At first I thought, "years of hard work"? How can this be when clones fill up the store in a matter of days? Doesn't seem like it is that much work. Then I thought, well perhaps designer spends years designing a game with all sorts of clever ideas then copiers use them all a few days after release. I have to ask, though, is this what happens? Surely a game must spend some time before becoming popular enough to copy, during which it builds a following and has first mover advantage. Copiers can't copy those advantages. It seems like it is still worth doing to many since folks are still making games for these platforms.

In the USA at least, as I was recently schooled on another thread, local monopolies are forbidden by federal law. Now exorbitant fees are a different matter.

Yes, that is my point. The current business model is not the only one. Who knows, maybe they would finance the things with different merchandising deals. No single person is capable of knowing everything that is or isn't possible. How much of the cost goes into the actors salaries? I don't know, but I'll bet there is a whole lot of wiggle room there.

I think you are wrong to suppose you are capable of predicting what is or is not possible. History is full of examples of people figuring out ways to do things that many others dismissed as impossible. I don't know what the field might look like either.

"as we currently know them" is the key phrase here. No one in the current production chain has any right to keep their job at everyone else's expense, any more than blacksmiths and farriers did. Now, would movies, good and bad, still get made if copying was perfectly legal? Yes, although the field would no doubt be very different than what we currently know.

Yes THEY are all retards, aren't they? Or at least, that is a major plank of the youtard platform.

Priceless!

When dealing with a telco, I just told them I wasn't going to pay anymore and this phone call constituted their notice. Then off I went. Of course, I didn't care about the fallout when they tried to pursue collections and did their credit reporting thing. I understand that not everyone is able or willing to take that hit. It didn't affect me at all.

That is really interesting, thanks for this correction! I am inconvenienced by having to reassess my opinions, but I do not blame you for this. ;-)

It really depends on how it is done. If the rep says "You know with your usage this other plan would provide the same options and be $10 less" (I know, when would that really happen) or "I see you are close to the limit, for $10 more you would get the next biggest tier", I would agree that there is no problem. If they go overboard and start yammering about "get our phone service for just $50 more!" on a call about Internet service then I'll have a problem.

No, those rights are not available to other providers, that is part of the problem. Typically the local governments grant a monopoly to one provider and keeps out all others, in exchange for some consideration from the cable operators. This is one reason why Comcast and Time Warner don't directly compete in any areas.

Yes, the summary's idea that one could get a heart transplant with faked records is baloney. But there are a lot of simpler health care interactions which are easier to get with faked records, such as basic prescriptions. And it's not much harder to monetize, you do it the same way you do credit cards. Those marketplaces are well established for both CC info and health info, in many cases they are the same place.

I work the other side of this scenario, and while you are right for the most part (IDS technology sucks and should never be used) what you describe is an elaborate and costly setup that a minority of organizations could implement and even fewer could do effectively. It seems to me that a much more effective approach would be to limit the value (i.e. risk) of the information available to an attacker. Instead of taking extra measure to protect SSNs, ask if we even need to store them at all. I've seen a lot of incidents where I had to ask things like 'Why does this database have all this information in it when you only need three fields?' I'm not saying we should simply accept intrusion but vulnerability is infinite so moving to reduce the value of an intrusion to reduce the reward for attackers might be more effective than fruitlessly striving for perfect defense.

Given that the hospital's information is shared with all sorts of insurers, coding and transcription services, government agencies, services that comb the records looking for more insurance claims or more profitable claims, and so on, I have to say that these guys came really late to the party.

What does "for profit" have to do with cutting costs or other IT failures? Are you claiming that the "not for profit" or "non profit" hospitals are more diligent?