthesis, the other to digest the cellulose, either in tandem to continuously produce fuel or after some harvesting. Naturally I have no idea as to the feasibility of any part of that, so don't blame me if you you're a venture capitalist and this idea goes nowhere. ;-)
Uh... I'm honestly not sure if you were serious or making a very subtle joke. I think muscle memory is actually a product not of muscle itself but the neurons controlling it. In which case, yes, this could be controlling the conditioned pathways that cause "muscle memory." I'm pretty sure this is not the same myosin that makes up your muscles, so it's not directly the sarcomeres that could be doing anything like this. In any event, the myosin in your muscles are arranged in a different configuration than endosomal transport.
There may be some receptor change at the neuromuscular junction, in which case you would expect Myosin Vb to be involved in that, and THAT might also contribute to "muscle memory."
Short answer that should have been at the top: I'm not really sure but I don't think so.
And also more $$$, it's an economy joke.
Clearly not: he didn't say anything about it being natural and therefore healthy, that's a major branch he missed.
Cause and effect is clearly an issue, but let's be honest, if they got rid of the third amendment today, nothing would actually change, the military has no interest in making or even asking you to give soldiers room and board. My point was merely that the forefathers did not give us a plan that would remain 100% relevant forever, as today it has only historical significance.
Right, which is just one of many reasons I'm not running for congress! Idly talking about "Man, someone should change that" is, of course, much much much easier. I'd vote for someone who was all about getting rid of it, but yeah, I can't see any realistic circumstances in which the electoral college is going away, and it's a darn shame.
My diet rarely consists of spotted owl. Do they crap a cure for cancer?
That type of reasoning sounds really stupid when you consider it from the other side. For example:
"Most of the paper I use doesn't come from the US. Do loggers do anything that makes them more sympathetic to me than spotted owls?"
One would have to be grossly inadequate in one's history education to think strong central power will not eventually fall into the hands of less than savory folk. And it is at those times that you wish the firewall of State power had not been eroded by idealistic ninnies such as yourself.
One would have to be pretty immature to stoop to that level of personal attacks just because someone else disagreed with them. Where's all this anger coming from? Sure, you may deeply disagree with me, but this is just empty discussion. There's really no need for name-calling.
Anyway, your argument falls apart when you realize state governments are already populated by idiots because there is no scrutiny. Voters barely care what their national representatives and senators are doing. Oops, am I ranting incoherently again?
I don't buy that logic, it assumes that there are more votes to be gained by convincing your own base to get up off their lazy asses than there are by convincing independants that you're their guy. I don't think that's very realistic, I would hypothesize that it would still be more effective to get the moderate vote than to just get all of your own party to vote for you.
It's also worth pointing out that the electoral college focuses the emphasis on state VS state, and the only civil war we've had thus far is state VS state, not right VS left.
No, but feel free to try. Get right on that constitutional amendment.
Well, I never said it was GOING to happen anytime soon! Maybe if Obama loses the popular vote but wins the electoral vote...
Who am I kidding? The right and left would just call each other hypocrites once more and nothing would change.
Well, this is clearly nonsense, as they never did that, and given that all the Signers of the Constitution *knew* that Washington would be elected, never would have, even from the start. Further proof that Vox Wikipedia Non Est Vox Dei.
And it's striking that Washington was the ONLY president who was not part of a political party (wiki tells me Tyler was expelled from his party, so that's technically another one, but that's a strange event and from wiki anyway). I doubt the forefathers expected that there would always be one clear choice like washington, which is why they weren't expecting anyone to get a clear majority of the votes and were expecting the senate to pick the president usually.
I was saying two things. One: it's not infallible, and does need to be changed occasionally. Two: one of the things that should be changed, now, is the electoral college system.
Nothing about how we should junk the whole thing. Nothing about it being trivial. Nothing about it should be easier to amend the consitution. Nothing about getting rid of the second amendment.
Calm down.
Right, but it's proof that your statement "This false idea that the hardcore are all anti-casual gamer is a bunch of bullshit pedalled by internet trolls," is not correct. There ARE people who call themselves hardcore that are upset at what they call "casual."
Those people are idiots who are not representative of the gaming community, I agree, but you can't tell me they're not out there, because they are.
I suspect it's that pesky 2nd amendment you want to get rid of the most.
Surprise! It's actually the 3rd one. People SHOULD be forced to quarter troops in their houses! It's UNPATRIOTIC to deny soldiers room and board!
To get rid of the electoral college, you would have to get rid of the States.
That's absurd nonsense. It never actually worked out that way, again because the founders' crystal ball didn't work. They foresaw presidential elections as always being decided by congress only because they didn't foresee parties and a clear majority every time. By your standards, the states are already destroyed because they don't actually elect the president because with the two party system, there's always a majority.
The reality is that the people are voting for the president, but indirectly, through a system that distorts the value of their vote based on geography.
I personally don't see much wrong with destroying states anyway, as they tend to be made up of even worse politicians. In practice, there's less scrutiny on them and more room for them to engage in corruption and incompetence. Keep in mind that state legislatures were the ones that passed the Jim Crow laws, are where women's rights are being peeled back the most effectively, and are one of the places creationists have had sucesses in their attack on evolution. But that's beside the point. Popular vote will not change anything as far as states go.
One of the big problems in the US is not that we do not elect the Federal President by popular vote, but that so many people who insist on offering their opinion on how we should change the system have no bloody clue how it currently works.
Keep in mind that faithless electors have played a very trivial role, especially in recent times. The only real difference between a popular vote and the current system is that each citizen's votes will be equal. A Wyoming citizen should not get a better vote than a Californian citizen.
This false idea that the hardcore are all anti-casual gamer is a bunch of bullshit pedalled by internet trolls.
Go to gamefaqs.com sometime, the wii boards, if you honestly think it's a hoax. If not, then I have to applaud you on the spinjob there.
Grah!!! Reducio ad absurdum (or something latiny like that), bane of my existence!
Frankly, if you want to disagree with the Founders, at least attempt to reason at a similar strength as they did. The i-pod in your pocket doesn't give your ideas any extra merit.
It's actually a nomad jukebox, the discman-sized one, thank you very much.
The strongest reason is that the primary reasons I've heard for it's existence in the first place are no longer concerns. One idea was that you needed an electoral college because someone could get the nomination of a party and fool the nation, especially since back in the drafting days, most citizens wouldn't ever see a speech by the canidate. As I've heard it, the thinking was that electors would be able to change their minds to reflect the best interests of the nation if upon coming to washington they realized the citizenry had been duped and the candidate was bad. In modern times, this has not really happened.
The wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)#Origin_of_name) has a different interpretation than the one I remembered from gradeschool: that the electoral college was supposed to merely nominate canidates for congress to choose, because the forefathers didn't realize elections would come down to two canidates, meaning someone would always get the majority.
So their reasons appear to have no strength and are based off of false predictions.
Against the electoral college is what is for me the most convincing argument: that it makes the "One citizen one vote" ideal a joke. Citizens in less populated state have more of a vote than citizens in more populated states. Three times now, that has meant the candidate who more citizens voted for did not get the presidency.
This is a good visual presentation of counties distorted by population and how they voted in kerry V bush
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/countycartredbluelarge.png
I can see advantages of the electoral college, but none that justify why one citizen should get a bigger vote than another.