Its nice to see that people really were not magically running a 2 second finish split. The box at 3, and 10 must have both been off by 10 seconds or so.
I already lost enough sleep over it, so lets just be glad it wasn't a WRE or something where people would be yelling and calling for voiding courses.
It is very frustrating that a $5 watch can keep better time than an expensive SI box.
People should be reminded that the SI boxes are there to verify visiting the control. The splits feature is an added bonus!
On the intermediate controls, certainly the primary function is to verify visiting the control. At the start and finish, where there are often multiple boxes,
timing offsets between boxes can affect apparent finish order, and if errors are not detected fairly immediately to allow the painfully tedious post-event corrections to be made, they can become permanent incorrect records. And it appears that even when an effort is made to synchronize clocks between all SI units for an event, errors still seem to happen sporadically, probably because there are often several hundred boxes to tend to and things get rushed or not verified, but conceivably (since it happens inconveniently often) because of some timing-dependent software glitch.
On Ed's comment about the superior timekeeping of $5 watches, my impression is that sometimes you get lucky on a cheap watch accuracy, usually you don't (on the scale of a second a year, which is what would be needed to avoid having to be perpetually re-synchronizing your SI boxes), and that generally there are significant frequency drifts with both voltage and temperature on those little 10-cent 32kHz tuning-fork crystals they use for timing. One big advantage that the wristwatches have over the SI boxes is that they tend to spend most of their time attached to a 37C active temperature control unit, while the SI boxes likely have a much more variable thermal history.
What eldersmith is hinting at is that we should use interns as control stands in addition to synchronizing the SI boxes.
Between the butt cheeks, under the tongue or in the armpit?
The realbig advantage that wristwatches have is that the same one is used for start and finish (as well as all intermediate controls). One-second per two-hours accuracy gets you pretty darned good orienteering results in that scenario. I believe this is one of the advantages that EMIT aficionados crow about: no boxes to synchronize, since the competitor carries the clock.