My textbooks are all 100 percent non-fiction

My library books are about 80/20 non-fiction/fiction

My books (paperbacks mostly) I buy are about 40/60 non-fiction/fiction

Except you ignore NAFTA, FTA, and TPP and other treaties. Consumer Laws used to be at the state level, with few at the national level, but increasingly it's the international treaties that undercut those, and if we are so foolish as to allow China to force us to sign TPP, will be gutted even further.

I took US and Canadian consumer law classes for a while, my brother is an international lawyer in NYC with BC and CA bars. You can continue to believe this is only decided locally, but it isn't.

Look back at the beginning of the information superhighway and you'll see I was there long before you civilians even knew about it.

My name might not appear the same way, but I was there.

Now realize your trade deals are trying to sell your Rights to corporations, but we all know they aren't people, so they don't have Rights.

I was born here too. But I know, having lived in other American countries, that we are NOT the only ones on these two continents to say America and mean where we are (not USA).

You could always damage the circuit which does the reporting. This may generate a fault, but since you own the device, and it's your property, an act like removing a bridge jumper or cutting a capacitor on the circuit should suffice.

Or just find out where the IOT connects and disconnect that.

Actually, the highest risk is from using a cell phone, or even having a cell conversation while driving, even if hands off. Texting is even worse.

Alcohol is pretty bad though.

PUT DOWN THE PHONE!

Based on what my family knows from the intel agencies we worked in, it's a feature.

What, you thought you lived in a Free Society, with Rights?

There are real privacy laws in America.

Just ask Canada. It's a Right in the Canadian Constitution.

Heck, even Mexico has more privacy rights than the US does. ... oh, you thought the US was America. I'll tell Brazil they belong to Europe ...

You don't need your TV to monitor your conversation so that you get even less exercise than pressing a button.

You don't need a smartphone if all you do is listen to music and get bus times and stock quotes and news briefs.

Embrace Dumbness. Reject Smart Technology.

Besides, we're already recording you and using your cell and phone and Net providers to track you. Don't help us even more.

This includes answering those stupid FB polls that just let us collect more data on you.

Rip FB out of your phone.

try Alberta

the Vancouver bubble is mostly due to people preparing to flee from China, or move assets out for the next inevitable crackdown.

Homes are a subsidized tax break for the top 10 percent of our society, paid for by the renter class and those who pay taxes (usually the bottom 95 percent).

They do limit your moving options, since your cost out is higher than cost in for the first 2-3 years, or 10 years if you buy high and sell low (approx 7 year cycle) like most people do.

That said, for most people aren't in the bottom 10 percent, they make sense. Until they seize the house on a made up pretext.

Sigh.

Look, if you do win, you'll burn through it very fast and end up no better, and with fewer friends and upset relatives than if you didn't bother at all.

That's what happens.

Raffles on the other hand, since they return 100-400 percent of the expected value, tend to do a lot better.

(caveat - I have won raffles, lotteries, and many forms of gambling myself, but that has nothing to do with your odds)

They'll enable them next year.

Fairly easy to do that already, though. Problem is people try to take the whole bottle in one unit, which shows up as a vacuum area on the scans. If you switch to flat or tubular bladders, you can use shoes or purse handles or briefcase handles or backpack parts to move the same amount of liquid.

You're thinking of the single stage versions that go from the surface to earth orbit. Multi-stage (platform) is currently possible, and viable for lunar at the moment, and we're almost at the point where we could do a Mars version. Depends on how you lift and the speed and wind profiles. Switch to a balloon method - hydrogen gets you high enough that the air resistance drops so that you can go higher.

You confuse "difficult" "non-elegant" engineering problems with "impossible" problems. It's not impossible. Just not elegant or simple.

The first part of the lift cycle uses the most energy, after all.