The value, if you can call it that, is the vetting. The publisher is willing to invest in an author, so there *may* be something to their writing. They allow me to concentrate on a dozen rather than hundreds of candidates. The problem with self-publishing is the lack of a reliable filter.

This is essentially form of marketing. It allows me to find a publication that would have been otherwise effectively buried and never even heard of. In this context marketing adds value not just to the author but to me as a consumer as well.

You could also take the opposite spin on this: There is no secure internet access to begin with so why wouldn't you choose faster connection over more secure, but still compromised connection? Use SSL, TLS, SSH and the like where you need to be secure and assume that everything else is compromised. Why would one assume that their ISP is secure? Always assume that somebody is eavesdropping the connection, or running an active MITM against you, and consider if your mitigation actions are sufficient?

Would I consider TLS with SHA-1 to be sufficient for accessing Slashdot over potentially compromised network? Yes. In worst case my Slashdot account would be compromised, no big deal.

Would I consider the same to be sufficient for the company payment interface? No, I wouldn't.

My experience on this is that you need 'DevOps' to run the development environments but you need production ops to run, eh, production.

DevOps people don't necessarily have good understanding of the underlying issues of the production environment. There are several issues revolving around this: Security, availability, scalability, etc. As an example is dev who can secure the application but not the platform (database, web servers and so on).

Good handovers between the two are the key for success. If 'DevOps' changes the development environment in a significant way this needs to be taken into account when moving the version to production. Oh, you upgraded the database in development environment? I guess that explains why RTP failed and we had to roll back.

Some changes may be very simple to do in development environment, while difficult in production environment. Need some extra disk and upgrade your database backend? Sure, just get it done in the development environment but there may some issues when doing that in production environment; you may need unacceptable amount of downtime, etc...

I'm not sure about the currency you got there, but it doesn't really matter: 100 currency units is cheap for 3-5 hours of flying, no matter what currency! I'd have to pay almost 3-5 times more than that for flying.

On the other hand 100 EUR will get me 3-5 skydives in Europe or 100 USD will get me 3-5 skydives in US.

Because my "service provider" charges me my first born son for roaming data.