Microsoft is really not the company it used to be.

Companies are made of people and they change, grow up/older and move on. It is a huge company and in any such organisation it takes a long time for culture and strategy to change significantly.

Anyone who witnessed the hideousness of the SCO litigation has to look at a new Microsoft where FOSS is actively supported (even if there are strings attached) and where employees can talk about open-sourcing the OS without being fired on the spot has to accept that they are at least heading in a better direction than they were.

At least in UK accounting a subscription model has benefits for anyone who can claim a Windows licence as a business expense. A subscription would be classed as an operating expense and can be wholly offset against tax as part of the cost of sales. A licence on the other hand is an asset, which can only be depreciated over at best, three years (50% the first year then 25% for the following two)

This has a number of effects: By reducing my costs in the current year and at the same time being able to offset the entire cost improves my cashflow and reduces my tax burden. Also, by avoiding the ownership of an asset I reduce the book value of the company so I increase the ratio of earnings to investment (ROI). The additional cashflow will allow me to grow the business; I should be able to get a good return on the cash or else why am I bothering to be in business in the first place?

It may well be that Microsoft make more money out of my company using a subsription model, but that does not necessarily mean that my company makes less money, it all depends on just how I can juggle the numbers and what I do with the cash.

Disclaimer: I am not an accountant, but I have been a subcontractor running a limited company for several years.

their they're!

oops!

(fellow grammar pedant here)

I just wrote to Peter F. Hamilton begging him to employ an editor to revise all of his excellent books with the correct use of which and that

This is a little tricky.

Yes, we British don't really have an historical right of ownership of the Falklands, it's not like they are on our doorstep, or even in our hemisphere. However, the Argentinians have never had a presence on the islands (except for the famously brief war) and their only interest is in the oil reserves suspected, and now being found, in the surrounding waters. The war was also an attempt by the Junta to boost their flagging popularity in Argentina and a corresponding opportunity for the Conservative government to boost their own flagging popularity in the UK. There are no white hats in this fight.

The only tangible facts are that the people who now live on the islands voted overwhelmingly to remain under British sovereignty and that Mrs Thatcher had bigger balls (and better-trained special forces) than the Junta.

Can we start a petition to bring back frequent contributions from any Bennett Haseltons? For one day in the year it would be preferable to this drivel...

Stop already. In the UK the joke doesn't count if it's after mid-day anyway.

Apologies if I misread the sarcasm content...

;-) od

No. It may be #2 as a result of the fact that PROFIT is #1. Safety is the job of the FAA, and the fact that they do not yet feel comfortable to publish a code of regulations for such things means that they do not yet think there is a safe way for it to be done.

Two issues:

You have it exactly right; 'pilots' will have to be trained to pilot the vehicle for which they are to be licenced. Obviously this is a bit nonsensical; it will be computers that do the piloting, but the FAA is set up to regulate human control of aircraft and they have to develop a whole new set of rules to regulate machines, which is an even tougher call.

Secondly,

welcome to civil aerospace regulations. What's the failure rate of that there FPV? Oh, well, that doesn't cut it by five orders of magnitude...

So build them to FAR23.

yes, exactly

Just to elaborate. By the current rules, if you choose to fly, you should be able to fly for 1000 lifetimes to have a chance of dying due to a problem with the design of the aircraft. Johnny in his sandpit didn't choose to fly and the FAA has to protect him.

I can tell you the fundamental problem.

All of aerospace safety is based on the probability of various outcomes and the severity of those outcomes. For example, a 'catastrophic' event is one in which all, or most occupants of the aircraft die and the hull is lost. This has to have a probablity of occurence per aircraft of one in one billion flight hours, this means it's pretty much never going to happen and why all the crashes on TV are terrorists/pilot error/bad luck but almost never failure of the machine itself. There is a sliding scale of decreasing severity and correspondingly higher probability of occurence. There is an insaneamount of work goes into making aircraft safe.

So here's the problem: Drones don't carry people. So the old ways of calculating what's acceptable don't work anymore, yet the FAA will be eviscerated if they set up a code that suddenly causes four or five deaths per year from a sky filled with, maybe a few thousand drones one year, then a million the next causes hundreds of deaths. The numbers will still show that air transport is safer than staying in bed, but the press will not see it that way.

Troll

But I'll bite. Becaiuse the kid playing in his backyard shouldn't have to expect a car driving through his sandpit, nor a 50lb machine with face-cutting rotary knives (no longer) holding it aloft dropping into it from the sky,

Well, you are arguing my point. Build the drones to FAA civil aerospace standards and maintain them to keep them in flying condition, then get people to fly them who have gone through the same checks and training as FAA certified pilots and you have a safe system. Guess what: costs more than a truck with a driver.