Good luck finding a citation for that, because that $2B number came directly out of someone's posterior. Amazon has long frustrated investors by not breaking out revenue numbers for AWS. Instead, they lump AWS in with all of Amazon's other side businesses as "other revenue".
IFF she took the risk knowingly, she reasonably cannot be mad that someone hacked because reasonable people who take risks don't blame others when they get unlucky.
I think that this is where we disagree and probably will never agree.
From my point of view, if someone is driving recklessly/illegally and hits me while I'm on my bike, I certainly will be pissed and blame that person for his/her negligence. Based on this, I think it's fair of Lawrence to be pissed and blame the unknown person who hacked her iCloud account (definitely illegal) and distributed private photos of her (probably a copyright violation). In both cases, the negative outcome was due to someone else's illegal and immoral behavior. This was not due to an accident like your examples were (bungee jumping, surgery complications, etc.)
Sure, we both could have prevented our respective negative outcomes. But just as I wouldn't want someone to visit me in the hospital and tell me I shouldn't have been riding a bike, I'm not prepared to tell Lawrence that she shouldn't sext with a romantic partner. And this is coming from someone who does not personally sext.
We know Lawrence took a stupid risk - we are not blaming her for getting unlucky - we are blaming her for taking the risk which was not worth it from our point of view. And if it was worth it from her point of view, she shouldn't be complaining.
How does the fact that she is complaining about it make it a stupid risk? What if I was riding my bike and some soccer mom was simultaneously texting, applying eye makeup, and screaming at her kids while driving, swerved her minivan into me and hit me, can't I complain that she was not paying attention to the road, driving in violation of several traffic laws? Because I can tell you right now that I would complain about her actions in such a scenario.
And so why can't Lawrence be mad that someone hacked her iCloud account and leaked obviously private photos of her to the public?
If you're not prepared to tell me that I'm stupid for riding my bike, then why are you so quick to say that Lawrence is stupid for sexting with her boyfriend?
Right, but that's still not what happened here, and bringing it up in this case is both TMI and prevarication.
TMI? All I said was that I was present in a hot tub without the benefit of a swimsuit. If you imputed anything other than "he was relaxing, minding his own business" into my statement, then that is your own wild imagination getting carried away. Anyway, if the above was too much info about me for your liking, you have my express invitation to mentally substitute the words "someone who I know very well" in place of "I" in my example.
Also, your accusation of prevarication is unfounded. My having brought up the incident where I was photographed without my permission was in response to gandhi_2, when he said, "Do not allow those photos to be taken. Do not allow them to exist." My response is that's not always possible to maintain 100% vigilance 24/7/365 for the entire duration of your life, and that you often can't control the actions of others. To be clear, my response was never in reference to Jennifer Lawrence and the leak of her nude photographs. Neither was it in reference to the snapchat photo leaks.
It's still true that if you don't want people to see naked pictures of you that you shouldn't take them, and if you must take them then you must keep them safely hidden away.
And this is exactly what OP was disagreeing with, and for once, I think Hazelton got it right.
Here's a better example: I've gone skydiving (fully clothed!). People sometimes die skydiving. Just as Lawrence did not want her nude photos to be leaked to the public, neither did I wish to die skydiving, yet I dove anyway. What possessed me to do such a stupid thing as skydiving if I was not comfortable with the idea of being killed in the process? The same calculation that Lawrence made: Expected Benefit > (Potential Negative Outcome * Likelihood of Negative Outcome). I knew that skydiving was going to be a lot of fun (it was), and that the likelihood of death was very very small (I survived). And so I went through with the skydive, despite the inherent risk in having done so.
Likewise, Lawrence wanted the cheap thrill of sending nudie pics to her boyfriend. Maybe she's an exhibitionist (she is an actress after all, so not so far fetched). Maybe was convinced to send the pics against her better judgment. Maybe she's telling the truth that she sent them to her boyfriend as a substitute for porn (as though grainy pics of boobs constitute porn in 2014 and as though she didn't have enough money to fly to wherever her long-distance boyfriend was and have intimate relations with him in-person). It doesn't matter. It's none of my business. But what we do know is that for her, Expected Benefit > (Potential Negative Outcome * Likelihood of Negative Outcome). Unfortunately for her, she was the unlucky one who got the negative outcome.
But that doesn't mean she's stupid, any more than I would have been considered stupid had my skydive ended in tragedy. The bad outcome has to happen to someone, and in this case, she was the unlucky one. Perhaps she didn't understand the risks, and I wouldn't necessarily fault her for that. Apple always claims that their iCloud is totally secure, and they continue to make these claims despite grainy proof to the contrary. You and I know better, but she probably knows more about acting than we do. Nobody can be a master of all trades.
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if she knew the risks and did it anyway for the thrill of it. And we can't really say that she made a bad decision just because hindsight showed that she happened to have been unlucky.
And I agree with you that the disclosure of naughty pictures should be a nonevent. Because, yeah. It's 2014.
Well, you can do a lot if you would stop frequenting orgies and stripping to the buff in the middle of the public library...
So... why shouldn't I be able to frequent an orgy and have a reasonable expectation that some drunken jackass won't take my picture? I mean, as long as everyone uses protection, seriously, what's wrong with an orgy?
I can only think of 2 places where I strip down to my birthday suit, and both of them are in my own house.
There are only a few places that I get naked on a regular basis: my home, and the gym locker room. But it's not like I've never been naked outside just for the thrill of it. Hell, even my straitlaced, nerdy wife went streaking once in college. I don't think it's reasonable to think that people will never, ever, ever be naked outside of their own homes.
But haven't you noticed that cheap thrills are fun? And in the end, aren't most of them pretty harmless? Or shouldn't they be?
I've done "soft" drugs, drank to excess, gone skydiving, bungee jumping, and things like that. All of these carry a small risk of a large disaster. Was I stupid to have done those? Or, like OP said, did I make a calculated risk, that the Thrill of jumping out of a plane would exceed Potential Disaster x Likelihood Of Disaster? Lawrence made that same calculation and came up on the losing end, but does that make her decision unwise, just because she was unlucky?
I've had unwanted nude photos taken of me in a hot tub by a drunken jackass (and he wouldn't dispute that characterization of himself). This shit happens sometimes. I don't really care that much about it, but given the choice, I'd rather that the photos not exist.
if you don't want people to see those photos, don't take those photos. Do not allow those photos to be taken. Do not allow them to exist.
I'd like to agree with you that it's that simple, I really would. But with the ubiquity of cellphone cameras, a lot of people find the thrill to be difficult to resist. Your advice would certainly be effective, but isn't it akin to telling teenagers to abstain from sex in order to protect themselves from STIs and pregnancy? What percentage of teens will follow this advice?
And your advice also relies on controlling the actions of others, which is notoriously difficult to accomplish with 100% effectiveness. Unless you make yourself crazy ensuring that you never appear naked near anyone who might have a camera (and everyone has a camera these days), you can't really guarantee that this will work. All it takes is a few seconds and whoops! Your photo is taken. Can you really prevent that 24/7/365 for every day of your life?
Hopefully, one day, people will chill the hell out about nakedness. I mean, we all have bodies. We're all naked from time to time. Why does this need to be such a big deal?
Sample size of 1, but my wife absolutely refused to do any type of programming when she graduated college. And it's not like she couldn't have learned, considering her math and science background. She just hated programming, and that was that.
I did not take AP Comp Sci for the following reasons:
It was taught in Pascal, which I had zero intention of learning
There was no room in my schedule due to other AP classes
The I had already taken a course with the AP CS teacher (Precalc), and the teacher and I had already collaboratively determined that we seriously despised each other
Like you, I found value in taking CS101 in college instead of in high school. I had already amassed enough AP credit to permit me to blow off college, so it's not like skipping AP CS was any big hole in my transcript.
Not the OP, but presumably the second download had a different URL, so I'm not sure that any web proxy would have known to cache the file because it was the same as the first one.
If I'm so shy of money that a coupon is worth the hassle (and, if it's an electronic coupon, further tracking) then I'll be putting the purchase off or buying it used anyway.
Oh, me too. I wouldn't buy something that I couldn't afford. But when given the choice to pay more for something or to pay less for it, I generally prefer to pay less.
But yeah, I wouldn't take the shitty ads that you see to be a sign that your efforts to avoid being profiled have been successful. Current state of the art in ad targeting is abysmal.
I doesn't matter how well-targeted the ads are -- ads are not a benefit to me at all.
Why not?
Example: About a month ago, I was looking to buy a pressure cooker. I did some searches, read some reviews, watched a few demo videos, etc. If an ad had popped up on Google or via adwords on the review site or YouTube with a store coupon for the pressure cooker I wanted, I would have been happy and would have clicked and bought and saved a few bucks!
But ads never seem to be that awesome. Amazon is still trying to sell me a pressure cooker even though they know damn well that I bought one and am happy with it (I wrote a positive review). I get ads for feminine hygiene products even though I'm a dude. I get ads for Microsoft shit on Slashdot because I guess MS just likes to waste money on a website that famously despises them.
Why are ads such garbage? Clearly computers can be useful in anticipating what I want, because Google Now is bloody awesome. If I search for a flight, it tells me when I have to leave for the airport to catch it. When I walk outside a building and look at a map, it tells me where I parked my car. It tells me when I need to leave for appointments. If I search for something a few times and there is related news on the topic, it shows up, and it knows which news sites I like to read. It's like Google Now knows me.
So why do Google (and other) ads just suck complete ass?
California was proposing to ban lathes? Where do you get that from TFA?
I read that they wanted to ban the act using a CNC to finish off an "80% Lower" without assigning it a serial number, but that the governor thought that this requirement wouldn't deter any criminals so he vetoed it.
I wouldn't even care about solving captchas if CloudFlare's captcha worked without JavaScript. But you need JavaScript to solve the captcha, and enabling it goes against Tor best practices, so that kinda blows.
I, also, buy with cash, even (especially?) products as expensive as cars.
Why? The last two cars I bought I took out a loan because the APR was something ungodly low like 0.9%. That's better than free money. You could use that cash to buy a 5 year CD and get an FDIC-guaranteed positive return on that.
Because if you don't heat hot water periodically, its temperature will eventually cool down until it reaches equilibrium with the ambient temperature in the room. It's this extraneous heating that I'd be trying to avoid with a smart hot water heater. It's wasteful to use energy to maintain 50 gallons of 110 degree water when nobody is home to use it.
I've coded in notepad before, in a pinch. Don't knock it 'till you've tried it!
Regarding where to enter the code, that will depend a bit on the programming language that you're using. For instance, if you're writing in Java, Eclipse or Netbeans would be a good choice. For ruby or python, emacs is nice. Any decent introductory book on the language that you're using should point you in the right direction.
I don't know of anybody who's ever died from a kludged together web app, either.
Me either, but my current client suffered a security breach of a kludged together web app. Between isolating the system, investigation, remediation, compensation of affected customers, etc., this breach cost them a lot of money.
So while nobody dies of poor web app design, businesses incur real cost. When you cheap out on development, you pay for it later on down the line.
Maybe this will change in the future, but for now, low-quality software is generally not "good enough". If your website is vulnerable to SQL-injection, you're going to find out, and the results will be catastrophic. If your UI looks like it was designed by a chimpanzee on LSD, it is not going to pass muster. And if your developer doesn't understand complexity theory very well, the software will quickly become unusable from a performance standpoint.
Photography is fundamentally different, due to digital photography, but not in the way that you mentioned. Let's rate photos on a scale from 1-10, and let's assume that the photos taken by an experienced professional like your wife are going to average a 9. Let's further assume that the photos taken by our chimpanzee on LSD are going to average about a 4. In the days of film, each time you pressed the shutter button, it cost you money. For a pro who bought and processed film in bulk, it might have been $0.20/frame. For an amateur, it might have been $0.50/frame. Given the costs involved, it was important to be taking 9s and not be taking 4s! But with digital, our chimpanzee can easily take 1000 photos of a wedding, at a marginal cost of zero per frame!
Now of those 1000 photos, most of them will be trash, but you really only need 30 or so frames to make an album. What do you want to bet that 30 of those 1000 will be 7s or above? I'd say it's highly likely, and that's why your wife isn't getting as many calls as she otherwise would have. Digital has changed the game. An amateur really can achieve acceptable results by brute force!
The software equivalent is to keep writing more and more code until the system works. I'm sure you've seen systems that fell victim to that paradigm. Sure, release 1.0 may work acceptably well, but release 2.0 will never happen, because nobody can so much as breathe wrong on the codebase without breaking something.
Nobody needs a home thermometer and refrigerator connected to the internet.
I'm with you on the fridge, but I'd love to have my thermostats and hot water heater thermostat connected to the Internet.
My family travels a lot, and it would be convenient to be able to set back my thermostat and hot water heater so that they aren't wasting so much energy while we're out of town, and then set them back to normal settings when we're an hour or two away from home. I know programmable thermostats have been around a long time, but most don't support "go into vacation mode until Sunday at 7pm".
Slashdot Mirror
Good luck finding a citation for that, because that $2B number came directly out of someone's posterior. Amazon has long frustrated investors by not breaking out revenue numbers for AWS. Instead, they lump AWS in with all of Amazon's other side businesses as "other revenue".
No one outside of Amazon has a solid P&L for AWS.
IFF she took the risk knowingly, she reasonably cannot be mad that someone hacked because reasonable people who take risks don't blame others when they get unlucky.
I think that this is where we disagree and probably will never agree.
From my point of view, if someone is driving recklessly/illegally and hits me while I'm on my bike, I certainly will be pissed and blame that person for his/her negligence. Based on this, I think it's fair of Lawrence to be pissed and blame the unknown person who hacked her iCloud account (definitely illegal) and distributed private photos of her (probably a copyright violation). In both cases, the negative outcome was due to someone else's illegal and immoral behavior. This was not due to an accident like your examples were (bungee jumping, surgery complications, etc.)
Sure, we both could have prevented our respective negative outcomes. But just as I wouldn't want someone to visit me in the hospital and tell me I shouldn't have been riding a bike, I'm not prepared to tell Lawrence that she shouldn't sext with a romantic partner. And this is coming from someone who does not personally sext.
We know Lawrence took a stupid risk - we are not blaming her for getting unlucky - we are blaming her for taking the risk which was not worth it from our point of view. And if it was worth it from her point of view, she shouldn't be complaining.
How does the fact that she is complaining about it make it a stupid risk? What if I was riding my bike and some soccer mom was simultaneously texting, applying eye makeup, and screaming at her kids while driving, swerved her minivan into me and hit me, can't I complain that she was not paying attention to the road, driving in violation of several traffic laws? Because I can tell you right now that I would complain about her actions in such a scenario.
And so why can't Lawrence be mad that someone hacked her iCloud account and leaked obviously private photos of her to the public?
If you're not prepared to tell me that I'm stupid for riding my bike, then why are you so quick to say that Lawrence is stupid for sexting with her boyfriend?
Right, but that's still not what happened here, and bringing it up in this case is both TMI and prevarication.
TMI? All I said was that I was present in a hot tub without the benefit of a swimsuit. If you imputed anything other than "he was relaxing, minding his own business" into my statement, then that is your own wild imagination getting carried away. Anyway, if the above was too much info about me for your liking, you have my express invitation to mentally substitute the words "someone who I know very well" in place of "I" in my example.
Also, your accusation of prevarication is unfounded. My having brought up the incident where I was photographed without my permission was in response to gandhi_2, when he said, "Do not allow those photos to be taken. Do not allow them to exist." My response is that's not always possible to maintain 100% vigilance 24/7/365 for the entire duration of your life, and that you often can't control the actions of others. To be clear, my response was never in reference to Jennifer Lawrence and the leak of her nude photographs. Neither was it in reference to the snapchat photo leaks.
It's still true that if you don't want people to see naked pictures of you that you shouldn't take them, and if you must take them then you must keep them safely hidden away.
And this is exactly what OP was disagreeing with, and for once, I think Hazelton got it right.
Here's a better example: I've gone skydiving (fully clothed!). People sometimes die skydiving. Just as Lawrence did not want her nude photos to be leaked to the public, neither did I wish to die skydiving, yet I dove anyway. What possessed me to do such a stupid thing as skydiving if I was not comfortable with the idea of being killed in the process? The same calculation that Lawrence made: Expected Benefit > (Potential Negative Outcome * Likelihood of Negative Outcome). I knew that skydiving was going to be a lot of fun (it was), and that the likelihood of death was very very small (I survived). And so I went through with the skydive, despite the inherent risk in having done so.
Likewise, Lawrence wanted the cheap thrill of sending nudie pics to her boyfriend. Maybe she's an exhibitionist (she is an actress after all, so not so far fetched). Maybe was convinced to send the pics against her better judgment. Maybe she's telling the truth that she sent them to her boyfriend as a substitute for porn (as though grainy pics of boobs constitute porn in 2014 and as though she didn't have enough money to fly to wherever her long-distance boyfriend was and have intimate relations with him in-person). It doesn't matter. It's none of my business. But what we do know is that for her, Expected Benefit > (Potential Negative Outcome * Likelihood of Negative Outcome). Unfortunately for her, she was the unlucky one who got the negative outcome.
But that doesn't mean she's stupid, any more than I would have been considered stupid had my skydive ended in tragedy. The bad outcome has to happen to someone, and in this case, she was the unlucky one. Perhaps she didn't understand the risks, and I wouldn't necessarily fault her for that. Apple always claims that their iCloud is totally secure, and they continue to make these claims despite grainy proof to the contrary. You and I know better, but she probably knows more about acting than we do. Nobody can be a master of all trades.
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if she knew the risks and did it anyway for the thrill of it. And we can't really say that she made a bad decision just because hindsight showed that she happened to have been unlucky.
And I agree with you that the disclosure of naughty pictures should be a nonevent. Because, yeah. It's 2014.
Well, you can do a lot if you would stop frequenting orgies and stripping to the buff in the middle of the public library...
So... why shouldn't I be able to frequent an orgy and have a reasonable expectation that some drunken jackass won't take my picture? I mean, as long as everyone uses protection, seriously, what's wrong with an orgy?
I can only think of 2 places where I strip down to my birthday suit, and both of them are in my own house.
There are only a few places that I get naked on a regular basis: my home, and the gym locker room. But it's not like I've never been naked outside just for the thrill of it. Hell, even my straitlaced, nerdy wife went streaking once in college. I don't think it's reasonable to think that people will never, ever, ever be naked outside of their own homes.
But haven't you noticed that cheap thrills are fun? And in the end, aren't most of them pretty harmless? Or shouldn't they be?
I've done "soft" drugs, drank to excess, gone skydiving, bungee jumping, and things like that. All of these carry a small risk of a large disaster. Was I stupid to have done those? Or, like OP said, did I make a calculated risk, that the Thrill of jumping out of a plane would exceed Potential Disaster x Likelihood Of Disaster? Lawrence made that same calculation and came up on the losing end, but does that make her decision unwise, just because she was unlucky?
I've had unwanted nude photos taken of me in a hot tub by a drunken jackass (and he wouldn't dispute that characterization of himself). This shit happens sometimes. I don't really care that much about it, but given the choice, I'd rather that the photos not exist.
if you don't want people to see those photos, don't take those photos. Do not allow those photos to be taken. Do not allow them to exist.
I'd like to agree with you that it's that simple, I really would. But with the ubiquity of cellphone cameras, a lot of people find the thrill to be difficult to resist. Your advice would certainly be effective, but isn't it akin to telling teenagers to abstain from sex in order to protect themselves from STIs and pregnancy? What percentage of teens will follow this advice?
And your advice also relies on controlling the actions of others, which is notoriously difficult to accomplish with 100% effectiveness. Unless you make yourself crazy ensuring that you never appear naked near anyone who might have a camera (and everyone has a camera these days), you can't really guarantee that this will work. All it takes is a few seconds and whoops! Your photo is taken. Can you really prevent that 24/7/365 for every day of your life?
Hopefully, one day, people will chill the hell out about nakedness. I mean, we all have bodies. We're all naked from time to time. Why does this need to be such a big deal?
Sample size of 1, but my wife absolutely refused to do any type of programming when she graduated college. And it's not like she couldn't have learned, considering her math and science background. She just hated programming, and that was that.
I interned at IBM and I made more than the salaried folks because I got paid overtime and I was non-exampt.
IBM underpays.
I did not take AP Comp Sci for the following reasons:
Like you, I found value in taking CS101 in college instead of in high school. I had already amassed enough AP credit to permit me to blow off college, so it's not like skipping AP CS was any big hole in my transcript.
Not the OP, but presumably the second download had a different URL, so I'm not sure that any web proxy would have known to cache the file because it was the same as the first one.
I personally would wire a five bedroom house for the $150 range plus the cost of materials
Where the hell do you live, and would you like to wire my house today?
If I'm so shy of money that a coupon is worth the hassle (and, if it's an electronic coupon, further tracking) then I'll be putting the purchase off or buying it used anyway.
Oh, me too. I wouldn't buy something that I couldn't afford. But when given the choice to pay more for something or to pay less for it, I generally prefer to pay less.
But yeah, I wouldn't take the shitty ads that you see to be a sign that your efforts to avoid being profiled have been successful. Current state of the art in ad targeting is abysmal.
I doesn't matter how well-targeted the ads are -- ads are not a benefit to me at all.
Why not?
Example: About a month ago, I was looking to buy a pressure cooker. I did some searches, read some reviews, watched a few demo videos, etc. If an ad had popped up on Google or via adwords on the review site or YouTube with a store coupon for the pressure cooker I wanted, I would have been happy and would have clicked and bought and saved a few bucks!
But ads never seem to be that awesome. Amazon is still trying to sell me a pressure cooker even though they know damn well that I bought one and am happy with it (I wrote a positive review). I get ads for feminine hygiene products even though I'm a dude. I get ads for Microsoft shit on Slashdot because I guess MS just likes to waste money on a website that famously despises them.
Why are ads such garbage? Clearly computers can be useful in anticipating what I want, because Google Now is bloody awesome. If I search for a flight, it tells me when I have to leave for the airport to catch it. When I walk outside a building and look at a map, it tells me where I parked my car. It tells me when I need to leave for appointments. If I search for something a few times and there is related news on the topic, it shows up, and it knows which news sites I like to read. It's like Google Now knows me.
So why do Google (and other) ads just suck complete ass?
The NFL also gets nonprofit status on top of this. Could we do more to support them?
Well, we could build massive new stadiums for all of their teams using public funds. Oh, wait...
Drug cartels today could manufacture their own guns, yet they don't.
Why should they? It's quicker and cheaper and easier to steal them.
California was proposing to ban lathes? Where do you get that from TFA?
I read that they wanted to ban the act using a CNC to finish off an "80% Lower" without assigning it a serial number, but that the governor thought that this requirement wouldn't deter any criminals so he vetoed it.
I wouldn't even care about solving captchas if CloudFlare's captcha worked without JavaScript. But you need JavaScript to solve the captcha, and enabling it goes against Tor best practices, so that kinda blows.
I, also, buy with cash, even (especially?) products as expensive as cars.
Why? The last two cars I bought I took out a loan because the APR was something ungodly low like 0.9%. That's better than free money. You could use that cash to buy a 5 year CD and get an FDIC-guaranteed positive return on that.
Why do you need to heat hot water?
Because if you don't heat hot water periodically, its temperature will eventually cool down until it reaches equilibrium with the ambient temperature in the room. It's this extraneous heating that I'd be trying to avoid with a smart hot water heater. It's wasteful to use energy to maintain 50 gallons of 110 degree water when nobody is home to use it.
I've coded in notepad before, in a pinch. Don't knock it 'till you've tried it!
Regarding where to enter the code, that will depend a bit on the programming language that you're using. For instance, if you're writing in Java, Eclipse or Netbeans would be a good choice. For ruby or python, emacs is nice. Any decent introductory book on the language that you're using should point you in the right direction.
Good luck!
I don't know of anybody who's ever died from a kludged together web app, either.
Me either, but my current client suffered a security breach of a kludged together web app. Between isolating the system, investigation, remediation, compensation of affected customers, etc., this breach cost them a lot of money.
So while nobody dies of poor web app design, businesses incur real cost. When you cheap out on development, you pay for it later on down the line.
Maybe this will change in the future, but for now, low-quality software is generally not "good enough". If your website is vulnerable to SQL-injection, you're going to find out, and the results will be catastrophic. If your UI looks like it was designed by a chimpanzee on LSD, it is not going to pass muster. And if your developer doesn't understand complexity theory very well, the software will quickly become unusable from a performance standpoint.
Photography is fundamentally different, due to digital photography, but not in the way that you mentioned. Let's rate photos on a scale from 1-10, and let's assume that the photos taken by an experienced professional like your wife are going to average a 9. Let's further assume that the photos taken by our chimpanzee on LSD are going to average about a 4. In the days of film, each time you pressed the shutter button, it cost you money. For a pro who bought and processed film in bulk, it might have been $0.20/frame. For an amateur, it might have been $0.50/frame. Given the costs involved, it was important to be taking 9s and not be taking 4s! But with digital, our chimpanzee can easily take 1000 photos of a wedding, at a marginal cost of zero per frame!
Now of those 1000 photos, most of them will be trash, but you really only need 30 or so frames to make an album. What do you want to bet that 30 of those 1000 will be 7s or above? I'd say it's highly likely, and that's why your wife isn't getting as many calls as she otherwise would have. Digital has changed the game. An amateur really can achieve acceptable results by brute force!
The software equivalent is to keep writing more and more code until the system works. I'm sure you've seen systems that fell victim to that paradigm. Sure, release 1.0 may work acceptably well, but release 2.0 will never happen, because nobody can so much as breathe wrong on the codebase without breaking something.
Yes, yes, let's teach everyone to do it and flood the market with cheap programmers.
That sounds to me like job security for the competent!
Nobody needs a home thermometer and refrigerator connected to the internet.
I'm with you on the fridge, but I'd love to have my thermostats and hot water heater thermostat connected to the Internet.
My family travels a lot, and it would be convenient to be able to set back my thermostat and hot water heater so that they aren't wasting so much energy while we're out of town, and then set them back to normal settings when we're an hour or two away from home. I know programmable thermostats have been around a long time, but most don't support "go into vacation mode until Sunday at 7pm".