Neil

A helicopter just landed at ARI. Maybe somebody made it.

It's not related according to BBC News.

North Sea helicopter crash: all 16 people on board feared dead | World news | guardian.co.uk

have they figured out what caused the last one?

Not yet. The final report won't be out until the end of the year. Speculation at this stage is that the terrain avoidance warning system (TAWS) unit was malfunctioning.

Yeah, the last one ditched on the approach to the ETAP platform and was only 500 yards or so away from it from what I can recall. Folks on the platform heard it splashing down at any rate, so they weren't far away.

Edit: The preliminary investigation report is here: http://www.aaib.gov.uk/cms_resources/S3-2009%20G-REDU.pdf

There is fair weather this time though (unlike the last incident where the weather was poor) and during the day, which makes this all the more surprising. Although should at least aid the recovery effort.

Terrible news though.

I like how nefarious C is on it both the highest and lowest list(under a different username).Thats some good work!

If people have multiple accounts on this site then I would like to be informed of them please. It's against the rules.

Those of you currently using Tiscali / Pipex / Nildrim etc for your ISP might want to start looking for another one: BBC NEWS | Business | Tiscali sale talks with BSkyB end

Sounds like Tiscali won't be around for much longer.

That is a genuine shame. Oh well.

If vBulletin improve the feature in the future then I'll happily switch it back on and give it another shot.

The thing that seems lunacy to me is that surely no self respecting businessman would want to fly on an airline that wasn't part of an alliance - those all important air miles would surely dictate travel policy in their case? From looking around (flyertalk, mainly) - these people do attach quite a lot of significance to their air miles account

Not really. You have to remember that most businessman aren't even paying for the flights in the first place. Their company or clients pay for them. If you can collect some air miles on the way then bonus, if not, it's no big deal. Air miles don't get you much these days anyway. Businessmen are more fussed about making sure they travel in business class or first class rather than cattle class. Primarily so we can get into the airport lounges and get drunk on all the free booze. Whoops...did I say that?

I just don't see the business case for Aberdeen-Houston flights. The failure of the all-business carriers out of Stansted show that these type of airlines don't attract business because of the inflexibility of the schedule - and while BA's London City-New York service will probably succeed because of the convenience, it just seems unlikely that people would want to travel on a service that might only have one flight a day.

Stansted isn't near a bunch of oil and gas fields though. If (and it's a big if now these days) an Aberdeen-Houston route was to come about then it would most likely consist of chartered flights subsidised by the oil companies taking advantage of it. This is done elsewhere in the world by the oil industry (there is a chartered Houston-Luanda route for example). This also gives them control of the schedule etc.

The Tags feature in vBulletin is, in my opinion, a little immature at the moment. Unfortunately, there is no way that individual tags can be manually moderated and so all we can do as staff is delete the dodgy tags when we spot them (as people can't report on tags either). But even then we can't see who added the tag in the first place in order to punish them.

I found many of the tags to be amusing as well, but at the end of the day that is not why this feature exists. The tags are meant to enhance people's ability to search for specific topics covered in threads and so the tags should only ever contain words or phrases that describe the topic(s) discussed in the thread in question. Very few tags added by people were for this purpose, although we didn't really explain this when they were first switched on admittedly.

Due to the continued abuse of the Tagging system it has now been disabled.

Mainly so they can run transatlantic widebody services IIRC. Aberdeen-Houston has long been a stated objective of certain interests here. IIRC, their is/was a campaign group plugging the route.

Heh, great minds eh?

Okay, expansion or no expansion, we probably won't see Aberdeen-North America flights - but 300m extra will make a fair bit of difference when it comes to the viability of Aberdeen-Europe flights.

Don't completely discount US flights. One of the long-standing reasons for extending the runway was to allow the larger Boeing 737's to land so they could start a direct Houston / Aberdeen route for the oil industry to take advantage of. I doubt the current economic climate would make that viable now though.

*sigh*

Can we try and keep this thread civil please?

Where the fuck did Jake go? Did Northsound capture him and steal his internet identity?!

He asked for his account to be deleted.

We don't need multiple threads for this one topic thanks. Closing...

I'll be on the show reprising my role as resident music pundit one last time. I've also been thinking about the future of broadcasting in the city, and I think it may be time to dust off ab-music radio. We gave it a go a few years ago, the audience for it was too small to make it viable then, but if we started up live streams and podcasts on this site again, does anyone think it could be more successful this time round?

Just say the word...

Discussion about this taking place here: http://www.aberdeen-music.com/forums/politics-current-affairs/46761-nightclub-curfew-come-into-force-aberdeen-new-post.html

Lots of people still prefer CD-R's, from what I've seen people working at labels are far more likely to put on a CD in the office/wherever stereo while they're doing work, rather than open up another tab/window to look at a band's myspace. Also a lot handier if they plan on forwarding MP3's to other employees/people who might be interested. Same goes for getting press, journalists will want a CD-R of your single rather than have to constantly refresh your myspace page while writing a review. Sending high-quality MP3s is becoming a lot more common, however the chances of people downloading unsolicited files is slimmer than the chances of putting on a CD-R while you're doing other things.

That'll be the MP3s you first have to rip or copy from the CD-R then? Nah, don't buy that explanation. The promoters and record industry types I know (and granted, I'm don't know any big or important ones) just Google a band's name and then listen to them online. They don't bother fiddling about with CDs.

Why are people talking about CD-Rs? Do bands still send those things out to people? No-one is going to bother their arse opening up a package with a CD-R in it when they can visit a band's MySpace page and listen from there.

Oh, and I wonder how many "music industry experts" GoNorth will by flying up from London expenses paid this year...

This page is on the front page of Google hits when you type his name in.

I predict a Northsound style "cease and desist" request coming soon from Mr Angus (no pun intended).

Well, not quite. But I've received enough complaints about the content of this thread to do some pruning and to now close it. The court case is up in March though and you can all happily discuss this topic again when the verdict has been delivered.

I'd like to remind people that Tags should be used to aid the searching of threads on the web site. So please think of them as "keywords" relevant to the thread in question.

That's the Original Shoe Company and Qube stores closing now:

JJB Sports fashion stores are shut down with loss of 438 jobs | Business | guardian.co.uk

Sky have no fair use policy. If they limit me I can do something about it because it is not in the contract.

Yes they do: Sky.com - Sky Products>Broadband>Terms and Conditions

And if anyone can enlighten me as to why we don't just let them fold, presumably allowing an orderly liquidation of assets and debts, I'd be all ears!

Because, if you believe the government at least, it would have resulted in a complete failure of the banking system and would have triggered a run on most of the high street banks ala Northern Rock. RBS and HBOS would certainly have gone under and the general atmosphere of panic would have probably led the same happening to Lloyds and Barclays as well.

No banks means no mortgages, credit cards, loans or savings. As most businesses rely on at least some lending from banks then they would have gone under as well. This is actually happening anyway, but on a smaller scale, as the banks tighten up their belts.

The compensation schemes currently in place to give people back their savings back if a bank goes under wouldn't be able to compensate everyone in a massive banking failure like this either, so lots of people would lose their savings, investments etc. So the end result is probably becoming unemployed, having no savings and the government becoming bankrupt.

Have a look at Iceland now to get some idea of what it would have been like if the banks hadn't been bailed out.

Already!?

Umm...they've had a stake for ages. The only reason Lloyds took over HBOS and saved their skin was because the government agreed to throw some money into the deal (hence their 43% stake). And funnily enough it's writing down some more of HBOS's dodgy assets that caused their share slump today. The share price will pick up again in the next few weeks though.