Forget sued. The way they'll structure this, and with the various laws and treaties that have essentially been purchased, anyone doing that will probably be arrested.
The problem is, our mucking around with the world may lead to us (or at least the majority of our population) being naturally selected against. Do you know what happens to the losers in the natural selection game?
One of the people mentioned in that article, Michael Servetus, had most copies of his book burned by religious authorities. One person can be a nut job, but for many people to follow the same nuttiness seems to require religion (or at least a cult of personality).
Regardless of who is right about the quality of Harley motorcycles versus other bikes, the fact that you ended your post by apparently threatening the grandparent poster with violence kind of supports his other point.
I think the overall concern is that someone who doesn't understand evolution on religious grounds may decide to not understand how blood circulates around the body on religious grounds, or may object to the idea that the brain is the seat of consciousness, etc. They may also object to certain effective medicines or treatments if the theory the medicine or treatment works by relies on an understanding of some evolutionary principle.
This is Iodine we're talking about. When I say that it's toxic and caustic when concentrated, think more along the lines of cement or acetic acid from vinegar, not cyanide. DNA is pretty darn toxic when concentrated too. There has to be some sanity to these things. Treating purified, crystallised Iodine as a controlled substance in the first place is beyond the pale. Anyone capable of the kind of basic chemistry to make a meth lab in the first place can make their own. Probably of lower quality, but they won't really care. No-one has even said what they use the iodine for in the meth labs. For all we know, it's just used for cleaning. Do you know what else meth labs probably use a lot of? How about glassware and cookware? Propane? Water? Various kinds of filters I'm sure. Probably aquarium supplies from pet stores. Pool supplies probably. Pretty much any basic lab supply that you can think of, but sourced on the cheap. Does that mean that anyone dealing in pretty much anything needs to have a special license from the DEA? This is a ridiculous joke. Requiring a license from the DEA for this for this is an abomination. The cost and other requirements for this license are an abomination.
Drug paraphernalia and manufacturing equipment fall into the same category as "bomb-making materials". They can be almost anything, and almost every household is in possession of them. Do you have any cash? Then you're in possession of "drug paraphernalia". Any wire, wirecutters, screwdrivers, nuts, bolts, sections of pipe, dremel, batteries, soldering iron... ? If you have any of those then what, pray tell, are you doing with all those bomb-making materials? Do you think everyone should pay for a special DEA license to use anything that could be used in a meth lab? We all already pay for the DEA via our taxes. Don't you think it's a bit of a problem that DEA bureaucrats get to choose thinks to treat as controlled substances and charge people large amounts of money for the right to handle them? That's a tax, levied by unelected employees of the executive branch. That's not how it's supposed to work.
It's very kind of the DEA to be concerned for him that he'll be robbed, but isn't that his business? I mean, this is iodine we're talking about. It's an element. It's fundamental to pretty much all animal life. Maybe it's a little complicated to get it into crystalline form, and it's pretty caustic and toxic when it's that concentrated. I'm betting it's not really that hard for anyone with a basic lab setup (like a meth lab) to get into crystalline form, however. As for the caustic and toxic aspect, there are plenty of household chemicals that are just as bad or worse.
Basically, meth labs will be able to get hold of crystalline iodine if they don't care about high purity and cleanliness (and they generally don't). Meanwhile, this guy's legitimate product is being squashed because some meth labs might have used it as a source of raw materials. Driving him out of business will barely hurt the meth labs if at all, but it hurts him and his customers a lot.
It is safer, but that's because it isn't a reactor. It's powered by natural radioactive decay. I'm not sure how well encapsulated it is, but it's probable that, if something went wrong, the fuel would be dangerous mainly because it could land on someone.
Yeah, I suppose with the right goals, you can avert that problem when you've achieved them. The problem is, you still have to deal with the volatile and dangerous part. One problem is that religion doesn't change fundamental human nature. For example, humans can manage to be incredibly lazy, even when working themselves to death in the name of a cause. If your religion tells you to work hard to achieve the goal of space colonization, some people are going to study hard and work hard to develop the necessary technologies. Other people are going to toil 15 hours a day digging an earthwork depiction of a spaceship that will be visible from space in a cargo cult style attempt to praise the space gods into granting space travel. And those people and their leaders are going to denigrate the lazy engineers who think they're too good to pick up a shovel. That's just one wacky example (just because I think the example is wacky doesn't mean that I don't think it can happen, humans have actually done wackier things en masse) but the point is that a designer religion is likely going to go off down all kinds of weird paths that the founders can't predict.
Considering how some parents and coaches drive children on sports teams, frankly I'd be more comfortable with the kids (who have less water in them to begin with, and more surface area relative to volume) drinking the sports drinks too. Unless they have diabetes or something and have to control their sugar intake more precisely, it's unlikely to hurt them, probably will help them perform better, reduce the chance of joint injuries, etc., and probably won't cost more than most bottled water. Most kids are going to be fine either way, but there's always the fringe case teenagers who die of heatstroke or a heart attack in the middle of the game.
Example 1 is an outright scam operation. Example 2 with the "toning shoes" is a pretty good example. Example 3 appears to be another outright scam. Example 4 is outright false labelling and I'm not sure why it's the FTC dealing with it and not the FDA. Example 5 with the supposedly germicidal vacuums is a pretty good example.
So, in light of some of those examples, my statement that the government in the US doesn't care about false advertising is looking like some serious hyperbole. Perhaps they just don't publicize it enough when they do crack down on an advertiser for false advertising. Or maybe I'm just not paying attention. Still, from what I see on US television and what I hear about what's done in Europe regarding false claims and what's done in the US, it still seems to me that the EU takes it more seriously. Watching TV commercials in the US, the advertisers seem to be absolutely fearless.
Sure, drinking water and eating food containing the electrolytes and carbohydrates you need should be fine. If you're actually in distress, however, or if you simply need to rehydrate during half-time as opposed to at the end of the game, the sports drinks work better. The reason for this is simply that the food is going to contain a lot of extra stuff that you don't immediately need (barring medical conditions that might require you to, for example, get a lot of protein rapidly). So, if you eat a sandwich at halftime, your body is going to start diverting blood to your digestive system that could be better used elsewhere while playing. Not to mention that your sandwich is going to soak up some of the water you drink like a sponge.
There's nothing wrong with eating a sandwich and drinking some water. However, if you're going for best performance during a sport, use a sports drink. If you have to treat someone on the verge of death from dehydration, for the sake of their life, give them a properly formulated sports drink, or other oral rehydration therapy, and don't kill them by making them eat.
Maybe I'm biased in this due to personal experience. When I was a child, I took a road trip across the United States with my family in a VW van. While crossing some of the vast desert regions, my sister and I were both thirsty. Very, very, very thirsty. We kept on drinking water and it wasn't helping. Our parents bought us some gatorade and the relief was almost instant. Memories like that stick with you
The problem is that there's a lot of misinformation about sports drinks out there. Much of it comes from the advertising of the sports drinks companies themselves. People are confused into believing that sports drinks are all about providing "fuel" or "energy". Now, your body can and does use the carbohydrates in sports drinks for energy, but the more important function is to hydrate via sodium-glucose transport. Bottom line is that that, if you're defining hydration as getting the water where it's needed, as opposed to just sitting around in your body, sports drinks really do hydrate better than plain water.
Bear in mind that we're certainly looking at a translation of what the actual advertising claim was, and possibly a biased one. There's this Nestle PureLife water commercial to consider. In it, a bunch of girls on a soccer team run up to their coach and are handed sports drinks and the coach tells them to "drink up [they're] losing a lot of water out there", and one of the girls asks why, if they're losing water, they don't just drink water. The coach has a dumbfounded expression for a moment, then takes the sports drinks back, and hands out Nestle PureLife water instead. The voiceover then says that nothing hydrates like water.
The medically correct answer to the little girls question is that, when exercizing, you lose salts and carbohydrates as well as water. Proper rehydration replaces those as well. Given that the commercial is presenting what amounts to (potentially fatal in extreme conditions) medical advice, it amounts to false advertising. In the United States, it's clear that the government just doesn't care about false advertising any more, but in the EU, they actually take consumers being lied to by corporations in the name of profit seriously.
We pretty clearly do have the technology and energy resources to put a family of four on Mars now. It quite simply is possible with currently available resources. You can argue about whether there's any point to it, or the cost, or the long-term health implications of the environment, etc., but arguing that we don't have the capability is ridiculous. The total mission cost of Pathfinder was something like $280 million. If we can land a rover on Mars, we can land supplies. The upcoming Curiosity mission will land a 900 kg rover in a controlled landing after an 8 month trip. A similar mission and landing system could land humans there relatively safely. Every other technology needed for humans to live there exists. Pressurized living environments, airlocks, spacesuits, carbon dioxide scrubbers, solar cells, nuclear power, computers, dehydrated food, liquid oxygen, radio communications, electric vehicles, digging tools... What technology that we haven't had since the Apollo missions is missing to put a family of four on Mars?
The problem with this, is that it's too easy to end up with a Heaven's Gate, where the members end up committing suicide so that their spirits can reach a spaceship hidden behind a comet. Religious frameworks can sometimes herd people into accomplishing great works, but they're volatile and dangerous. If you invent a religion to achieve some grand goal, then you have the problem of what to do with the religion once the goal is achieved.
Reports like that are usually done by looking at a not particularly good biofuel, like corn ethanol, then generalizing the results to all biofuels. The use of corn ethanol is largely due to political interference from the powerful corn lobby. It's used for the same reason so many inferior corn-based sweeteners are used. Plenty of biofuels work a lot better than the worst-case examples that might be featured in biased reports.
If you're using carbon you've sucked out of the air already to release into the air, it beats using carbon that was sequestered in the ground that you've pulled out and are now releasing.
That is the point of reducing carbon emissions through biofuels: lower net production of CO2. Sequestering carbon, then releasing it beats releasing sequestered carbon without sequestering more. Actually, if some of the plant being grown (doesn't have to be hemp), is being sequestered as construction materials, textiles, plastics, plant material in soil, etc. then there's a net reduction in CO2 rather than a zero-sum game. Until it reaches a new equilibrium, in any case.
We don't want to lose a lot of people. For one thing, some of the people lost might be ourselves or our families and loved ones. Even if not, mass human tragedy isn't desirable.
The really awful thing about that is that the actual music to "Happy Birthday to You" isn't copyrighted, or at least shouldn't be under copyright. The melody is from "Good Morning to All", which was written in 1893. According to Wikipedia, the combination of the "Happy Birthday to You" lyrics and the "Good Morning to All" melody first appeared in print in 1912 and was copyrighted by people who clearly weren't the true originators in 1935 and, due to the various copyright extensions, won't fall out of copyright until 2030.
Now, the lyrics consist of 4 lines, only one of which is unique, and only barely, since it differs from the other three only by replacing "to you" with "dear ____". And there are only 5 actual words (aside from the person's name, which is clearly not a copyrightable part of the song). So, "Happy Birthday to You" is a clear example of a song that doesn't deserve to fall under copyright. If it ever went to court, the defendant would probably win, but very few people would ever fight it because the expense and effort involved wouldn't be worth it versus caving and handing over the protection money.
Well, actually, I thought it sounded like another flavorless base to build recipes on top of. Might be interesting to try. As for soylent green... aren't people supposed to be delicious? Why do all that processing? Hmm, actually, same reason we do all that processing on beef, I suppose. Thinking about this too hard probably isn't good for me.
I don't think you've though about this very clearly. All the single pass systems provide an instant, clear-cut winner. The multi-pass systems don't. Also, given that I brought the debacle in Florida into this, saying that you don't need complicated gyrations to determine the winner in a simple plurality voting situation seems kind of funny.
I don't think you actually got what I meant about simple plurality vs. other voting systems. You seem to think I meant some sort of proportional system where candidate A gets to be 53% of the President, B gets to be 19% of the President, C gets to be 12%, etc. That's not what I meant. I just meant a system where everyone votes, but the options don't force them into so much of a devil's bargain.
In any case, there are plenty of systems that have an instant, clear-cut winner that aren't all that desirable. Every single party system has an instant, clear-cut winner, for example. They're so instant, in fact, that you know the results before they even hold the election.
It's known as the Spoiler Effect and it got both Clinton, via Perot and Bush, via Nader elected. Somehow, it got stirred up into anger at the "third party" candidate, when the real problem is that the US uses a simple plurality voting system that is extremely biased towards a two party system since voting any other way risks throwing your vote away on a spoiler. The fundamental problem is that simple plurality is the best functional system for choosing between exactly two options. For all numbers other than two, it's the worst functional system (there are other, worse, systems, but I wouldn't consider them functional). All of the known single pass systems have paradoxes, but the one that the US actually uses has the worst paradox in the Spoiler Effect.
Then, of course, the Democrats and Republicans, realizing they have a duopoly, work together to ensure it stays that way. For example, the so-called "presidential debates" are a purely Democrat/Republican media affair. There's no invitations for other parties to participate and no established mechanism for other parties or independents to join. Real presidential debates would last about a month and be either arranged tournament style like an actual debate competition, or in some format that allowed every candidate to debate every other candidate. Instead, there's just a polished media event between members of the traditional duopoly arranged by power brokers. I'm not going to say that voting in the US is a sham per se, but I would like people to think about how many US elections have been decided based on a difference in votes that was actually smaller than the margin of error in the voting system (which the debacle in Florida a while back that was sorted out in part by the brother of one of the candidates makes abundantly clear).
Just like the scanners in the first place, who wants to bet that the lucky contractor also has financial ties to someone currently or formerly in a position of authority at the TSA or Dept. of Homeland Security?
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Forget sued. The way they'll structure this, and with the various laws and treaties that have essentially been purchased, anyone doing that will probably be arrested.
The problem is, our mucking around with the world may lead to us (or at least the majority of our population) being naturally selected against. Do you know what happens to the losers in the natural selection game?
One of the people mentioned in that article, Michael Servetus, had most copies of his book burned by religious authorities. One person can be a nut job, but for many people to follow the same nuttiness seems to require religion (or at least a cult of personality).
Regardless of who is right about the quality of Harley motorcycles versus other bikes, the fact that you ended your post by apparently threatening the grandparent poster with violence kind of supports his other point.
I think the overall concern is that someone who doesn't understand evolution on religious grounds may decide to not understand how blood circulates around the body on religious grounds, or may object to the idea that the brain is the seat of consciousness, etc. They may also object to certain effective medicines or treatments if the theory the medicine or treatment works by relies on an understanding of some evolutionary principle.
This is Iodine we're talking about. When I say that it's toxic and caustic when concentrated, think more along the lines of cement or acetic acid from vinegar, not cyanide. DNA is pretty darn toxic when concentrated too. There has to be some sanity to these things. Treating purified, crystallised Iodine as a controlled substance in the first place is beyond the pale. Anyone capable of the kind of basic chemistry to make a meth lab in the first place can make their own. Probably of lower quality, but they won't really care. No-one has even said what they use the iodine for in the meth labs. For all we know, it's just used for cleaning. Do you know what else meth labs probably use a lot of? How about glassware and cookware? Propane? Water? Various kinds of filters I'm sure. Probably aquarium supplies from pet stores. Pool supplies probably. Pretty much any basic lab supply that you can think of, but sourced on the cheap. Does that mean that anyone dealing in pretty much anything needs to have a special license from the DEA? This is a ridiculous joke. Requiring a license from the DEA for this for this is an abomination. The cost and other requirements for this license are an abomination.
Drug paraphernalia and manufacturing equipment fall into the same category as "bomb-making materials". They can be almost anything, and almost every household is in possession of them. Do you have any cash? Then you're in possession of "drug paraphernalia". Any wire, wirecutters, screwdrivers, nuts, bolts, sections of pipe, dremel, batteries, soldering iron... ? If you have any of those then what, pray tell, are you doing with all those bomb-making materials? Do you think everyone should pay for a special DEA license to use anything that could be used in a meth lab? We all already pay for the DEA via our taxes. Don't you think it's a bit of a problem that DEA bureaucrats get to choose thinks to treat as controlled substances and charge people large amounts of money for the right to handle them? That's a tax, levied by unelected employees of the executive branch. That's not how it's supposed to work.
It's very kind of the DEA to be concerned for him that he'll be robbed, but isn't that his business? I mean, this is iodine we're talking about. It's an element. It's fundamental to pretty much all animal life. Maybe it's a little complicated to get it into crystalline form, and it's pretty caustic and toxic when it's that concentrated. I'm betting it's not really that hard for anyone with a basic lab setup (like a meth lab) to get into crystalline form, however. As for the caustic and toxic aspect, there are plenty of household chemicals that are just as bad or worse.
Basically, meth labs will be able to get hold of crystalline iodine if they don't care about high purity and cleanliness (and they generally don't). Meanwhile, this guy's legitimate product is being squashed because some meth labs might have used it as a source of raw materials. Driving him out of business will barely hurt the meth labs if at all, but it hurts him and his customers a lot.
It is safer, but that's because it isn't a reactor. It's powered by natural radioactive decay. I'm not sure how well encapsulated it is, but it's probable that, if something went wrong, the fuel would be dangerous mainly because it could land on someone.
Yeah, I suppose with the right goals, you can avert that problem when you've achieved them. The problem is, you still have to deal with the volatile and dangerous part. One problem is that religion doesn't change fundamental human nature. For example, humans can manage to be incredibly lazy, even when working themselves to death in the name of a cause. If your religion tells you to work hard to achieve the goal of space colonization, some people are going to study hard and work hard to develop the necessary technologies. Other people are going to toil 15 hours a day digging an earthwork depiction of a spaceship that will be visible from space in a cargo cult style attempt to praise the space gods into granting space travel. And those people and their leaders are going to denigrate the lazy engineers who think they're too good to pick up a shovel. That's just one wacky example (just because I think the example is wacky doesn't mean that I don't think it can happen, humans have actually done wackier things en masse) but the point is that a designer religion is likely going to go off down all kinds of weird paths that the founders can't predict.
Considering how some parents and coaches drive children on sports teams, frankly I'd be more comfortable with the kids (who have less water in them to begin with, and more surface area relative to volume) drinking the sports drinks too. Unless they have diabetes or something and have to control their sugar intake more precisely, it's unlikely to hurt them, probably will help them perform better, reduce the chance of joint injuries, etc., and probably won't cost more than most bottled water. Most kids are going to be fine either way, but there's always the fringe case teenagers who die of heatstroke or a heart attack in the middle of the game.
Example 1 is an outright scam operation. Example 2 with the "toning shoes" is a pretty good example. Example 3 appears to be another outright scam. Example 4 is outright false labelling and I'm not sure why it's the FTC dealing with it and not the FDA. Example 5 with the supposedly germicidal vacuums is a pretty good example.
So, in light of some of those examples, my statement that the government in the US doesn't care about false advertising is looking like some serious hyperbole. Perhaps they just don't publicize it enough when they do crack down on an advertiser for false advertising. Or maybe I'm just not paying attention. Still, from what I see on US television and what I hear about what's done in Europe regarding false claims and what's done in the US, it still seems to me that the EU takes it more seriously. Watching TV commercials in the US, the advertisers seem to be absolutely fearless.
Sure, drinking water and eating food containing the electrolytes and carbohydrates you need should be fine. If you're actually in distress, however, or if you simply need to rehydrate during half-time as opposed to at the end of the game, the sports drinks work better. The reason for this is simply that the food is going to contain a lot of extra stuff that you don't immediately need (barring medical conditions that might require you to, for example, get a lot of protein rapidly). So, if you eat a sandwich at halftime, your body is going to start diverting blood to your digestive system that could be better used elsewhere while playing. Not to mention that your sandwich is going to soak up some of the water you drink like a sponge.
There's nothing wrong with eating a sandwich and drinking some water. However, if you're going for best performance during a sport, use a sports drink. If you have to treat someone on the verge of death from dehydration, for the sake of their life, give them a properly formulated sports drink, or other oral rehydration therapy, and don't kill them by making them eat.
Maybe I'm biased in this due to personal experience. When I was a child, I took a road trip across the United States with my family in a VW van. While crossing some of the vast desert regions, my sister and I were both thirsty. Very, very, very thirsty. We kept on drinking water and it wasn't helping. Our parents bought us some gatorade and the relief was almost instant. Memories like that stick with you
The problem is that there's a lot of misinformation about sports drinks out there. Much of it comes from the advertising of the sports drinks companies themselves. People are confused into believing that sports drinks are all about providing "fuel" or "energy". Now, your body can and does use the carbohydrates in sports drinks for energy, but the more important function is to hydrate via sodium-glucose transport. Bottom line is that that, if you're defining hydration as getting the water where it's needed, as opposed to just sitting around in your body, sports drinks really do hydrate better than plain water.
Bear in mind that we're certainly looking at a translation of what the actual advertising claim was, and possibly a biased one. There's this Nestle PureLife water commercial to consider. In it, a bunch of girls on a soccer team run up to their coach and are handed sports drinks and the coach tells them to "drink up [they're] losing a lot of water out there", and one of the girls asks why, if they're losing water, they don't just drink water. The coach has a dumbfounded expression for a moment, then takes the sports drinks back, and hands out Nestle PureLife water instead. The voiceover then says that nothing hydrates like water.
The medically correct answer to the little girls question is that, when exercizing, you lose salts and carbohydrates as well as water. Proper rehydration replaces those as well. Given that the commercial is presenting what amounts to (potentially fatal in extreme conditions) medical advice, it amounts to false advertising. In the United States, it's clear that the government just doesn't care about false advertising any more, but in the EU, they actually take consumers being lied to by corporations in the name of profit seriously.
We pretty clearly do have the technology and energy resources to put a family of four on Mars now. It quite simply is possible with currently available resources. You can argue about whether there's any point to it, or the cost, or the long-term health implications of the environment, etc., but arguing that we don't have the capability is ridiculous. The total mission cost of Pathfinder was something like $280 million. If we can land a rover on Mars, we can land supplies. The upcoming Curiosity mission will land a 900 kg rover in a controlled landing after an 8 month trip. A similar mission and landing system could land humans there relatively safely. Every other technology needed for humans to live there exists. Pressurized living environments, airlocks, spacesuits, carbon dioxide scrubbers, solar cells, nuclear power, computers, dehydrated food, liquid oxygen, radio communications, electric vehicles, digging tools... What technology that we haven't had since the Apollo missions is missing to put a family of four on Mars?
The problem with this, is that it's too easy to end up with a Heaven's Gate, where the members end up committing suicide so that their spirits can reach a spaceship hidden behind a comet. Religious frameworks can sometimes herd people into accomplishing great works, but they're volatile and dangerous. If you invent a religion to achieve some grand goal, then you have the problem of what to do with the religion once the goal is achieved.
Reports like that are usually done by looking at a not particularly good biofuel, like corn ethanol, then generalizing the results to all biofuels. The use of corn ethanol is largely due to political interference from the powerful corn lobby. It's used for the same reason so many inferior corn-based sweeteners are used. Plenty of biofuels work a lot better than the worst-case examples that might be featured in biased reports.
If you're using carbon you've sucked out of the air already to release into the air, it beats using carbon that was sequestered in the ground that you've pulled out and are now releasing.
That is the point of reducing carbon emissions through biofuels: lower net production of CO2. Sequestering carbon, then releasing it beats releasing sequestered carbon without sequestering more. Actually, if some of the plant being grown (doesn't have to be hemp), is being sequestered as construction materials, textiles, plastics, plant material in soil, etc. then there's a net reduction in CO2 rather than a zero-sum game. Until it reaches a new equilibrium, in any case.
We don't want to lose a lot of people. For one thing, some of the people lost might be ourselves or our families and loved ones. Even if not, mass human tragedy isn't desirable.
The really awful thing about that is that the actual music to "Happy Birthday to You" isn't copyrighted, or at least shouldn't be under copyright. The melody is from "Good Morning to All", which was written in 1893. According to Wikipedia, the combination of the "Happy Birthday to You" lyrics and the "Good Morning to All" melody first appeared in print in 1912 and was copyrighted by people who clearly weren't the true originators in 1935 and, due to the various copyright extensions, won't fall out of copyright until 2030.
Now, the lyrics consist of 4 lines, only one of which is unique, and only barely, since it differs from the other three only by replacing "to you" with "dear ____". And there are only 5 actual words (aside from the person's name, which is clearly not a copyrightable part of the song). So, "Happy Birthday to You" is a clear example of a song that doesn't deserve to fall under copyright. If it ever went to court, the defendant would probably win, but very few people would ever fight it because the expense and effort involved wouldn't be worth it versus caving and handing over the protection money.
Well, actually, I thought it sounded like another flavorless base to build recipes on top of. Might be interesting to try. As for soylent green... aren't people supposed to be delicious? Why do all that processing? Hmm, actually, same reason we do all that processing on beef, I suppose. Thinking about this too hard probably isn't good for me.
I don't think you've though about this very clearly. All the single pass systems provide an instant, clear-cut winner. The multi-pass systems don't. Also, given that I brought the debacle in Florida into this, saying that you don't need complicated gyrations to determine the winner in a simple plurality voting situation seems kind of funny.
I don't think you actually got what I meant about simple plurality vs. other voting systems. You seem to think I meant some sort of proportional system where candidate A gets to be 53% of the President, B gets to be 19% of the President, C gets to be 12%, etc. That's not what I meant. I just meant a system where everyone votes, but the options don't force them into so much of a devil's bargain.
In any case, there are plenty of systems that have an instant, clear-cut winner that aren't all that desirable. Every single party system has an instant, clear-cut winner, for example. They're so instant, in fact, that you know the results before they even hold the election.
It's known as the Spoiler Effect and it got both Clinton, via Perot and Bush, via Nader elected. Somehow, it got stirred up into anger at the "third party" candidate, when the real problem is that the US uses a simple plurality voting system that is extremely biased towards a two party system since voting any other way risks throwing your vote away on a spoiler. The fundamental problem is that simple plurality is the best functional system for choosing between exactly two options. For all numbers other than two, it's the worst functional system (there are other, worse, systems, but I wouldn't consider them functional). All of the known single pass systems have paradoxes, but the one that the US actually uses has the worst paradox in the Spoiler Effect.
Then, of course, the Democrats and Republicans, realizing they have a duopoly, work together to ensure it stays that way. For example, the so-called "presidential debates" are a purely Democrat/Republican media affair. There's no invitations for other parties to participate and no established mechanism for other parties or independents to join. Real presidential debates would last about a month and be either arranged tournament style like an actual debate competition, or in some format that allowed every candidate to debate every other candidate. Instead, there's just a polished media event between members of the traditional duopoly arranged by power brokers. I'm not going to say that voting in the US is a sham per se, but I would like people to think about how many US elections have been decided based on a difference in votes that was actually smaller than the margin of error in the voting system (which the debacle in Florida a while back that was sorted out in part by the brother of one of the candidates makes abundantly clear).
Just like the scanners in the first place, who wants to bet that the lucky contractor also has financial ties to someone currently or formerly in a position of authority at the TSA or Dept. of Homeland Security?