For 500 single-family homes, you'll need 500 trash barrels. Which do you think is easier to service, 20 dumpsters or 500 barrels?

I don't dispute that the apartment may be easier to service. I'm just pointing out that its nowhere near 50x as difficult to serve the homes despite them having 50x time 'frontage'. Hauling 3 dumpters a day from one building or collecting garbage from 10 blocks... sure the individual cans is going to be more work... but not THAT much more. If you want to charge them more, fine... but not 50x more.

Despite all that, dense development is much more cost-effective in city services than single-family homes.

I don't really disagree with you here. But its a question of scale. Your frontage proposal puts the ratio at the home owner paying 50x as much, when the real differential is MUCH MUCH less.

Addtionally your link doesn't factor in the fact that the 'urban developments' were mixed use -- 6 million feet of commerical space in the gulch. commerical space tends to be far more expensive than residential. So while it makes a very good case for infill development vs a suburb its not really comparing apple to apples with respect to our debate.

So my question is, why should poor renters subsidize middle- and upper-class homeowners

They aren't. Poor renters, and poor owners are in the least expensive housing, and pay the lowest property taxes.

RTFA. It talks about exactly this.

The assessment for street maintenance on the property taxes for the 10 homes should each be 50 times that of an apartment unit.

Based on what? Most of the maintenance costs are for the bridges overpasses, main thoroughfares, and other shared items. Not the roads in front of my house.

Yes, it's easier to haul away trash from a single dumpster than from trash barrels serving the same number of homes.

Slightly easier sure, but the highrise produces 50x as much trash. So instead of 10 trashcans once a week they need to haul away 5 dumpsters worth every day.

Yes, water infrastructure costs less per unit in an apartment building than a single-family home.

Not really. The infrastructure is shared, but its much more complicated due to the volume needed, and maintenance is much more expensive. In the suburbs you can put up a couple pylons and just dig a hole to do what needs doing. Downtown you'll need flag people to help redirect traffic, you may need coordinate access to buildings, or involve other utilities etc. There's literally a lot more concrete everywere so its not nearly as simple. And it goes without saying that the highrise block uses 50x as much.

But this should be on everyone's trash collection fees, not their taxes.
[re sewer, water, garbage, recyling...]

Why? What's the point? Why split them them up if its not metered and its a service by the city? In some places I've lived they are part of the taxes, in others they are private companies and billed separately... in others they are on a separate 'utility bill' from the city. But if they aren't metered (which in most cases they are pro-rated by property value.

The idea being that... bigger more expensive homes with more people and more bathrooms will use more water. That breaks down a bit when you've got smaller units down town that cost more, but

These things are probably about the same cost for condos as for single-family homes.

Right. Along with policing, fire departments etc. Clearly placing the burden based on roadside frontage is far far more clumsy and inexact.

and it encourages urban sprawl when the property's burden on infrastructure isn't properly reflected in property taxes.

And your proposal using frontage is categorically worse.

Stuff like street maintenance, right? Is a property's burden on the streets proportional to the property's value or the property's street frontage?

So if you highrise apartment block with 500 families occupying a 'city block' vs a 10 homes occupying another city block. The 10 families in the 10 homes should each pay 50x the property taxes as the high rise tenants?

Because the highrise properties burden on the towns resources is less?! Sure maybe for snow clearing on that particular street. But water? garbage removal? schools? Libraries? Recreation centers? Parks? Sewers? Why is the home owners share of all that 50x as much exactly?

Cities and towns usually get this answer wrong, and that causes a lot of problems such as those we saw in the real estate crash

I disagree completely.

Condo stratas tend to divide costs pro-rated by each units square footage. Cities tend to divide costs by an assessment of value. Within a strata that works out pretty close to being the same thing -- larger (more valuable) units pay slightly more... but across a city a penthouse downtown is woth 20x a home in the suburbs even if the home is larger.

Wouldn't it pretty much have to be?

Nope.

The oil they dig up from the ground is clearly younger than the sun, even if the hydrogen and carbon atoms in it are older. Right?

Likewise, the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water are clearly older than the sun, but its hardly a forgone conclusion that they've been bonded together as water the entire time. Quite the opposite even.

Odds are most of the water around us hasn't been water the entire time. A lot of the oxygen in the water around us may have spent some time as carbon dioxide or other oxides or compounds that are definitely "not water". Ditto for the hydrogen which may have spent some time as various hydrocarbons and so forth that are also "not water".

Here they have water that presumably has actually been water since before the sun lit up. That's a bit more interesting.

Shouldn't *all* water in the solar system be older than the Sun?

That was my first reading of it as well... a big "Duh!".

But upon reflection, I realize they aren't saying that the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that make up the water are older than the sun, but that some of it has been combined as 'water', since before the Sun, and they've found samples of some. And that actually *IS* interesting and potentially scientifically significant.

bash scripts use environment variables to store arguments. web requests passed to cgi scripts calling bash can result in bash assigning those header values to environment variables.

Due to a bug in bash, assigning an environment variable with 'extra stuff at the end' of the assignment results in the extra stuff being executed.

So calling a website with maliciously crafted header values with 'extra stuff', if bash assigns those values to an environment variable, to the extra stuff being executed.

So for example if i call a cgi with bash on the backend, and that bash script sets an environment to the user agent string. Then by maliciously crafting the user agent string I can get bash to execute arbitrary commands...

If it was supermarkets ...

On the other hand if its a rented property there all kinds of protections in place to prevent the landlord from tossing you out on the street the minute your late on a payment.

Maybe we should be protecting the car owners. After all, in the event of a car loan -- the title of the car actually belongs to the person. The bank only has a lien against it, not title to it.

Things get a bit murky as the loan was given 'on-condition that' the disabler be in place. But perhaps the term is unconscionable and should be made illegal.

After all, again, tenants agreements are strictly regulated and there is all kinds of stuff a landlord cannot legally put into a rental agreement.

Maybe vehicles should be afford the same consumer protections, given how integral they are to people's livlihoods, and how peoples safety is compromised if the car is shutdown remotely.

And frankly your supermarket argument fails the sniff test. The transactions are of a completely different nature. Nobody here is objecting to the car dealer refusing to sell someone a car who can't afford it. They are objecting to the dealer taking a risk by financing the car and then mitigating that risk using means of dubious ... acceptability.

I believe the thought is they can't get the votes to get the legislature to give the CRTC (or FCC in the US) such broad ranging authority and they are exceeding their current legislative mandate

The conversvative party is running a majority government, and the party under Harper very much votes as a block. Further despite the ramblings of idiots saying the CRTC has got to go, there is no real political will to do that.

"Hollywood North" is a massive industry, that benefits heavily from Canadian Content law, and the convservatives bow to the will of industry, on the flipside funding and protecting Canadian content is sacred to the NDP which is more of a socialist party -- so really they are on board with it too. The laws actually have broad support.

The only companies that object to them are the broadcast companies themselves (Bell / Telus / Shaw / etc ) -- but if they can't escape the rules themselves damn right they are going to make sure any competition coming in form the states is bound by them.

Joe Consumer who is just pissed he can't get American netflix, and that there is too much Bryan Adams and Nickleback on the radio is really the only ones truly against this -- but the question is whether the rules are good for Canada as a whole or not.

And honestly, when you think about it, big picture, they probably are a good thing... at least in some form.

By your reasoning, we may as well close down the judiciary because every decision could potentially be changed by some future law.

Of course not. The majority of court cases are not against an entity that can simply change the law as suits it. Doe vs Smith for example.

Similarly A court case challenging the constitutionality of a law is similarly interesting, because the government has to either rework the law to fit within the constitution or amend the constitution (which is not particularly easy).

But yes, when a court case IS brought before the judiciary against the entity that has the power to alter the law to suit itself more or less at will, then, exactly right, it really is NOT particularly interesting what the outcome will be, and the interesting question is what the government (and by extension the voting public) WANT the outcome to be.

When looking a a law, you also have to look at the historic reasoning behind it.

The Canadian content laws are about
1) promoting and ensuring there is a voice for Canadian culture

2) promoting and sustaining the film / production industry within Canada (American shows produced substantially in Canada qualify as Canadian content.

If the technology for distribution of video changes from primarily broadcast to primarily singlecast then the law must be evaluated and updated to determine whether it still needed and if so to apply to to the current technology.

and if the CRTC wants to broaden its authority to 1-on-1 content [...] it should consult with the people first, in the form of the democratically elected lawmakers.

Which is paraphrasing EXACTLY what I wrote. Thank you very much.

The interesting question isn't whether netflix 'counts' as 'broadcast' or not. The interesting question is whether Canada wants Canadian content rules to apply to them or not. If the Canadian people do (as represented by their government), then its trivial to make it so by legislation.

This is not nitpicking, this is respecting the law as it was written.

Except that is nit-picking. The answer to the question of whether the CRTC has jurisdiction over netflix is a silly legal argument; the answer to which doesn't really matter in the slightest except as a passing interest to the directly involved parties.

It isn't that interesting because it doesn't really matter what the final answer is. If Canada want the answer to be "yes" then Canada will adjust the law accordingly.

So the only question that matters is whether or not Canada wants the answer to be yes or no.

Let's backtrack to Econ 101:

That usually results in oversimplifying the problem.

This causes the market price of the good (food, here) to fall.

The dominant cost is already transportation. Literally tons of food is ALREADY being wasted / thrown out / and left to rot. Its not because it isn't cheap enough to produce, but because transporting it isn't cheap enough to get it to where its needed.

If this is successfully argued, could it then be argued that there is no reason why there are any country restrictions on streaming any sort of media since it isn't "broadcasting"?

This fixation on whether or not its 'broadcasting' is just a distraction. If the governments wants to regulate streaming video it will just revise the legislation granting the regulatory body authority over streaming video within the country.

Then what's Netflix/Google going to do?

Think about it. If netflix gets a pass, then Bell/Telus/Shaw just have to switch from a 'broadcast model' to a 'streaming model' and then they too will be exempt from Canadian Content rules. And they are on the verge of launching their own streaming services as we speak ... hell they all 3 already offer video on demand libraries.

The result is that eventually nobody will "broadcast" anything, and the canadian content rules will be mooted.

The end game is either

a) that the CRTC will be granted regulatory oversight on streaming video providers operating in Canada to enforce Canadian content guidelines in some fashion on all operators.

or

b) that the rules on Canadian content will be repealed entirely on all forms of video distribution.

Dithering about whether or not streaming is a form of broadcasting for the purposes of canadian content rules is just splitting hairs, and is lawyering for the sake of lawyering. If netflix "wins" then Canada can just change the CRTC mandate at the stroke of a pen to include them anyway.

The only argument worth having is within Canada with Canadians to decide whether Canadian content rules are desirable or not. If they are, then apply them to streaming service operators. If they are not, then get rid of them.

Its that simple.

I take this to mean that if you can reboot the thing, which you can always do by letting the battery run flat and then charging it, you can access the device without the passphrase

After a reboot I can login either by fingerprint or by passphrase. With the iphone my understanding is that the passphrase must be used the first time before it will allow a fingerprint.

Again, I am not sure exactly what exactly the real security advantage of that is though.

I use a longer passcode on my phone than 4 characters, but not even close to 40.

On a phone keypad I'd rather enter a phrase then a complicated shorter password due to the clutzyness of smartphone keyboards and the tedious of switching cases, and accessing punctuation symbols.

If you need to use bad/broken logic to justify the use of something, it probably does not deserve justification.

10-12 characters, including numbers and punctuation marks would still be beyond annoying to have to enter every time I access my phone.