Yes, that makes sense in most fields, but not medicine. I'd be absolutely horrified if medical researchers weren't looking at the newest research. That's like 75% of their job!
Yeah, I hate it when a government siphons money away. I find it completely baffling when they just take money out of the economy like that and throw it in a big hole and bury it.
If people are buying things based on ads that is the doctor's fault.
Of course, the pharmaceutical industry has totally corrupted doctors. 'You heard of that product on TV? Why, yes, I'll give you a prescription for it, even though I could easily write you one for a more proven generic medicine that's cheaper.'.
We need to totally divorce research from manufacturing, and we need to stop advertising totally for any prescription drug. If we've already decided it's not legal to let people purchase the drug, why the hell do we allow advertising to them?
This is how the industry should work:
There's a lab. It can be government, or private. When it comes up with something it thinks is a good idea, it hands the drugs to the FDA, along with enough money for the tests and a patent if it is a private company.
The FDA tests it. Maybe we can privatize the testing for cheaper, maybe not. We set strict rules about what the lab is required to find, and if the lab fails to do so, they are liable. The lab gets paid exactly the same no matter what they find, if a private lab. (If it clears all testing, and some completely random and unexpected side effect surfaces, OTOH, no one is to blame.)
If it passes tests, the patent holder, if any, can set royalty prices, and then anyone can manufacture it. The patent holder can't keep it from market, they can't offer different prices, they can't even manufacture it themselves. All that can say 'For each 500 mg you make, we get X cents.'
What does this accomplish? Well, the people selling the drugs suddenly have an incentive to sell the cheapest, unpatented stuff. (Yes, yes, for as much as they can, but where there is competition, prices are low.) Without advertising, no one would even hear of the more expensive stuff that wasn't any better.
And it allows much fairer collaborations between academia and private companies. 'Sure, we'll patent that thing we're working on. We'll take 50% of the royalties, also.' Which sounds only fair, but all too often private companies walk off with the entire patent. By actually having everything out in black and white, it's easier to see what's going on.
To clarify, all particles have mass, and this mass turns into energy as they go faster, turning completely to energy at the speed of light. Mass is measured at 'rest'. (That is, in the same frame of reference as the particle.)
Since photons, by defination, cannot go slower than the speed of light, the amount of mass they have is the amount of mass they would have if stopped. Or, to put it another way, it's the amount of mass they would have if you could measure their mass while traveling at the speed of light.
Which is why it's called 'virtual mass', as you can't actually do either of those. All you can do is calculate the mass from the energy of the photon. (Which, as another post pointed out, is set by the frequency.)
Well, yeah, one kilogram will always be one kilogram. They could define a kilogram as 'the weight of the sun', and 'one kilogram' would still be 'one kilogram'.
I think you mean 'things that formerly massed one kilogram would continue to do so'. (Barring any relativitistic changes in mass, of course.)
I didn't assume you're a bible tumper, I assumed bible thumpers were the ones pushing the ban on funding, which they were.
And, am I to then believe that you're against IVF totally? If so, don't hide behind stem cells. Get out there and complain about IVF.
And here's a fun one: Instead of IVF, what if we got stem cells by detesting pregnancy (currently impossibly) early, when the fertilized egg splits in half, going in, and taking one cell out, leaving the other? Which then would just split again, none the wiser.
What if we wait until it's sixteen cells, and just take one? Is that morally equal to maiming someone? What if we put that cell elsewhere in the womb, let it grow to sixteen cells, and then take it out? Did it turn back into killing?
You know, there's a slipperly slope with abortion that's been used for decades by the religious right, and it's fun to be able to use the same one backwards. By asserting that sixteen cells that live in a tube are a person, they open up the door to all sorts of silliness.
That's why I refuse to use the term 'identity theft'. That's newspeak to make it about you, where you are the victim. But they didn't steal a damn thing from you.
They defrauded a bank.
The bank then turned around and started illegally harrassing you because they were incompetant.
People need to start bring suits against the criminals at the banks that persist in blaming us for the bank opening accounts for other people in our name, which is, at the minimun, slander. Which then leads to harrassment.
And if they take any action against you once they know of their mistake, like asking you to do a bunch of stuff before the mark is removed from your credit report, that's extortion.
Well, I think the obvious solution to stop customers from being hurt by lawsuits against their bank is for them to stop being the customer of a damn bank that loses their personal information.
No they can't. At least not without reimplimenting Wine. Window drivers are too tied to their API. They have dialog boxes and use the messaging system and all sorts of stupid shit, which is exactly what happens when you let hardware manufacturers write code. Think about how many 9x drivers you can't use in XP. (OTOH, you can trivially port NDIS network drivers, and in fact there's a program to run them under Linux already. But NDIS drivers can't do any Windows stuff, because they date from the DOS era, and they don't exist for a lot of hardware.)
Meanwhile, Linux driver code is almost always 'owned' by the kernel devs, aka, it's GPL, and it's in the kernel. It 'automatically' stays current(1) (If devs change the API they will change the driver), it's not going to disappear when the manufacturer goes under, it's been subjected to at least an overview by the kernel hackers, and it can't under any circumstances use libc. You can port them to other kernels in very short periods of time.
1) People don't realize the amount of old hardware that's not supported anymore in Windows. PNP ISA Ethernet cards, for example. Pre-VGA monitors. Some SCSI cards. Older scanners. Some USB network cables, for God's sake. Because the manufacturer hasn't updated any drivers, usually because they are out of business.
Linux, meanwhile, will happily copy MFM drives to 5.25 floppies while networking using Appletalk over a crossover serial-cable network connected via a serial ISA card, using an EGA monitor, on a 386 with 6 megs of RAM, because it used to be able to do those things, and there's no point in removing them.
And, you know, the real gag is, because they're stem cells, we could just split them in half, let one half grow up to be a person, and do research on the other half. (Aka, what happens with identical twins.)
I'm sure that would somehow magically be immoral also, though. There's probably a verse in the bible about not cleaving your embryos in half.
In fact, I suspect it's immoral that we don't duplicate every fertilized cell in IVF a dozen times, and have everyone be a set of identical dodecatuplits. I mean, those people could have existed.
So, instead, you'd rather the embryos get sent down the drain?
Or are you offering to be implanted with leftover IVF embryos?
You know, the point to have this fucking moral debate was when we invented IVF and they started making four embyros and only implanting one and throwing the rest away. Pretending that there's suddenly some new moral issue about using the stem cells, instead of throwing them away, is completely absurd.
Any moral issue is the extra life we're creating that we know we'll throw away. If people start going to IVF clinics to make embyros to get stem cells made, well, fine. Complain then. Don't complain about medical research that's from, basically, medical waste. Complain about the creation!
And pretending that life starts at sixteen cells is absurd, and if they're alive, there's some serious malpractice to be had against IVF clinics, because something like a third of them 'don't take' and thus DIE. If you lose a third of your patients, you're a fairly crappy doctor.
Of course, that's actually a rather lower rate than embryos that get created naturally (Because IVF embryos, at least, get implanted at the right time of the month.), and thus God has some pretty serious explaining to do about why over half the 'people' who've ever existed die before a first month is over.
Or you can realize that a clump of cells lacking a brain, a brainstem, a head, a heart, lungs, arms, legs, or even a fucking torso are not people, anymore than your cuticle is a person. I don't know when a person become a person, but I would rather suspect it would be past 'able to see with the naked eye'.
And 'they could become life' doesn't cut it, because, like I said, more than half the people who could 'become' do not, in fact, do so, and IVF embryos sitting in a test tube are rather unlikely to spontaneously become adults.
Re:But it can be confusing, and can break security
on
Firefox 1.0.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
It's only a problem because every single damn broswer has implemented the back button incorrectly since the dawn of time.
The standard clearly says that going back and forth should not reload the page. You should be able to page like it's a book.
And, if banks care about this, they're on crack. First of all, people don't expect things to change when they go back and forth. If people flip back to before a transaction, they rather expect it not to have happened. People do not map backwards and forwards to space, they map it to time. (If they did map it to space, it would be screwed up anyway, because you can magically go in circles while walking forward and backward.)
Second, having them change causes as much problems as otherwise. (Double posting, double 'delete fourth record', etc etc.)
Third, if they really want to stop it, they could use a meta tag saying not to cache the page. Um, duh.
Actually, while he's accurating quoting Aleister, he's sorta missing the point. Aleister wasn't saying 'You should do whatever you want', he's more saying 'Doing whatever you want is all that exists'.
It's not some sort of incitment to anarchy, it's the claim that everyone is completely free, and there is nothing else. Everyone who thinks they aren't free to do whatever they want is simply mistaken.
So, yeah, the quote is accurate, but the sentiment isn't really.
No. It's not possible. Under any realistic circumstances.
To shoot a laser through hundreds of miles of air and have it be powerful enough to even slightly affect a satellite (And I'm talking about screwing up the images here, which might works because the imaging system is so sensitive.), would require a huge amount of resources, and an amazing power supply. It's doable by any nation that can send thing into space, but, at that point, you have to start wondering why they don't fire a damn missile at it.
To disable a satellite? That's an absurd amount of energy. If you didn't have a nuclear reactor, I guess you could build one into a power plant or something. But there's no fucking point. It's like trying to design a surface-to-air screwdrive for taking airplanes apart in midair. Shot a missile at it and stop screwing around.
We're talking laser's that are heavier to haul around than nuclear missiles, require more power when used than a city of a million people do at the same time, and can be disabled with a frickin handgun. And the only concept people have come up with require large amounts of really exotic materials. This is not a militarily useful concept.
I mean, if we could build lasers that could do that, we would. But we can't even build lasers we can mount on tanks and use to shoot soldiers or other tanks.
Every day at 4, the Mayfield guy would come in, move any milk he wanted in and out of the fridge, hand me a receipt, I'd count the gallons on the dolly in and on the dolly out, and sign it, and then I'd print off something the register and hand him a receipt, and he'd walk out of there with however much milk he chose, leaving however much he chose.
Now, legally, I don't know 'whose' milk it was. All I knew is that we kept track of it for him, and he could do anything he wanted to the milk. He decided how much was in the freezer, he decided to take things off the shelf, he carried it in and out (I just witnessed it), he was in total charge of all Mayfield products, which was basically just milk. Unlike almost every other item in the store, it was not ours to do with as we willed.
A funnier gag was that some one figured out the ATM network did that. Give an invalid account number and PIN, get locked out of that account for X amount of time.
So they just used one PIN and brute forced the account numbers that used it.
The milk company can prevent that, but not for the reason you think. They can prevent that because almost all store have a contract with the milk company. They don't buy the milk and resell it, they let the dairy put the milk on the shelf, they get a cut of the profits, and the dairy comes in every day and takes expired milk back and puts in missing milk. The store cannot sell expired milk because it's still the dairy's milk until they sell it.
If a store just goes out and purchases 10 gallons of milk and puts it on the shelf...no, the milk company could not prevent the resell.
Of course, it would be illegal, but that's for health reasons, not 'might damage your printer' reasons. It's not illegal to sell products that people can use to damage their printer, whereas it is illegal to sell 'food' that people cannot safely eat.
I didn't say there weren't any differences in blade technology, I said there weren't any advances. Gillette hasn't invented some super-duper method of making razor blades, even if their blades are better. They're using technology that's been around decades at least, and possibly thousands of years. In fact, I'm sure all razor blade makers are using the same process, some are just less careful about it.
If anything, razor blades technology has gone downhill. You used to be able to buy blades that you could sharpen, and people did sharpen, and now they're stuck in plastic and you can't.
You also, a long time ago, used to be able to buy ones that 'never needed sharpening', although 'never' was rather subjective. Unless the thing's made of diamond, it's going to need sharpening at some point. They meant for 100 years or so.
I agree with you, but I think there's something you aren't considering:
With public wifi, the costs are an internet connection, and various adapters. (Don't have to pay for locations, businesses love having a free wifi connection in their business.)
With for pay, you added 'billing', and 'keeping track of who paid their bill', and all sorts of crap.
Sticking up a public network might cost, oh, 300 dollars a month, with a startup cost of 5000 dollars. (Probably need a system admin, but, then again, they probably already have an IT guy for the government. Or just have the local high school students volunter to run it.) This is trivially within reach of any town over 200 people.
Now add billing, and someone to keep track of it. Well, you could do that with income tax, except people don't pay local income tax. There are going to have to be bills sent.
Now add the fact that keeping track of the people on the network is now a full time job...you need to keep track of MAC addresses or logins or something, and match those up with the billing.
I mean, you've at least tripled the cost. You've probably added another full-time staff, and you've turned it into a business.
I mean, imagine the street in front of your house, and all those people who don't use it. Imagine all the streets that you don't use, and how you pay for them. Now imagine that the government could keep track of who used what streets, at least statistically, and just billed everyone for their existimated useage...that would cost a lot more than just having the streets.
Sometimes, just doing things for everyone is a hell of a lot cheaper than billing people for them. Yes, people without computers will pay for people who have them, but people in cities paied for phone lines in the country, and people without cars pay for roads, people without children pay for schools, etc, etc. A wifi broadband connection is peanuts compared to one road being built on the other side of the state, which you pay for all the time.
OTOH, my local touristy city has an open wifi network on the square that I think was setup by the Chamber of Commerce. Or just three or four businesses on the square working together. (Of course, I'm talking about a football field worth of coverage here, not a city.)
The government shouldn't use tax money to compete with private industry. Or, to put it another way: If they get tax money, the private industry should get tax money.
Well, I'm all for a private industry putting up a free wifi network, and I'd be perfectly willing to pay taxes for that.:)
The cops do routinely say 'ah, screw it' when confronted with, no pun intended, prostitution.
Logically speaking, there should be almost no illegal prositution anywhere. Unlike drugs, you can't have an underground distribution network where all cops can get is the end dealer. The customer must have access to the source. And like all victimless crimes, it requires two people finding each other, unlike other crimes, where just the criminal has to find the victim.
There is almost no way to operate that business underground. Yes, in theory, you could have only refererals from trusted sources, and customers being searched for wires and blindfolded and driven somewhere else...but, at that point, there would be exactly ten prostitutes employed in the country, and they would cost $50,000 an hour.
Ergo, if cops want to stop prostitution, they could. Without spending a lot of money or time.
If they were willing to commit entrapment, they could do it a lot faster. Yes, they can't prosecute someone after entrapping them, but they can certainly haul them in for questioning. And then entrap them with a different officer two hours later when they show back up the street, and haul them in again, etc...
Start doing the same thing with the customers, too, and frankly prostitution would disappear in a two days. It would be too much hassles,and, for the customers, too much embarrassment. If you randomly make every third person on the street a cop, it's over.
The only reason I can think of that they don't do this is not the revenue (If they wanted the revenue, taxation would be a lot better avenue there.), but so they have some minor criminals they can roundup and threaten when looking for important criminals.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that makes sense in most fields, but not medicine. I'd be absolutely horrified if medical researchers weren't looking at the newest research. That's like 75% of their job!
Oh, wait, no they don't.
Of course, the pharmaceutical industry has totally corrupted doctors. 'You heard of that product on TV? Why, yes, I'll give you a prescription for it, even though I could easily write you one for a more proven generic medicine that's cheaper.'.
We need to totally divorce research from manufacturing, and we need to stop advertising totally for any prescription drug. If we've already decided it's not legal to let people purchase the drug, why the hell do we allow advertising to them?
This is how the industry should work:
There's a lab. It can be government, or private. When it comes up with something it thinks is a good idea, it hands the drugs to the FDA, along with enough money for the tests and a patent if it is a private company.
The FDA tests it. Maybe we can privatize the testing for cheaper, maybe not. We set strict rules about what the lab is required to find, and if the lab fails to do so, they are liable. The lab gets paid exactly the same no matter what they find, if a private lab. (If it clears all testing, and some completely random and unexpected side effect surfaces, OTOH, no one is to blame.)
If it passes tests, the patent holder, if any, can set royalty prices, and then anyone can manufacture it. The patent holder can't keep it from market, they can't offer different prices, they can't even manufacture it themselves. All that can say 'For each 500 mg you make, we get X cents.'
What does this accomplish? Well, the people selling the drugs suddenly have an incentive to sell the cheapest, unpatented stuff. (Yes, yes, for as much as they can, but where there is competition, prices are low.) Without advertising, no one would even hear of the more expensive stuff that wasn't any better.
And it allows much fairer collaborations between academia and private companies. 'Sure, we'll patent that thing we're working on. We'll take 50% of the royalties, also.' Which sounds only fair, but all too often private companies walk off with the entire patent. By actually having everything out in black and white, it's easier to see what's going on.
Since photons, by defination, cannot go slower than the speed of light, the amount of mass they have is the amount of mass they would have if stopped. Or, to put it another way, it's the amount of mass they would have if you could measure their mass while traveling at the speed of light.
Which is why it's called 'virtual mass', as you can't actually do either of those. All you can do is calculate the mass from the energy of the photon. (Which, as another post pointed out, is set by the frequency.)
I think you mean 'things that formerly massed one kilogram would continue to do so'. (Barring any relativitistic changes in mass, of course.)
It'd just be listed as '1'. Just...'1'.
And, am I to then believe that you're against IVF totally? If so, don't hide behind stem cells. Get out there and complain about IVF.
And here's a fun one: Instead of IVF, what if we got stem cells by detesting pregnancy (currently impossibly) early, when the fertilized egg splits in half, going in, and taking one cell out, leaving the other? Which then would just split again, none the wiser.
What if we wait until it's sixteen cells, and just take one? Is that morally equal to maiming someone? What if we put that cell elsewhere in the womb, let it grow to sixteen cells, and then take it out? Did it turn back into killing?
You know, there's a slipperly slope with abortion that's been used for decades by the religious right, and it's fun to be able to use the same one backwards. By asserting that sixteen cells that live in a tube are a person, they open up the door to all sorts of silliness.
They defrauded a bank.
The bank then turned around and started illegally harrassing you because they were incompetant.
People need to start bring suits against the criminals at the banks that persist in blaming us for the bank opening accounts for other people in our name, which is, at the minimun, slander. Which then leads to harrassment.
And if they take any action against you once they know of their mistake, like asking you to do a bunch of stuff before the mark is removed from your credit report, that's extortion.
Um, duh.
Meanwhile, Linux driver code is almost always 'owned' by the kernel devs, aka, it's GPL, and it's in the kernel. It 'automatically' stays current(1) (If devs change the API they will change the driver), it's not going to disappear when the manufacturer goes under, it's been subjected to at least an overview by the kernel hackers, and it can't under any circumstances use libc. You can port them to other kernels in very short periods of time.
1) People don't realize the amount of old hardware that's not supported anymore in Windows. PNP ISA Ethernet cards, for example. Pre-VGA monitors. Some SCSI cards. Older scanners. Some USB network cables, for God's sake. Because the manufacturer hasn't updated any drivers, usually because they are out of business.
Linux, meanwhile, will happily copy MFM drives to 5.25 floppies while networking using Appletalk over a crossover serial-cable network connected via a serial ISA card, using an EGA monitor, on a 386 with 6 megs of RAM, because it used to be able to do those things, and there's no point in removing them.
I'm sure that would somehow magically be immoral also, though. There's probably a verse in the bible about not cleaving your embryos in half.
In fact, I suspect it's immoral that we don't duplicate every fertilized cell in IVF a dozen times, and have everyone be a set of identical dodecatuplits. I mean, those people could have existed.
Or are you offering to be implanted with leftover IVF embryos?
You know, the point to have this fucking moral debate was when we invented IVF and they started making four embyros and only implanting one and throwing the rest away. Pretending that there's suddenly some new moral issue about using the stem cells, instead of throwing them away, is completely absurd.
Any moral issue is the extra life we're creating that we know we'll throw away. If people start going to IVF clinics to make embyros to get stem cells made, well, fine. Complain then. Don't complain about medical research that's from, basically, medical waste. Complain about the creation!
And pretending that life starts at sixteen cells is absurd, and if they're alive, there's some serious malpractice to be had against IVF clinics, because something like a third of them 'don't take' and thus DIE. If you lose a third of your patients, you're a fairly crappy doctor.
Of course, that's actually a rather lower rate than embryos that get created naturally (Because IVF embryos, at least, get implanted at the right time of the month.), and thus God has some pretty serious explaining to do about why over half the 'people' who've ever existed die before a first month is over.
Or you can realize that a clump of cells lacking a brain, a brainstem, a head, a heart, lungs, arms, legs, or even a fucking torso are not people, anymore than your cuticle is a person. I don't know when a person become a person, but I would rather suspect it would be past 'able to see with the naked eye'.
And 'they could become life' doesn't cut it, because, like I said, more than half the people who could 'become' do not, in fact, do so, and IVF embryos sitting in a test tube are rather unlikely to spontaneously become adults.
The standard clearly says that going back and forth should not reload the page. You should be able to page like it's a book.
And, if banks care about this, they're on crack. First of all, people don't expect things to change when they go back and forth. If people flip back to before a transaction, they rather expect it not to have happened. People do not map backwards and forwards to space, they map it to time. (If they did map it to space, it would be screwed up anyway, because you can magically go in circles while walking forward and backward.)
Second, having them change causes as much problems as otherwise. (Double posting, double 'delete fourth record', etc etc.)
Third, if they really want to stop it, they could use a meta tag saying not to cache the page. Um, duh.
It's very much in theory, as a lot of computers don't hit 400MB/s no matter what is used.
It's not some sort of incitment to anarchy, it's the claim that everyone is completely free, and there is nothing else. Everyone who thinks they aren't free to do whatever they want is simply mistaken.
So, yeah, the quote is accurate, but the sentiment isn't really.
To shoot a laser through hundreds of miles of air and have it be powerful enough to even slightly affect a satellite (And I'm talking about screwing up the images here, which might works because the imaging system is so sensitive.), would require a huge amount of resources, and an amazing power supply. It's doable by any nation that can send thing into space, but, at that point, you have to start wondering why they don't fire a damn missile at it.
To disable a satellite? That's an absurd amount of energy. If you didn't have a nuclear reactor, I guess you could build one into a power plant or something. But there's no fucking point. It's like trying to design a surface-to-air screwdrive for taking airplanes apart in midair. Shot a missile at it and stop screwing around.
We're talking laser's that are heavier to haul around than nuclear missiles, require more power when used than a city of a million people do at the same time, and can be disabled with a frickin handgun. And the only concept people have come up with require large amounts of really exotic materials. This is not a militarily useful concept.
I mean, if we could build lasers that could do that, we would. But we can't even build lasers we can mount on tanks and use to shoot soldiers or other tanks.
Every day at 4, the Mayfield guy would come in, move any milk he wanted in and out of the fridge, hand me a receipt, I'd count the gallons on the dolly in and on the dolly out, and sign it, and then I'd print off something the register and hand him a receipt, and he'd walk out of there with however much milk he chose, leaving however much he chose.
Now, legally, I don't know 'whose' milk it was. All I knew is that we kept track of it for him, and he could do anything he wanted to the milk. He decided how much was in the freezer, he decided to take things off the shelf, he carried it in and out (I just witnessed it), he was in total charge of all Mayfield products, which was basically just milk. Unlike almost every other item in the store, it was not ours to do with as we willed.
In Firefox, you can use Ctrl + and Ctrl - to change the size also.
So they just used one PIN and brute forced the account numbers that used it.
If a store just goes out and purchases 10 gallons of milk and puts it on the shelf...no, the milk company could not prevent the resell.
Of course, it would be illegal, but that's for health reasons, not 'might damage your printer' reasons. It's not illegal to sell products that people can use to damage their printer, whereas it is illegal to sell 'food' that people cannot safely eat.
If anything, razor blades technology has gone downhill. You used to be able to buy blades that you could sharpen, and people did sharpen, and now they're stuck in plastic and you can't.
You also, a long time ago, used to be able to buy ones that 'never needed sharpening', although 'never' was rather subjective. Unless the thing's made of diamond, it's going to need sharpening at some point. They meant for 100 years or so.
A lot of 'thinking' is rationalizing actions we're already in the middle of doing.
With public wifi, the costs are an internet connection, and various adapters. (Don't have to pay for locations, businesses love having a free wifi connection in their business.)
With for pay, you added 'billing', and 'keeping track of who paid their bill', and all sorts of crap.
Sticking up a public network might cost, oh, 300 dollars a month, with a startup cost of 5000 dollars. (Probably need a system admin, but, then again, they probably already have an IT guy for the government. Or just have the local high school students volunter to run it.) This is trivially within reach of any town over 200 people.
Now add billing, and someone to keep track of it. Well, you could do that with income tax, except people don't pay local income tax. There are going to have to be bills sent.
Now add the fact that keeping track of the people on the network is now a full time job...you need to keep track of MAC addresses or logins or something, and match those up with the billing.
I mean, you've at least tripled the cost. You've probably added another full-time staff, and you've turned it into a business.
I mean, imagine the street in front of your house, and all those people who don't use it. Imagine all the streets that you don't use, and how you pay for them. Now imagine that the government could keep track of who used what streets, at least statistically, and just billed everyone for their existimated useage...that would cost a lot more than just having the streets.
Sometimes, just doing things for everyone is a hell of a lot cheaper than billing people for them. Yes, people without computers will pay for people who have them, but people in cities paied for phone lines in the country, and people without cars pay for roads, people without children pay for schools, etc, etc. A wifi broadband connection is peanuts compared to one road being built on the other side of the state, which you pay for all the time.
OTOH, my local touristy city has an open wifi network on the square that I think was setup by the Chamber of Commerce. Or just three or four businesses on the square working together. (Of course, I'm talking about a football field worth of coverage here, not a city.)
Well, I'm all for a private industry putting up a free wifi network, and I'd be perfectly willing to pay taxes for that. :)
Logically speaking, there should be almost no illegal prositution anywhere. Unlike drugs, you can't have an underground distribution network where all cops can get is the end dealer. The customer must have access to the source. And like all victimless crimes, it requires two people finding each other, unlike other crimes, where just the criminal has to find the victim.
There is almost no way to operate that business underground. Yes, in theory, you could have only refererals from trusted sources, and customers being searched for wires and blindfolded and driven somewhere else...but, at that point, there would be exactly ten prostitutes employed in the country, and they would cost $50,000 an hour.
Ergo, if cops want to stop prostitution, they could. Without spending a lot of money or time.
If they were willing to commit entrapment, they could do it a lot faster. Yes, they can't prosecute someone after entrapping them, but they can certainly haul them in for questioning. And then entrap them with a different officer two hours later when they show back up the street, and haul them in again, etc...
Start doing the same thing with the customers, too, and frankly prostitution would disappear in a two days. It would be too much hassles,and, for the customers, too much embarrassment. If you randomly make every third person on the street a cop, it's over.
The only reason I can think of that they don't do this is not the revenue (If they wanted the revenue, taxation would be a lot better avenue there.), but so they have some minor criminals they can roundup and threaten when looking for important criminals.