Why should the self-absorbed drug addict who shows up 2 hours late and puts in a couple days' worth of work singing the songs that were written for him/her be awarded a disproportionate amount of the money? Just because its their picture on the cover?
This is either a troll, meant as satire, written by someone who only gets their music from TV, or written by a music industry exec.
Since a bunch of posters have already addressed most of it, here's the obligatory Steve Albini link to the economics of the music business The Problem with Music
We've learned (ok, apparently only I have learned) that ad revenue does not a company make.
Apparently you haven't noticed broadcast radio, TV, print magazines, newspapers, free weekly magazines, billboards, bus stop signs, and probably a lot of other things that don't come to mind in 10 seconds or less.
Those industries all are based on ad revenue. Some print media charge a subscription fee that doesn't approach the cost of producing the magazines/newspapers to give you a small barrier to entry so you don't just subscribe and never look at it. Plenty of others, such as alternative newsweeklies, just give the stuff away in boxes on the street.
since a virus scanner really does sometimes have to interrupt the user
As the sib post said, not really. And definitely not just to tell me that it completed a scan and everything is clean, cutting me off mid-password for my email.
The "dark" side of the moon is a terrible place for an optical telescope (where you can probably safely read optical as extending from IR to X-ray.)
It's not dark all the time-- it's just that the moon is tidally locked to the earth so we never see the backside, but it sees plenty of sun, which gives it huge temperature swings, which isn't good for precision optical alignment.
There's also stuff like meteor impacts to deal with-- they cause vibrations and kick up dust.
And then there's the gravity well that you have to drop all the sensitive equipment down without breaking it. It's not like mars, where there's at least a little atmosphere for braking. On the moon you have to do all the braking yourself. It adds both mass and complexity (risk) to a space mission.
Floating out in space (earth trailing like Spitzer, or L2 like WMAP or the planned JWST) is pretty benign by comparison.
There might be ok arguments for an array of radio telescopes, but they're probably least likely to be built there due to the large size/mass of stuff that you have to transport.
It reminds me of back in the dark old ages around 1985 or 86 when I had a work/study job that involved teaching people to use Macintoshes and an old threaded bulletin board system (Confer) for their classes. We would teach the faculty first, then teach their students.
I was showing a professor (and not a young one, either, and he had mentioned that he also had a small publishing house) Macwrite, and explaining how the display was designed with a typewriter analogy, and that it did pretty much the same things, but with click-drag, etc.
Then he says "I've never used a typewriter".
I was floored--this guy had been publishing papers for probably 30+ years, and ran a small publishing house, and had never used a typewriter. After a few moments of being stunned, and having the gears spin overtime in my head, I did start to figure out how to explain the interface to him, but he was missing the the whole typewriter language that Macwrite was based on.
By the way Digital Fortress had to be the worst book from a techy perspective.
Yeah, I picked it up in paperback while I was on vacation and nearly had to pull my eyes out. I got it because I didn't want to spend bucks on a hardcover Davinci Code, and swore never to read another of his books again. The characters were flat, and stupid, and the book was technically bad in every respect.
estimates that Akamai can only handle 150,000 streams at a time
Google has been trying to support the Tour of California by streaming video coverage of the race. They apparently had 60,000 people trying to watch on the first day (according to the on-line text commentary), many of whom (including me) spent a lot of time looking at a window that said "buffering...". It sounded like they added capacity the next days, but I still mostly got "buffering", and occasional video for a few seconds at a time, followed by it freezing, and maybe playing again.
I did finally get to watch about 20 minutes of the streaming (up to the finish) on Friday.
They were using akamai for at least some of the streaming, and it sounds like they actually contracted with someone to provide the whole video feed service (rather than use some in house beta capability)
ran out and got a GPS card and software for his laptop.
I had a similar experience with a GPS when I decided to use it to find my hotel when I had to travel for a meeting.
I got to the airport, got the rental car, set the laptop on the passenger seat and hooked up the GPS. I fired up the software and put in the destination-- everything was good so far.
This was an early one, so it didn't give voice cues, so I'd glance over occasionally and see that I was headed towards where I wanted, and it showed me on the road I was on.
I got to where the hotel was supposed to be after dark, and looked up to see a 20 foot high brick wall, topped with concertina wire, and a sign that said something like "After 5pm check prisoners in at the side entrance".
"Nice joke", I thought, now where's my hotel? There were no other buildings nearby, and it was slightly rural.
Eventually I found a place to call the hotel from, and it turns out that the hotel was at the opposite end of the ~5 mile long road (which I had driven the length of a couple times) in a mall area, set back from the road, and without a lighted sign. The map software had the numbering on the road reversed and sent me to the wrong end, and the hotel had just changed owners and they had hung a banner over the old sign, but it was in a non-obvious place, adding to the complication.
You can't actually, macrovision will give you a distorted picture.
Then my playstation must be broken, since for obscure reasons related to an old TV, a strange cable arrangement, and cheapness, I run the PS2 through the front AV inputs of a cheap VCR. The PS2 is my primary DVD player and I've never noticed any distorted picture...
Although it might be good to use as a method to tag point haired bosses so we can track their movement through the various companies during their careers.
That's not bad...
You can already use rfid badges/implants/hairpieces/whatevers to make something like the "Marauder's Map" from Harry Potter. Just expand it to a worldwide thing, and stick to the implants/hairpieces to just get PHBs.
To say nothing of employee's arms being taken and used to gain access. Just need to have a large plastic bags to put the body part in to keep it from leaking all over the hacker.
Who needs the arm? If the contents of the data center are really that valuable then some bad guy will just shoot the guy with the chip and pry the chip out with a knife. They don't need to carry the arm around.
All the chip does is increase the risk to the employee's safety. Where previously you could beat him up and take his card/wallet, now they need to pry the chip out of his arm, which is probably most easily done when he's unconscious or dead.
Or possibly it's the USPS carriers taking advantage of your netflix subscription without stealing the discs.
When I was a kid we used to see the mail carrier sitting out in his Jeep reading some of the magazines before delivering them. It's entirely possible, if not probable, that carriers and other postal employees are doing the same with netflix DVDs-- snag them, open them up roughly so it looks like a machine trashed them, watch them, wait a few days, insert them back into the system.
If only a one or two in an area are doing it, and not very often, nobody notices. If several are doing it independently then it might start to add up. And then if some damaged DVD envelopes start coming through, people might say "oh, it's already damaged, I'll give it a view before I put it back in the system" so a DVD might get watched a few times before getting to you or back to netflix.
Music sales are not all that down. There was an article about a year ago in the LA Weekly about how total CD sales were up, but sales of the Top 10 or so CDs were down. This indicates a lot more depth to sales than the major labels want--people are buying CDs, but they're exposed to a lot more variety (possibly through filesharing) and so it's getting harder and harder to push a model where you sell enormous numbers of a small number of releases. I still buy CDs, but I usually get them directly from the band at a show, or from someplace like CD Baby. I occasionally buy something on a major label through the standard outlets. I don't fileshare, though I do have about 16 GB of legal files on my iPod (all from my own CDs, except 1 track from iTunes)
I'm not sure what CD sales since the article are, but they're probably not all that bad. There are also reasons to believe that even without filesharing, CD sales would have leveled off and dropped some. A lot of people replaced a lot of their vinyl collections with CDs over time, and fueled back-catalog sales. As these people finished replacing what they wanted CDs of, sales would be expected to drop somewhat.
My 60 GB 4G iPod photo also supports firewire, it just doesn't come with the cable. I use Firewire to attach it to my old DVI powerbook that only has USB 1.1
I just picked up a macally firewire/USB 2.5" case for $35 (yeah, I splurged- you can get enclosures as cheap as $20) and an 80 GB 7200 rpm hitachi drive for about $155 at newegg. The drive is in my laptop now, but I set it up in the enclosure first (formatted, installed os, transferred, used it for a few days to make sure things were ok). It worked fine off Firewire bus power. Took minutes to install. Now my old laptop drive is in the external to use as backup.
There are more options if you're willing to go up to 3.5".
I finally got an iPod for christmas (actually a couple weeks early, since I got a deal on a 60 GB photo version). It's got about 15 GB of music on it, all of it legal, and all of it from my CDs. I think I have one stack left to rip to it. I think there's one song from iTunes among the 2700 or so that are on there now, which I bought before the iPod because the CD reissue I got of an album was the british version and didn't have one song from the US version.
I got it partly because I got sick of carrying my current favorite CDs back and forth to the car. Now I find that I'm listening to stuff I haven't listened to in a long time because it's more easily accessible: scroll quickly through a well lit, high contrast screeen in one place, rather than browse with my head turned sideways reading the tiny low contrast print of CD spines.
These were non-bonus tracks that were missing-- tracks from the middle that were even on the vinyl version (yes, I still own vinyl records and a turntable, too).
Perhaps the problem is that you keep buying average albums instead of above-average albums.
One of the reasons I *don't* buy from iTunes (among the many like lower quality for higher price, DRM, etc) is that I went a couple times to see if I could an album that I wanted, and they didn't include all the tracks that were on the CD! Usually it was a couple of missing tracks that I thought the album was incomplete without.
After doing that a few times I got totally turned off to iTunes.
I certainly have albums that have low-hit rates, but I also have albums where I've gotten more attached to some of the songs that weren't the ones I bought them for. It ends up being a wash.
I did finally get an iPod and I'm ripping my CD collection to it, which is taking a bit of time. I'm too lazy to dig around for free downloads, and being old I like to have the physical media in my hands.
Ever since phishing got popular I started always showing full headers, not displaying html, and not autodisplaying images in email. Now, instead of getting phishing attacks, I get the interesting poetry that they use to get past the spam filters. Some of it is quite good and answers the age old question of whether a machine can create art.
Very little email that I want includes html that I want to see rendered, or pictures that I want displayed without warning. Combined with showing full headers it's pretty phish proof.
Beats me how many offices in one election in Canada, maybe a half dozen for the federal elections. I live in California.
Do we really need to have full results the next morning on all the minor offices on every ballot? If yes, then a paper ballot that is both human and machine readable (as I mentioned a few posts up) would allow for both. You can get them all counted by machine in a few minutes, but you can also count them by hand if anybody decides it's necessary.
The ballots we use in LA County are to some extent human and machine readable, but not as much as I'd like. They're like the punch-cards, but use a little spring loaded magic marker instead, and just leave a black dot. If you look at the little booklet that's mounted over the marking jig, each choice has a cryptic little number next to it. If you look at the ballot, the number in the booklet corresponds to the number of the dot on the scannable ballot. You can (and I do) use this to double check that the alignment was correct when you slid the ballot into the marking jig and marked it up.
I'd prefer a ballot that had the name or proposition next to the dot, but that makes the ballot printing more expensive because you need custom ballots almost down to the precinct level in some cases.
A machine will make it a little faster, but it's not required. With machines counting what amount to scantron sheets, we start getting returns as little as a few minutes after the polls close. With paper counted by humans it might take a few hours, but you can still have pretty complete results in the morning.
Canada, which has a population similar to that of California, still uses paper for federal elections. They're counted by pairs (or more if their are more candidates) of real live people, who are party reps, at the end of the night. They don't even use a machine to mark the ballots-- just a pen.
I'd be more than happy to mark my ballot with a pen and have opposing party reps sit and count them together (along with whoever else wants to watch).
I don't even care if it takes a couple days to get the results. The less hype around instant knowledge of the outcome the better. People can take their time and get the count right.
But if you do the math, it's entirely possible to count each precinct accurately by hand at the end of the night. The throughput for voting is really low--it takes a long time to get people checked in and get the ballots marked up, but they all get marked in the 12 hours from 8 am to 8 pm, with a lot of dead time when most people are at work. Counting them is a much higher throughput activity, and there isn't the built in dead-time that goes with having a polling place waiting for people to show up.
You're right that technology makes accurate voting harder rather than easier, but we also have this culture that wants instant results.
The combination of electronic machines that produce a human (and maybe machine) readable paper ballot that the voter verifies gives you both. The electronics count the votes on the fly and give you a preliminary result, then the paper ballots are the official votes and used in case a recount is needed.
separated are at the very end, when the poll worker tears the top stub off the ballot and drops the rest of the ballot into the box.
And at that point it becomes a secret ballot, and nobody can match you back to your ballot.
That you voted isn't secret, how you voted is secret.
Mine works the same way. While the number is still attached to the ballot, the ballot is either in my hand or in a little envelope covering the markings, or folded over, covering the markings. At no point during that can someone try to see how I voted without it being very obvious, and they can't accidentally see. Then at the end they tear off the numbered tag and voila, secret ballot.
If there were a requirement that your ballot be flagged if you showed up without ID, but you were allowed to bring ID before the results were finalized there would have to be some way to connect you back to your ballot.
I suppose you could take those ballots from people without ID and put them in sealed envelopes with their identity on the outside, and if they show up later with ID they get to watch the envelope be unsealed and the secret ballot tossed into the anonymizer (ballot box). People without ID then get to cast their vote on time, but it doesn't get counted unless they show up with ID later.
Then again, it'll probably become moot as everyone moves to absentee voting anyway.
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Why should the self-absorbed drug addict who shows up 2 hours late and puts in a couple days' worth of work singing the songs that were written for him/her be awarded a disproportionate amount of the money? Just because its their picture on the cover?
This is either a troll, meant as satire, written by someone who only gets their music from TV, or written by a music industry exec.
Since a bunch of posters have already addressed most of it, here's the obligatory Steve Albini link to the economics of the music business The Problem with Music
We've learned (ok, apparently only I have learned) that ad revenue does not a company make.
Apparently you haven't noticed broadcast radio, TV, print magazines, newspapers, free weekly magazines, billboards, bus stop signs, and probably a lot of other things that don't come to mind in 10 seconds or less.
Those industries all are based on ad revenue. Some print media charge a subscription fee that doesn't approach the cost of producing the magazines/newspapers to give you a small barrier to entry so you don't just subscribe and never look at it. Plenty of others, such as alternative newsweeklies, just give the stuff away in boxes on the street.
since a virus scanner really does sometimes have to interrupt the user
As the sib post said, not really. And definitely not just to tell me that it completed a scan and everything is clean, cutting me off mid-password for my email.
get the part off ebay and the instructions for replacement off http://pbfixit.com/
(pbfixit will also sell you the drive, but it's usually cheaper on ebay)
I've had to replace a couple in old laptops and it's not hard.
The "dark" side of the moon is a terrible place for an optical telescope (where you can probably safely read optical as extending from IR to X-ray.)
It's not dark all the time-- it's just that the moon is tidally locked to the earth so we never see the backside, but it sees plenty of sun, which gives it huge temperature swings, which isn't good for precision optical alignment.
There's also stuff like meteor impacts to deal with-- they cause vibrations and kick up dust.
And then there's the gravity well that you have to drop all the sensitive equipment down without breaking it. It's not like mars, where there's at least a little atmosphere for braking. On the moon you have to do all the braking yourself. It adds both mass and complexity (risk) to a space mission.
Floating out in space (earth trailing like Spitzer, or L2 like WMAP or the planned JWST) is pretty benign by comparison.
There might be ok arguments for an array of radio telescopes, but they're probably least likely to be built there due to the large size/mass of stuff that you have to transport.
It reminds me of back in the dark old ages around 1985 or 86 when I had a work/study job that involved teaching people to use Macintoshes and an old threaded bulletin board system (Confer) for their classes. We would teach the faculty first, then teach their students.
I was showing a professor (and not a young one, either, and he had mentioned that he also had a small publishing house) Macwrite, and explaining how the display was designed with a typewriter analogy, and that it did pretty much the same things, but with click-drag, etc.
Then he says "I've never used a typewriter".
I was floored--this guy had been publishing papers for probably 30+ years, and ran a small publishing house, and had never used a typewriter. After a few moments of being stunned, and having the gears spin overtime in my head, I did start to figure out how to explain the interface to him, but he was missing the the whole typewriter language that Macwrite was based on.
By the way Digital Fortress had to be the worst book from a techy perspective.
Yeah, I picked it up in paperback while I was on vacation and nearly had to pull my eyes out. I got it because I didn't want to spend bucks on a hardcover Davinci Code, and swore never to read another of his books again. The characters were flat, and stupid, and the book was technically bad in every respect.
estimates that Akamai can only handle 150,000 streams at a time
Google has been trying to support the Tour of California by streaming video coverage of the race. They apparently had 60,000 people trying to watch on the first day (according to the on-line text commentary), many of whom (including me) spent a lot of time looking at a window that said "buffering...". It sounded like they added capacity the next days, but I still mostly got "buffering", and occasional video for a few seconds at a time, followed by it freezing, and maybe playing again.
I did finally get to watch about 20 minutes of the streaming (up to the finish) on Friday.
They were using akamai for at least some of the streaming, and it sounds like they actually contracted with someone to provide the whole video feed service (rather than use some in house beta capability)
ran out and got a GPS card and software for his laptop.
I had a similar experience with a GPS when I decided to use it to find my hotel when I had to travel for a meeting.
I got to the airport, got the rental car, set the laptop on the passenger seat and hooked up the GPS. I fired up the software and put in the destination-- everything was good so far.
This was an early one, so it didn't give voice cues, so I'd glance over occasionally and see that I was headed towards where I wanted, and it showed me on the road I was on.
I got to where the hotel was supposed to be after dark, and looked up to see a 20 foot high brick wall, topped with concertina wire, and a sign that said something like "After 5pm check prisoners in at the side entrance".
"Nice joke", I thought, now where's my hotel? There were no other buildings nearby, and it was slightly rural.
Eventually I found a place to call the hotel from, and it turns out that the hotel was at the opposite end of the ~5 mile long road (which I had driven the length of a couple times) in a mall area, set back from the road, and without a lighted sign. The map software had the numbering on the road reversed and sent me to the wrong end, and the hotel had just changed owners and they had hung a banner over the old sign, but it was in a non-obvious place, adding to the complication.
I realized that might be the why I don't have distortion a couple minutes after I posted-- I'll try recording later on and see.
You can't actually, macrovision will give you a distorted picture.
Then my playstation must be broken, since for obscure reasons related to an old TV, a strange cable arrangement, and cheapness, I run the PS2 through the front AV inputs of a cheap VCR. The PS2 is my primary DVD player and I've never noticed any distorted picture...
Although it might be good to use as a method to tag point haired bosses so we can track their movement through the various companies during their careers.
That's not bad...
You can already use rfid badges/implants/hairpieces/whatevers to make something like the "Marauder's Map" from Harry Potter. Just expand it to a worldwide thing, and stick to the implants/hairpieces to just get PHBs.
To say nothing of employee's arms being taken and used to gain access. Just need to have a large plastic bags to put the body part in to keep it from leaking all over the hacker.
Who needs the arm? If the contents of the data center are really that valuable then some bad guy will just shoot the guy with the chip and pry the chip out with a knife. They don't need to carry the arm around.
All the chip does is increase the risk to the employee's safety. Where previously you could beat him up and take his card/wallet, now they need to pry the chip out of his arm, which is probably most easily done when he's unconscious or dead.
Or possibly it's the USPS carriers taking advantage of your netflix subscription without stealing the discs.
When I was a kid we used to see the mail carrier sitting out in his Jeep reading some of the magazines before delivering them. It's entirely possible, if not probable, that carriers and other postal employees are doing the same with netflix DVDs-- snag them, open them up roughly so it looks like a machine trashed them, watch them, wait a few days, insert them back into the system.
If only a one or two in an area are doing it, and not very often, nobody notices. If several are doing it independently then it might start to add up. And then if some damaged DVD envelopes start coming through, people might say "oh, it's already damaged, I'll give it a view before I put it back in the system" so a DVD might get watched a few times before getting to you or back to netflix.
music sales are still down.
Music sales are not all that down. There was an article about a year ago in the LA Weekly about how total CD sales were up, but sales of the Top 10 or so CDs were down. This indicates a lot more depth to sales than the major labels want--people are buying CDs, but they're exposed to a lot more variety (possibly through filesharing) and so it's getting harder and harder to push a model where you sell enormous numbers of a small number of releases. I still buy CDs, but I usually get them directly from the band at a show, or from someplace like CD Baby. I occasionally buy something on a major label through the standard outlets. I don't fileshare, though I do have about 16 GB of legal files on my iPod (all from my own CDs, except 1 track from iTunes)
I'm not sure what CD sales since the article are, but they're probably not all that bad. There are also reasons to believe that even without filesharing, CD sales would have leveled off and dropped some. A lot of people replaced a lot of their vinyl collections with CDs over time, and fueled back-catalog sales. As these people finished replacing what they wanted CDs of, sales would be expected to drop somewhat.
My 60 GB 4G iPod photo also supports firewire, it just doesn't come with the cable. I use Firewire to attach it to my old DVI powerbook that only has USB 1.1
Is this really an ask slashdot?
I just picked up a macally firewire/USB 2.5" case for $35 (yeah, I splurged- you can get enclosures as cheap as $20) and an 80 GB 7200 rpm hitachi drive for about $155 at newegg. The drive is in my laptop now, but I set it up in the enclosure first (formatted, installed os, transferred, used it for a few days to make sure things were ok). It worked fine off Firewire bus power. Took minutes to install. Now my old laptop drive is in the external to use as backup.
There are more options if you're willing to go up to 3.5".
I'll second that.
I finally got an iPod for christmas (actually a couple weeks early, since I got a deal on a 60 GB photo version). It's got about 15 GB of music on it, all of it legal, and all of it from my CDs. I think I have one stack left to rip to it. I think there's one song from iTunes among the 2700 or so that are on there now, which I bought before the iPod because the CD reissue I got of an album was the british version and didn't have one song from the US version.
I got it partly because I got sick of carrying my current favorite CDs back and forth to the car. Now I find that I'm listening to stuff I haven't listened to in a long time because it's more easily accessible: scroll quickly through a well lit, high contrast screeen in one place, rather than browse with my head turned sideways reading the tiny low contrast print of CD spines.
These were non-bonus tracks that were missing-- tracks from the middle that were even on the vinyl version (yes, I still own vinyl records and a turntable, too).
Perhaps the problem is that you keep buying average albums instead of above-average albums.
One of the reasons I *don't* buy from iTunes (among the many like lower quality for higher price, DRM, etc) is that I went a couple times to see if I could an album that I wanted, and they didn't include all the tracks that were on the CD! Usually it was a couple of missing tracks that I thought the album was incomplete without.
After doing that a few times I got totally turned off to iTunes.
I certainly have albums that have low-hit rates, but I also have albums where I've gotten more attached to some of the songs that weren't the ones I bought them for. It ends up being a wash.
I did finally get an iPod and I'm ripping my CD collection to it, which is taking a bit of time. I'm too lazy to dig around for free downloads, and being old I like to have the physical media in my hands.
I sure as hell can't see the headers.
Ever since phishing got popular I started always showing full headers, not displaying html, and not autodisplaying images in email. Now, instead of getting phishing attacks, I get the interesting poetry that they use to get past the spam filters. Some of it is quite good and answers the age old question of whether a machine can create art.
Very little email that I want includes html that I want to see rendered, or pictures that I want displayed without warning. Combined with showing full headers it's pretty phish proof.
Beats me how many offices in one election in Canada, maybe a half dozen for the federal elections. I live in California.
Do we really need to have full results the next morning on all the minor offices on every ballot? If yes, then a paper ballot that is both human and machine readable (as I mentioned a few posts up) would allow for both. You can get them all counted by machine in a few minutes, but you can also count them by hand if anybody decides it's necessary.
The ballots we use in LA County are to some extent human and machine readable, but not as much as I'd like. They're like the punch-cards, but use a little spring loaded magic marker instead, and just leave a black dot. If you look at the little booklet that's mounted over the marking jig, each choice has a cryptic little number next to it. If you look at the ballot, the number in the booklet corresponds to the number of the dot on the scannable ballot. You can (and I do) use this to double check that the alignment was correct when you slid the ballot into the marking jig and marked it up.
I'd prefer a ballot that had the name or proposition next to the dot, but that makes the ballot printing more expensive because you need custom ballots almost down to the precinct level in some cases.
reading all the blasted things requires a machine
A machine will make it a little faster, but it's not required. With machines counting what amount to scantron sheets, we start getting returns as little as a few minutes after the polls close. With paper counted by humans it might take a few hours, but you can still have pretty complete results in the morning.
Canada, which has a population similar to that of California, still uses paper for federal elections. They're counted by pairs (or more if their are more candidates) of real live people, who are party reps, at the end of the night. They don't even use a machine to mark the ballots-- just a pen.
I'd be more than happy to mark my ballot with a pen and have opposing party reps sit and count them together (along with whoever else wants to watch).
I don't even care if it takes a couple days to get the results. The less hype around instant knowledge of the outcome the better. People can take their time and get the count right.
But if you do the math, it's entirely possible to count each precinct accurately by hand at the end of the night. The throughput for voting is really low--it takes a long time to get people checked in and get the ballots marked up, but they all get marked in the 12 hours from 8 am to 8 pm, with a lot of dead time when most people are at work. Counting them is a much higher throughput activity, and there isn't the built in dead-time that goes with having a polling place waiting for people to show up.
i mean seriously, why the technophilia?
You're right that technology makes accurate voting harder rather than easier, but we also have this culture that wants instant results.
The combination of electronic machines that produce a human (and maybe machine) readable paper ballot that the voter verifies gives you both. The electronics count the votes on the fly and give you a preliminary result, then the paper ballots are the official votes and used in case a recount is needed.
separated are at the very end, when the poll worker tears the top stub off the ballot and drops the rest of the ballot into the box.
And at that point it becomes a secret ballot, and nobody can match you back to your ballot.
That you voted isn't secret, how you voted is secret.
Mine works the same way. While the number is still attached to the ballot, the ballot is either in my hand or in a little envelope covering the markings, or folded over, covering the markings. At no point during that can someone try to see how I voted without it being very obvious, and they can't accidentally see. Then at the end they tear off the numbered tag and voila, secret ballot.
If there were a requirement that your ballot be flagged if you showed up without ID, but you were allowed to bring ID before the results were finalized there would have to be some way to connect you back to your ballot.
I suppose you could take those ballots from people without ID and put them in sealed envelopes with their identity on the outside, and if they show up later with ID they get to watch the envelope be unsealed and the secret ballot tossed into the anonymizer (ballot box). People without ID then get to cast their vote on time, but it doesn't get counted unless they show up with ID later.
Then again, it'll probably become moot as everyone moves to absentee voting anyway.