I've spent a fair amount of time over the past few months following the Presidential elections in the US, and you can tell from the links at the side where my political persuasions lie, but it is always good to hear both sides of the story. One of the BBC's 'Have your say' sections at the moment is 'Can Kerry Beat Bush?' Of the comments from Bush supporters, one is typical of many that I have heard:

Our country hasn't been attacked on our soil since Bush had the spine to address the terrorists and take the fight to them.

Or to put it another way, in the 3 years since 9/11, the Bush administration's policies have prevented another terrorist attack. I'm a smoker, have been for more than 3 years, but I don't have cancer - does that mean that smoking prevents cancer?

You know those flat 'escalators' you get at airports, the ones where old ladies spend half an hour getting on, only to be forcefully thrown off the other end? Ever wonderered what Maradona would look like trying to run the wrong way up one? Thought so.

The BBC have been reporting quite heavily today on new research that shows moths in the UK are in decline. The online story is here, and it's also been on the national & local news on TV. Now if it's true, great, I can't stand the little f*ckers. But hang on a second.

The way they track them is by placing light traps to attract the moths, who in turn are gassed; the researchers then count the dead. And they've been doing this for 35 years. Now in that time, maybe the moths have learnt to avoid the traps - maybe it's been passed down the generations, 'here son, mind you don't go near them triangular lights, we lost your uncle to one of them.' So none of this jumping to conclusions that they're in decline - they're actually getting cleverer.

I've added more photo galleries for your viewing pleasure, this time of a holiday to Tennessee a couple of years ago. There's photos of Memphis, Nashville & Gatlinburg, including Graceland, Beale Street, Sun Studios & the Grand Ole Opry.

For the first time, I've scanned in prints taken with a 35mm camera (using a cheap scanner, hence the quality) and discovered two things. Firstly, what a royal pain in the butt scanning photos is, but it's either that or pay Jessops £10 a film to do it. Secondly, how many duff photos I used to take without the luxury of being able to view them straight after. Click on the links on the left to view them (the half-decent ones that is, not the duff ones).

No reason, just something I did for b3ta

After coming across yet another copy protected CD, this time Brad Paisley's Mud On The Tires (another BMG CD), it occurred to me that by adding copy protection to CDs to prevent ripping, the record companies could actually be encouraging illegal downloads.

MP3 players are no longer the domain of geeks and early adopters - they are now the mainstream replacement for portable cassette and CD players. According to a recent article on the BBC, 10 million digital music players are expected to be bought worldwide in the next 12 months. Some people will give up buying CDs completely and start buying their music online, from Apple's iTunes and similar services, but for others the digital player won't be their sole music player and so they are likely to continue buying CDs. And this is where a problem arises.

To play the music on their iPod or other player, they need to be able to rip the tracks to a digital format, but copy control on CDs prevents them from doing this. So they now have three options:

1) Accept that they won't be able to play the tracks from their newly purchase CD on their digital music player.
2) Purchase the tracks online in a format they will be able to transfer to their digital player, and end up paying for them twice.
3) Turn to the P2P networks and use Kazaa or one of the other file sharing programs to download the tracks for free.

Option 1 is possible for those with very little technical knowledge, whilst option 2 is very unlikely to happen - who in their right mind pays again for music they've already bought. Which just leaves option 3, download the tracks illegally.

It doesn't matter whether a CD has copy protection or not, it will always end up on the file-sharing networks: hi-fi + cable to PC + PC audio recorder = high quality copy. There is no way to stop people from doing this, it is just a bit fiddly and time consuming to do, and it only takes one person to do it and then share the files and any copy protection is worthless.

So the person who's just bought a copy of a protected CD goes on to Kazaa, possibly for the first time, to download the tracks they've already legally purchased. Whilst they're there they realise that they can download almost anything they want. I challenge you to find anyone who won't think 'whilst I'm here, I'll just see if I can find the latest CD from X', and pretty soon you'll have a regular user of P2P networks.

If the record companies want to stop illegal music downloads, they should be doing everything they can to discourage people from using file-sharing networks. CD copy protection has the exact opposite effect. Sell 'clean' CDs at a sensible price and people will still buy them - the sound quality is better than downloaded versions (including legal downloads) and it's easier and cheaper to rip a CD to MP3 than it is to burn an MP3 to CD. Alienate your customers by adding copy protecting though, and you'll end up pushing them away.