I am glad its not just me, I had to ask it to open the BBC app this morning to get R4.

I hope it goes back to the old days it was a lot easier.

You can create any number of alternate possibilities. Given that Maxwell’s and Epstein’s sex trafficking of young women and girls in order to satisfy themselves is now public knowledge through the courts, and one of those women is undoubtedly Giuffre; neither of us have to assume anything.

You are though, you are assuming she actually had sex with Prince Andrew and that it was in some way illegal. You are assuming that Prince Andrew knew she was illegally brought to the UK. You are assuming she made it clear to him that she didn’t want sex with him and he ignored it.

If you are not assuming that and can point to some evidence other than she’s said so 20years later, when he’s equally saying he didn’t 20 years later then I am all ears.

But she’s said that it wasn’t “fun for her at the time” repeatedly in court and in public. So, in order to make this claim, you’ve got to assume that that’s a lie.

Did she say that to Andrew if they did in fact have sex? If she did and then again nail him to the wall.

You’re assuming that she’s just cynically trying to make a buck. That’s she’ splaying at being a victim, just for the pay-out.

I am assuming nothing, I am saying its possible. Are you assuming it’s impossible?

But you have to be willing to suspend quite a bit of belief to hold the idea that given what is publicly known about this case, that the victims here are Maxwell, Epstein and Windsor.

Thing is I don’t think there has to be a victim, whilst unsavoury it could just have been fun at the time for everyone involved. Retrospectively with a large dose of cognitive dissonance ( I meant dissonance not bias last time) who knows what she thinks now.

She had a shit childhood no doubt but that does not mean at the time she didn’t enter into this willingly and felt happy. She may feel differently retrospectively.

You’re demonstrating it perfectly.

Not at all I am quite open to either Andrew knew exactly what was going on down to the coercion and everything and also open to the fact Roberts was a willing participant and gained massively out of it.

However I miss typed it, I meant cognitive dissonance with respect to evidence given.

People assume I have a point of view when the reality is my problem is with the way people assume the man, famous person, rich person is always in the wrong and are not prepared to consider the motivations of the parties involved.

Like you admitted there is not even any evidence that Andrew even slept with her yet everyone wants him hanged. This is the point that seems to be missed. We do have to understand there are potentially large sums of money at stake here and that can be a large motivator.

So the fact hat she’s repeatedly stated in filed court documents that she didn’t consent to sex is just her lying, right?

If there is evidence that she told Andrew that she didn’t want to have sex with him and he disregarded that and went ahead, then I am the first one to nail him to the wall. Is there evidence of this?

Also have you heard of something called cognitive bias?

Thats aimed at you and the thread in general as my post makes clear because thats what you are doing and it stinks. Quite honestly i am disgusted with what you have posted. its vile.

Well change my mind then? instead of just insulting me?

Are we not allowed to challenge the motives of people who make accusations against individuals? Is that victim blaiming?

Doing that is vile where starting a thread entitled “Prince Andrew, what a cowardly little ****” isn’t ? He claims that he doesn’t think he slept with her and we have to dismiss that out of hand based on what? His nick name “handy Andy”

What is truly vile is trial by media based on the fact people don’t really like someone.

I honestly don’t know what happened and neither does anyone on this thread, we don’t know the motives or how damaged or not she is by all this or if she is perfectly happy and sees it as a pay check. What I do know is the majority of people have really closed views and are not at all curious about the subtleties and its the subtleties that define the morality of it all if not the legality.

We have entered an age where it is not acceptable to challenge certain claims and I find that pretty scary.

@tjagain

but a nasty streak of mysogeny and victim blaming has arrived in this thread

I was referring to that bit of your post when I mentioned playing the man.

That’s where I think your version of “reality” can be handily placed.

Its not my reality, I am just putting an alternative argument. The main argument on here seems to be predicated on the fact she had no control over her actions and should not be responsible for them. This does seem to be the way people think these days, its always someone else’s fault. Yeah she had a rough time and may have been looking for a way out. She got a way out, she had a fantastic time, had sex with people SHE DECIDED to have sex with, now thats everyone elses fault but hers.

or at the centre of an elaborate scam to distract and bemuse a member of the royal family into paying out millions by means of a long fantastically plotted ruse.

No just opportunism.

I know you are only ( badly) making a point but a nasty streak of mysogeny and victim blaming has arrived in this thread

Has I totally knew that was coming, play the man instead of the ball.

Do you not think its nieve to think that there are not people out there who want to take advantage of a situation, you are quite happy to think that Andrew would take advantage of a situation but not Roberts.

This whole claim of victim blaming thing is a means to shut down the conversation. Its a modern way being too lazy to actually argue a point. If you can never question the other side then justice is dead.

Genuine wow, I can’t begin to imagine the level of dissociation it must take to bring everyone else down to one’s own level of cynicism and distrust, given what’s already in the public domain about this case.

Or a massive level of realism.

No – given that Maxwell was found guilty in court and given what we know

Are the two mutually exclusive? Is it not possible that legally a court found Maxwell guilty, but also that the statement “Or she could have been a young party girl that loved the lifestyle and had a blast. Now she sees an opportunity to make a few bucks out of it.” is true?

The whole trial was finely based on technicalities rather than any massively moral standpoint. Trafficking was chosen because they could not pin anything else on her, because in general they were very careful not to have underage girls hanging around. Those that were admitted to having fake ID’s etc. A party environment that young women willingly wanted to be part of.

Also evidence was given by friends of Roberts who at the time actually were underage, said that she recruited them but told them under no circumstances should that say how old they were. Yet all the moral outrage is aimed at Andrew. Where is the thread on Roberts declaring she’s is a money grabbing monster that pimped out her under aged friends?

Andrew is a victim of the Zeitgeist.

Being gaslight, being groomed etc can make it appear to be a persons own decision but its been made in a context of coercion

Or she could have been a young party girl that loved the lifestyle and had a blast. Now she sees an opportunity to make a few bucks out of it. Is that another possibility?

I think I will sue Thomas Cook for Trafficking me to Benidorm when I was 17 !!!

But all of that really isn’t the issue here, it’s the trafficking and abuse of position issues that make it unacceptable.

Is it trafficking if done it willingly and then tell their mates how much fun they are having. Don’t you need to be tricked or coerced for it to be trafficking? When does a young person having a good time turn into trafficking? Did they take her passport away and refuse to give it back until she had paid off the debt with sex?

If you were really trafficked and were living in fear I think you might have a different view on this.

As already posted Margaret Thatcher was close friends with him and lobbied to have him knighted despite knowing about his crimes. Interesting selective memory you have there.

Can you provide any evidence for this statement ?

I have a Trafic van and you would have to be pretty creative to get 3 bikes and 3 blokes sleeping in the back of one.

Even a LWB is not as big as people have in their head :-)

I have just boarded and insulated my garage, so have bought a fair bit of 12mm ply and 50mm Kingspan. All I can say is prices have rocketed this year !!!

None of us have camera’s on in meetings, just adds nothing. We are often sharing screens though and that’s where the value is.

As someone mentioned earlier it does seem like directors and management like to turn on their cameras for some reason. Its more important for people to mute their audio so we don’t have to listen to their dog barking or the workman outside.

Problem with meeting engagement is generally the meeting, not the people.

Its interesting that you said you were involved in triathlon and coaching triathlon.

I did Ironman triathlon for about 5 years and I was probably the fittest I have ever been. I knocked it on the head about 3 years ago as it was just taking too much time and I also realised that I didn’t actually like the stress of race prep. I loved it once I was in the water and off, but the stress of making sure everything was right before a race that cost a lot of money and had a lot of training invested was just not enjoyable.

Since then I have really struggled as everything is exercise rather than training. When I was training I knew what I was trying to achieve so I was able to understand what I wanted from each session. Now when I go for a run I think what am I trying to get out of this today and I struggle. I still do it but I don’t think I get as much benefit out of it.

So my way of dealing with this is to set goals that can be measured, stuff like get my 5KM time down to a certain level. However I still find it hard to work out what to do.

But my bit of advice is if you were coaching someone else and they had this issue, what would you say to them? Start coaching yourself.

@bazzer US Virgin Islands, consent age is 18.

and she is claiming he had sex with her there?

I am not being a dick I am just trying to get the facts straight and a quick google was a bit limited.

plus a minor couldn’t really consent anyway.

Apart from she was not a minor in the UK, if it turns out he had sex with her in the US in a state where the age of consent is older than 17 then I get it.

“BBC have it on their news site, but essentially she was trafficked to have sex with him age 17 and he knew of the trafficking. Possibly they also had sex in some US states where 17 was under age?”

Does it detail how she was threatened or coerced etc ie what made it trafficking rather than her willingly going to UK to hangout with a prince?

Are there any details of the allegations anywhere yet?

How old she was, what he did etc etc

I would be concerned that that bosch drill would not have enough torque at low speeds using the speed control. Obviously if you change belts to slow a drill down you are going to increase the torque. Its a nice package though.

I have had a small bench top drill (similar to the one posted on gumtree) I got from Machine Mart about 20 years ago, its nothing special but for banging holes in aluminium and steel its an order of magnitude better than a hand drill. I am lazy at changing the belts though, so the Bosch would be good on that front, though would have to be convinced the torque was there using large bits or hole saws.

If I want to make holes with any precision I now have a mill so will drill and ream them.

Some one or more than one person at work to say you were at work. The more people the better.

I remember going to see Moonraker with my dad, the first bond film I saw in the cinema.

When the Bond(Dr No) music starts I am 9 years old again.

I loved watching bond with my dad as a kid.

When I was a kid I wanted to be either Bond or a Spaceman. What do lads want to be when they grow up now ????

The ‘son’ part is a red herring, you’ve inherited it not him.

Not really it’s quite possible as the beneficiary of a will to effectively re-write the will so that someone else benefits, completely legal and done quite often.

Dostana in Woolton Village is really good, though not in the centre. Not that far though.

I use a 1TB Samsung T7 SSD drive for a Time Machine backup and a 2TB crucial SSD as additional storage (in fact I have 2 of these) This works really well and the performance is pretty good.

I could probably use a spinning disk for the backup but to be honest I like the fact there are no moving parts and its quiet for when I am recording.

I have recently got an M1 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM and 1TB storage. Replacing a 2016 i7 mackbook pro with a similar spec.

I pretty much use it solely for running Logic Pro and NI Maschine for music recording. So far so good, I have not really taxed it much yet, I need to install some of my other software synths on it to load up some of my projects that struggled on the old machine.

I am running two monitors on it one on HDMI and one from a USB C/Thundbolt port.

Happy so far.

@cougar I was talking about a CD-Player when I was talking about the bitstream really.

Years ago a lot of ripping software didn’t even bother to do the ECC it made it too slow, I am sure modern stuff might if you ask it to rip in the best quality. However once you have an error you can’t correct your only option in that case is to abort the rip. So it’s all a compromise.

If I remember correctly its a hamming code style ECC with a 1 to 4 bit redundant vs non redundant data. I would have to check how many bit errors that can correct and how many it can detect. However due to the very nature and size of blemishes etc on disks you tend to get bursts of errors rather than random.

To a point yes, ripping software can re-read data something that a CD-Player can’t do, however with all the caveats about positioning etc. However if it continuously reads data again and its got bit errors ecc can’t correct (damage/fingerprint or even a poorly aligned/focused laser etc etc) it won’t get a perfect copy of what the master digital media contained.

For the most part this is very subtle and it works just fine, I would not worry about it :-) Obviously once you have the PCM data ripped to your computer you can copy it without degradation.

@cougar in fairness, when I started I assumed it would work how you envisioned it working and it would be perfect as its digital. However the subtle bit is that if you get multiple bit errors then the ECC can’t correct (I forget how many it can correct) and it can’t do a retry when playing a CD so those errors are now in the bitstream.

It turns out it’s not quite that simple in reality.

I had an Adreani cartridge kit in a track motorbike and it was pretty good. They are part of the same group that own Ohlins for what thats worth.

@sandwich I am not an expert, just know a little bit more than cougar :)

@cougar

Ripped using a CD-ROM drive completely digitally. I thought it would work in the same way as reading data from from a data CD-ROM its not. If you ask for logical block you don’t always get the block you ask for as the disk can’t position properly as the format is not designed to do that, its not needed when streaming from a device.

Also the ECC can’t correct everything and the odd bit error will not cause a catastrophic loss of audio, in fact you’d probably not even notice if it was the least significant bit.

This is why modern ripping software does a lot of clever stuff to make sure it gets the best copy possible.

Edited for more detail

Data is stored in 2352 block 2048 data the rest ecc, the problem is you read 2352 bytes and due to the problems outlined it could be shifted by a few bytes so you might get a few bytes from the previous block and not all the data from the block you wan’t. So you end up having to do overlapped reads of multiple blocks and sliding them along against each other to match up data. This is all well and good but if one read has a bit error (remember this is pre ecc as the ecc is in the data still) then you can’t match it up as easily.

Also due to the fact its streamed off the disk when playing if ecc fails then it can’t just reposition and do a re-read like a disk drive or a CD-ROM does. So you might end up with bit errors in the stream, this could be anything from inaudible to big clicks. When it skips or fails to play that’s normally when its so bad it can’t even track the data on the disk.

So a better transport can give less bit errors, and we have not even got to the effects of the clock and its effect on frequency domain distortion.

So if you were to play a CD and record the digital out as data, it would not be the same every time. You would get un-correctable bit errors in different places.

@cougar

How many times do I have to write this? Music on a CD is data not audio. A 1 on a CD is exactly the same as a 1 on your hard drive. Exactly. A CD is not vinyl, there are no 0.5s here. A cheap CD drive won’t result in inferior audio reproduction, the data is either intact or it isn’t.

Except its not quite as simple as that, you may not get a 0.5 but you can get an error that means a 1 gets read as a 0 and vice versa. Also a CD drive is treated like a block device on a PC so you end up reading the data in sectors, red book formatted CD’s are not designed to be read like that and thus don’t have the framing to allow for accurate positioning on the disk, so your sector reads can overlap or you can end up with gaps between them. So you end up having to read multiple sectors and overlapping them and doing some shifting along to make sure you don’t get and gaps etc. So ripping a CD does not always end up with an exact copy. So the better the transport on the CD the more chance you have of not having bit errors, the less bit errors the more chance you have of correcting them. Bit errors can cause noise in the final audio, eventually you will get skips and obviously audible artifacts, but before that there will be general distortion of the audio signal.

I did a final year project at university that involved some ripping of audio CD’s and storing them on DAT tape. I discovered it was not as simple as I initially thought.

I have something but need to re-do it a bit more in the groove as timing is not perfect. Its only minor pentatonic based so worry its a bit boring.

What is the status of the jam? I am back from Spain this week so will probably have time to do something. I have had a bit of a noodle over it but not recorded anything yet :-)

This is a new experience for me I find myself half in agreement with tj :-)

I 100% agree with a return to debt free education, not just for the economy and social mobility, I truly believe education makes us all better people in general.

I am less convinced with the comprehensive system, since we had quite a few prime ministers from grammar schools, now we only get privately educated PM’s

I failed my 11+ too and had a poor experience at a secondary modern. However I was lucky and I did really well after that and ended up being the 1st person in my family to go to university and I got a 1st in Engineering. I am grateful for the education I received and sad that people really can’t even think about education for personal development anymore as it will put them into so much debt.

For me education is the key to a lot our problems.