A $4 tip plus $2 from the service nets me $6. I average 3 to 5 deliveries per hour, grossing $18 to $30 total. Minus $3 to $5 in expenses, and I’m earning $13 to $27/hr on that. Not great, but not terrible.

That was uncalled for.

In my area, I would not feel insulted by a $4 tip for a ~2-mile delivery.

If I wanted your clothes, I wouldn’t have left them at goodwill.

“Disrespectful” would be telling you that you in particular should continue to use windows or mac, and avoid Linux like the plague.

The 15% or 20% guidelines are based on the amount of work performed by the tipped employees (who earn less than minimum wage before tips.) the amount of the check correaponds pretty closely to how much time a waiter has to spend serving a table.

Drivers are not usually employees; they usually have $0/hr in wages, and pay their own fuel and vehicle expenses. Delivery services typically pay $2 per trip, and a trip will involve 2-4 stops. The base pay from the delivery service does not even cover fuel costs, let alone the driver’s time.

The amount of work a delivery driver performs is not at all related to the amount of the check. The 15%/20% rules are not remotely close to the amount of work the driver performs. $8 on a $20 order is a garbage tip if it’s a 10-mile delivery to a fourth-floor walkup. $4 on a $70 order might be a decent tip if it’s a 1-mile delivery to a front porch.

The appropriate tip for delivery is based on mileage, not food price. $1 for pickup, $1 for dropoff, and $1 per mile is a pretty basic tip. A driver can complete about 3, $2 runs per hour. $3 tips gives him a gross income of about $15/hr, and he can net about $10-12 of that after expenses.

Do you actually want to run an application that doesn’t exist on Linux?

I use a virtual machines for the 2 or 3 times a year I need to use a couple garbage windows-only programs. Usually for configuring some arcane piece of proprietary hardware that people were getting rid of because it is incompatible with everything.

Well, yeah. I mean, help desk deals with users at their moment of peak incompetence. If 1 in 20 users can’t figure out that “Office” is now “Libre office”, help desk is going to be swamped.

The solution is to merge help desk and HR, so that something productive can be done about PEBCAK issues.

It’s not the IT folks who need to be pushed. It’s the users.

Who pocket carries?

Who carries a pistol unloaded?

Who carries a pistol with a manual safety?

I’m not trying to be insulting. Your points are valid and worthy of consideration. However, the issues you have raised have long since been addressed.

Typically, concealed carriers use “IWB” (“inside waistband”) holsters to keep their handguns at the ready. Not a pocket. It’s actually very easy to draw from an IWB holster.

All modern pistols are specifically designed to be safely carried with a round chambered. Some training doctrine calls for handguns to remain loaded but unchambered. Israeli soldiers carry without a round chambered, but they are the exception. The broad consensus now is that your carry/duty pistol should be loaded, chambered, and ready to fire.

External safeties were common in older pistol models intended for duty use, where the user might be on horseback, and they commonly used a belt holster with a large flap that required both hands to reholster. The thinking was that a safety made sense when the user has the gun in their hand, but their attention was on something other than shooting. For example, if a cavalry officer’s horse were to start bucking, they were trained to immediately thumb on the safety and tend to their mount with pistol still in hand, rather than try to take the time to reholster.

Modern pistols are designed to be used with modern holsters. A modern holster protects the trigger from unintentional discharge. As soon as a carry gun is drawn, it needs to be ready to fire, so very few carry guns actually have manually operated safeties anymore. Modern duty holsters are designed for one-handed reholstering.

The internal safety features of modern handguns are intended to block the striker from hitting the cartridge in case of a mechanical malfunction. They are not intended to prevent firing when the trigger is pulled.

Please, ask reasonable questions and make reasonable observations. This is a serious subject. Please don’t treat it like a joke.

If you’re ever in a position where you need a gun, then it’s already too late to protect yourself

Someone has never heard of concealed carry. Nor have they ever heard something go bump in the night.

Considering that only 2% is not Hydrogen or Helium

I assume that claim comes from:

The abundance of chemical elements in the universe is dominated by the large amounts of hydrogen and helium which were produced during the Big Bang. Remaining elements, making up only about 2% of the universe

I kind of doubt that hydrogen or helium comprise 98% of the mass of the 48 tons of meteors per day. I kinda suspect that the 48 tons of meteors are comprised almost entirely of “other” elements.

Every machine I’ve purchased in the last 16 years has had a Linux liveCD or USB key before first power up. Windows has tried to boot a couple times, when I was too slow to figure out how to select a boot device, but none has actually completed the boot process. I take a sort of perverse pleasure in formatting pre-installed windows without it ever having run.

Wow, I actually forgot about Vista. I never actually had it installed on anything. XP was the last OS I had installed on hardware. Win 7 was the first I knew only from VM installations.

Straw that broke the camel’s back? Every vertebra in that camel’s back has been smashed with a sledge hammer over the past 30 years.

Windows 95 was the last version I was excited about; Windows 98 SE was the last version of Windows I willingly purchased, and XP was the last one I willingly used. When they announced Win7, I downloaded Ubuntu 6.06, “Dapper Drake”. Since then, Windows has only existed on my computers as pirated, virtual machines.

The scenario you describe actually demonstrates my point. Where anonymity is “illegal”, the only entity you can trust to protect your privacy is you.

That fact does not change when anonymity is “legal”. That fact does not change even when anonymity is mandated. Even if it is a criminal act for me to make a record of who is accessing my service, that is only a legal restriction. It is not a technical restriction. You can’t know whether I am abiding by such a law at the time you are accessing my service. A law mandating anonymity doesn’t actually protect your anonymity; it just gives you the illusion that your anonymity is being protected.

The relevant difference between your scenario and reality is that in your scenario, nobody is blatantly lying about whether your privacy is under attack: it most certainly is.

The inherent flaw is thinking that “privacy” is something that the courts are capable of providing. They aren’t. The most that government/courts could possibly do is make it illegal to generally and indiscriminately retain IP address records. But that only protects you from law-abiding privacy invaders; it does nothing to protect you from criminals who would use that information nefariously.

When you take adequate and appropriate steps to secure your privacy, it doesn’t actually matter what the courts have to say about “privacy”.

There is an IOS app for hot air balloon pilots called “Hot Air”. There is a similar app for Android that… Leaves much to be desired.

There’s several functions that are needed. First, we need a map. We need to be able to enter waypoints and/or polygons charting landing zones, prohibited zones, targets, etc. we need an easy way to select targets, and our bearing and distance to those targets.

For planning purposes, we need a bearing line that we can place and move on that map. We need to be able to easily drag and drop each end of the line, and get the bearing and distance between the endpoints.

Next, we need track recording. It should record a ground track during flight, preferably with altitude information, and notes about the flight.

Next, a wind map. The wind speed and direction varies considerably by altitude. It needs to record direction and speed as we climb and descend, telling us what altitude has winds favorable for our current target.

Bonus points if we can prepopulate that wind map with data from a “pibal” (pilot balloon; a simple latex party balloon released and tracked with compass and stopwatch before a flight)

Next, coordination with other pilots and ground crews. 3D location sharing between participants; wind map data shared between pilots.

SteefLem is a 47-year-old scuba instructor and retired lion tamer from Winnipeg who has just learned the colloquial meaning of the phrase “pulled it right out of my ass.”

NGO: Non-governmental organization

GDPR: General Data Protection Regulation. A set of European laws intended to empower individuals to control personal data held by companies.

“noyb” is a European privacy rights organization, who appears to prefer to style their name with lowercase letters. The name is an acronym for “none of your business”.