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Information Valuation - The Most Buck for the Bits?
Rational asks: "I've heard of Everquest accounts sold for upwards of a thousand dollars... Considering that what is actually for sale is just an username and password, which generally comes up to less than 20 bytes in total, this amounts to over $50 per byte. What are the most expensive pieces of information that you have heard of, in dollars per byte? Perhaps satellite pictures? The Human genome?"
Judging from the number of time's I've been suckered into looking at it, and that someone somewhere is paying for each of those views, I'll bet that the aggregate cost for Goat Sex is in the trillions.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
People with credit card limits in excess of several million dollars, their number sequence and expiration date can be stored in just a few bytes (8 bytes at the most).
<Amanda`> I just went out to the parking lot in my bathrobe to exchange warez CDs.
The problem with your comment is in the assumption that the only thing being sold is a username and password. Obviously the buyer thought they were buying something a little more substantive.
WEll Hell on the other end of the scale...
I can't even give away the naked group photo of the slashdot editors...
I think it costs me money instead of being valuable.. each time I: mv slasheditorsnaked.jpg to a different folder, i can never copy anything there again...
I had to pay $4G for changing only 4 bytes of my bank account state, that's $1G/B!
Krótko: kady Erotomek
W pimiennictwie ma swój domek.
You're not paying for the login, you're also paying for the character files which are how big? The login could be changed and you would get the same results, but if you change the character files around you will most definately not get the same results.
Continue with the inevitable "I paid big bucks for some antiquted OS/Software back in the day!"
Subject says it all really. What was it in the end, $5 million, $10 million?
Imagine the price for byte of an eight-character password that lets you change your grades, retroactively, to all 'A's. Satellite pictures and Human genome are lots of bytes.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
But I bet I would kill to get my hands on a real official version of a playable DOOM III demo.
Karmack ?! Why are you wasting your time reading my post ???!!!
Rapid Nirvana
Karma: 50, two of them. Bids, anyone?
So are we talking about data, or short-form representations of it?
I am willing to sell this fine, low UID slashdot account for only $10000 (or about $500 per byte stored on the server). If that isn't a bargain, I don't know what is :-)
I posted this little nugget about an expensive DB access. Probably not tops but up there.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
If you could sell ``42'' I reckon you would get a hell of a lot for it - and that's, what, a byte? :)
Are you asking about something actually for sale (like the Everquest account) or the presumed value of something not really "for sale" (like the Human Genome information or my CC number) ?
Considering that what is actually for sale is just an username and password, which generally comes up to less than 20 bytes in total, this amounts to over $50 per byte
Of course that's not what is for sale. What is sold is the information stored on the EQ servers that defines the character. The username/password are just what let you get at the character data. When I bought my house the transaction resulted in a key, but I can assure you that's not what I paid more than half a million dollars for...
This doesn't negate the basic point though. I don't know how much space an EQ character takes up, but it will still probably result in a fairly impressive dollar/byte sum.
Sailing over the event horizon
The name of GWBs coke dealer from the 70's [or whenever he did it]. I bet he would pay a lot of money to suppress that info.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Comment from Stewart Brand, the guy the "Information wants to be free" quote is attributed to: On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
Forget shareware.
What about the license key for a big WebLogic install ? Now that the some serious 6 figure money for a few lousy digits !
You aren't paying for bytes, you are paying for time. The time the person selling took to build their character up, for instance. The end product is represented by a series of bytes, and that is what is physically transferred from person to person, but the actual product is not the username/password.
In every other case it's the same. The human genome represents millions of dollars in hardware, research, man hours, etc. Sure, you can fit the resulting data into a nice little package of X bytes, but you aren't paying for the bytes.
-Adam
You are neither well-formed, nor valid.
Using that same logic, the key to a house costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. You aren't buying the house, but rather the key to the lock on the house. Or perhaps a better comparison is that of a car (since the locks on a house can be changed or might not exist at all). $20,000 for a little piece of metal? Wow!
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Cost me $289,000 to change the name on the title to my house.
- Consult the dictionary frequently to avoid mispelling
It would have to be license keys. Probably involving SGI.
A license key is a string of maybe 30 bytes usually, and cost up to the millions of dollars.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Because modern financial markets work on derivatives over underlying financial assets. Thus an exerciseable option over insurance loss for a satellite would be valued at a few billion dollars, and can be implemented as a single accept/decline of exercise. Thus the apparant information size is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the contractual obligations and legal infrastructure underpinning that option.
If you want real value, figure out the information cost of accessing the US bootball that controls the nuclear codes. You can literally reduce the world to the Stone age with effectively wiping out probably 1,000 trillion dollars of accumulated human capital and investment.
If you want something closer to home, figure out the cost of the root password to the root servers which will be registring an increasing amount of world commerce. I believe (hearsay) ATT once figured out the business losses stemming from a 1 hour disruption of their network and it wasn't pretty.
LL
Maybe a better question is how much money has been spent to protect the smallest amount of information? Nuclear launch codes come to mind.
Or to decrypt the smallest amount of information : Enigma.
Or another question is, if someone were able to misuse some numbers, what would be the most damage they could cause? For me, I think it would be my social security number. 9 Digits. They could run up massive debt in my name. Granted, there's legal protection, but still - losing your government-issued identity is probably the worst thing that could happen to an individual, from the standpoint of protecting a small number of bits.
The most expensive number to ever calculate was of course, 42.
Education is the silver bullet.
The issue illustrated by the EQ example is not that the user/pass combination is $x/y bits. As many have pointed out, the actual data you gain access to is much more than the bits in the user/pass, *however* the real issue is - what the most valuable data you've ever seen, protected by the least amount of entropy?
My money would be on nuclear launch codes, although I have no idea how long they are, so I could be wrong, but holding life or death for billions in a string of numbers is pretty impressive.
I've been on dialup, paying by the second, and downloading 0 byte files. Easily becomes the most expensive data you can possibly imagine ;-)
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
"We win" -- VE Day, 5/8/1945
Calculate the cost of that.
--Blair
"Hint: don't just count $."
Natalie Portman's phone number on Ebay....
.
.
.
.
if it ever came up for auction.
Especially if you consider how much they pay to protect them...
Business.com (~8 bytes): $5,000,000
Natalie Portman's phone number (~9 bytes): priceless
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
My cube neighbor and I once did an analysis of Everquest character auctions on E-Bay. Our conclusion was that Everquest currency (I forget what it is) pretty much traded (at that time) for a uniform 4 "whatevers" to the $US. This was amazingly constant. I wanted to start a futures pit in Everquest land, but he explained to me that it couldn't be done (I'm not an EQ'er, so pardon the technical cluelessness.)
> I've heard of Everquest accounts sold for upwards of a thousand dollars... Considering that what is actually for sale is just an username and password, which generally comes up to less than 20 bytes in total, this amounts to over $50 per byte.
...
Well, the money is being paid (presumably) for the stats and inventory of that user. So saying the 'value per byte' based on the metrics of the key is like saying that paying 1000$ for a key to a safety deposit box with 1000$ in it works out to (1000/metrics-of-key)$
So the real cost-per-byte number for these EQ accounts relates to how many bytes are in a full player record for an EQ account.
Anyhow, I'm sure some company out there has paid in the thousands for a few lines of code.
This does make me think about my 'Guiness Book of World Records That We'll Never Know' book I wish I could have. Whats the furthest a rental cars keys have ever been from its associated car, and is there an interesting story about it? You get the idea
"Old man yells at systemd"
Its got to be domain names... millions of dollars for some of them.
A lot smaller (byte wise) than a user id and password.
bill gates' ATM pin.
four-oh-four
How about the RSA factoring challenge? The biggest prize is $200,000 for the 2048 bit key (256 bytes). That makes it about $781 per byte.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Give a man a fish and tomorrow and he will be hungry the day after. Teach a man to fish, and he will subsist. Certainly, algorithms then are the most valuable. Take DeCSS - how many bytes was that down to? Look at it's financial, freedom, and legal implications.
Even more importantly - look at WWII German Enigma codes - the decoding of any one single message was certainly valuable, but understanding how to decode it was invaluable. Like life - power is knowledge, and understanding is inferring knowledge where before there was none (read: understanding creates power).
cheers
As any EQ player (seller actually, many players are against it, but that's a whole other topic) will tell you they are selling their TIME. It takes many hundred hours to get a character to the point where someone will pay $K+ for it. Taking that argument if you were to pay someone to "develop" your EQ character(s) you would probably pay the same thing. As an EQ account buyer it is more than just a user name and password you are buying, you are paying so that you don't need to waste your time to play the sort of game (high-level, what not) you want. I am sure the argument applies to other forms of valuable information. You are not just paying for a piece of information, but the time it takes to develop/asscertain that information too.
On credit card transactions, the actual transaction is what's being purchased. The bank actually purchases the transaction from the merchant. They then sell it to Visa, Who sells it to the Issuing bank who then charges the person's account. It's odd, but that's actually how it works. And since some people buy houses (and corporations buy inventories) with a single credit card transaction, that's a lock of buck for the byte.
No Zen is good zen
Not unless you count EVERY bit of genetic research ever conducted that led to our ability to map the genome. As a whole, the PCR/Shotgun technique we've used minimizes cost per base, relying on some simple cloning steps, robots to clean up the clones, and some only moderately expensive, Thermo-cyclers and other tools. When you consider the number of bases in our genome (yes, we have to count the junk too), the total bases per dollar (instead of bytes per dollar, because compression makes the storage 1/4 the actual size) couldn't possibly approach cost of byte some series having to do with nuclear weapon launching/disarming/design.
Two months salary to get one yes/no answer. DeBeers is the king of costly bandwidth.
This article, The Name Game cites these firms charging around $75,000 for a single word that may only be seven letters long. Not a logo, not an ad campaign, not even a domain registration, just the single word. I guess this runs roughly around $10,000 per byte.
It's like a server.. You can '0wn' a server by having the root password (or access as root), but you don't actually _own_ it.. The real owner can just pull the plug, and mount the hd somewhere else to change the password.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
I read somewhere that the consultant who came up with the name 'EXXON' [sorry, I forget the name,] was considered the most highly paid author, because he got paid $50,000 for a single word. (Authors, particularly those who write for magazines, typically get paid cents per word, where foo is not a bug number.)
So, assuming the then-standard ASCII notation, $50k/(5*8 bits) = $1,250.00/bit.
I imagine that keeping the few bytes in the dns system that make my browser point to hotmail.com or yahoo.com are very valuable to them, I wonder if they have them insured?
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Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
The Melissa worm :)
;)
Now thinking about how a proper reference monitor could have been implemented in outlook to completely avoid this worm and all the others, and how these implementations are often just a few hundred lines of code - I vote for the "missing reference monitor" in Outlook to be the most expensive *missing* data out there
(See TCSEC for a description of the reference monitor concept, if you don't know about it)
These have been arguably one of the most expensive bits in human history.
S
From Steven Levy's recent Wired article:
"I've got to ask you," I say. "How long do you envision this rule of the universe to be?"
"I'm guessing it's really very short."
"Like how long?"
"I don't know. In Mathematica, for example, perhaps three, four lines of code."
"Four lines of code?"
"That's what I'm guessing..."
The entire premise of the post is that you DONT own the character file. That is the property of the software company. All you buy is the info to access. That is why this is different than any real property, like a house.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Thats a pretty stupid way how to count that. At this rate the most expensive piece of information would be the numbers of Bill Gate's bank accounts or something of that sort. I think that the post was just a prime troll.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Last I heard, a one-year subscription to the L Report, a website for marketers on trends among urban youth, cost $20K a year. That's just a username and password too - and companies actually shell out for it, just so they'll know that kids in Seattle these days wear color X nail polish and enjoy bowling and taking E on weekends or whatever.
I can't believe I just spent 15 minutes reading these posts. I'll never get that time back.
an username
Come on!
Whenever the "u" is long (pronounced like "you"), it is not considered to be a vowel where "a" turns into "an".
It's "an umbrella" but "a username".
Sheesh!
Have you read my journal today?
I would guess that Windows NT clients are the most valuable bits, as its just one machine word which goes up to number of licences the user has. This has made billions of dollars for Microsoft, so its not a once-off thing either.
The US Department of Defense paid untold millions for zero bytes, which means there is a divide by zero error in this hypothesis. Recall that when the war on terror began the DOD bought all the time that Ikonos was over Afghanistan. This was effectively to ensure that it produced zero bytes of information.
Oil field development contracts are often competitively bid. Finding out the amount of your bid ahead of time can be worth billions to your competitor, so there's tons of industrial espionage. Even finding out ahead of time whether interest rates will go up tomorrow (one bit) can be worth billions to the right entity. Overall I'd say the question is meaningless. How much would the string "terrorists will crash planes into the WTC tomorrow" have been worth on September 10?
How about M$ source code passwords.
Parrallel programming for high performance scientific applications is considered so difficult (Programming many things that occur simulateniously, in an efficient fashion) that I've heard that a single line can run ~$400 after all is said and debugged.
I have been a couple places (including my current place of employ) where the marketing dept would spend massive amounts of money on a single CD containing marketing data (customer survey results and tracking data and such). I never sat down to do the math but the cost per byte had to be up there... Actual quote from a previous place of employ: "Don't stumble and break that CD, it cost us $2.5 Million." (needless to say, I walked carefully and held onto it firmly)
..that would be a definite yes/no information on the outcome of some high stake event (a really good tip) - so you can place your bet...
Examples would be abound (boxing matches, horse races...)
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
The private keys that Verisign uses to certify that people on the net are who they say they are are probably the most valuable sets of raw bits out there. As everybody else has said, most other strings of bytes just grant you access to other more valuable things, representing real assets like time and money. But the private keys that go with those root certs would be worth a fair bit of money; if you had them, you could break banks, impersonate financial institutions, distribute signed malware, and render e-commerce non-viable. That's a lot of power encompassed in a few thousand bits...
- Is there intelligent life out there?
- Is there life in our solar system?
- Is there a God?
- Is the universe expanding or shrinking?
- Where is/is there dark matter?
- Etc. Etc.
More mundane single bit questions for personal use that are hard to really put a price on but are relatively cheap to discover:I've seen a number of posts saying that you're not just buying the username and password, but the characters, lewt, etc. This is close, but not quite right.
The people buying EQ accounts could go in and get those high level characters and phat lewt on thier own without this account. They are buying a piece of your life.
Our lives have a finite number of hours in them. How we spend those hours defines what our lives are about. The people buying game accounts do not wish to spend thier lives building a virtual character. They want to play some, sure, but they don't want to experience the struggle ( or is it joy? ) of raising a character. They want to go in, have a little fun, and then jump back out and spent thier lives on something else.
So when you buy someone else's account, you are buying the time they took to build the character.
This is why Verant's stance on selling accounts bothers me. I sympathise with thier concerns, but that account represents an investment of time ( of the player's life, really ) and I can not see where Verant has any legal or moral leg to stand on. They assume that they own your time, a piece of your life.
This is as absurd as BMW owning a chunk of my life because I decide to sell my car. I invested time and money into keeping it in good shape, and if I want to move on to another car they have no hold on me. So it should be with online avatars.
Sorry to go off on a rant, but this is my life, not Verant's. If I want to sell my time, that's my business, PERIOD.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
it was only 20 odd years ago I was involved in a memory purchase for out B6700 - we paid roughly 1 million $$ for 1.5Mbytes of ram (core). And that came without any information in it .....
at 3 billion base pairs in the human genome, two bits per base pair (AT/TA/CG/GC), that means that without compression it takes 750 megs to store.
anyway, the more interesting question for me pertains to information that is of general interest, not like "my password".
(1 sports career + $2500 fine ) / (1 bite)
6 .h tm
Such a deal.
http://www.s-t.com/daily/09-97/09-26-97/a01wn00
The carry overflow bit that led to the Ariane V rocket being destroyed must have been the most expensive bit in human history...
I asked for a refund - and got my monkey back.
Any time you pay for a yes/no decision, all you've paid goes for a single bit. E.g. the millions spent on prosecution and defense of the over-hyped OJ Simpson trial all paid for the bit '0'. Similarly if you spend millions of dollars to business consultants to answer a question like 'should HP and Compaq merge?'
It is debatable whether these really are paying for just one bit - the OJ trial produced lots of public information, and the yes/no business descisions undoubtedly come with heafty reports explaining how the result was arrived at.
A test is to imagine an oracle that will (with known 100% accuracy) answer a question like 'If OJ goes to trial for murder, will he be found guilty?' If this result would be considered a sufficient substitute for actually holding the trial, then all those millions were indeed spent on one bit.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I think Mike Tyson got the best deal, getting paid millions to take a bite of Evander Holyfield's ear in their 1997 fight. Holyfield may have made more $ (I don't know), but ouch!
Let's save time and say that the human genome is a round 750 MB (it's about 3 gigabases, each base is two bits, so it's 750 MB.)
It cost about US $300 million. The project cost of 3 bil, bandied about, is the amount we expect to spend in the period from about 1990 to 2005 (reference, search page for "billion") on projects related to Genomics, which is the study of biological sequences, not just the human genome but a wealth of other information (including information about protein structures and the like - I generated four gigs of analytical information just this afternoon.)
Regardless, if you say that the fruit of the $300 million spent directly on the human genome is ONLY the human genome, and not all of the other data (such as correlations with other genomes which is what I was evaluating today, or the information about the number of genes, etc.) it still works out to about $US 0.40 a byte (300 bil over 750 MB). Dear, but not even in the running for most expensive data ever.
A pricing problem - do you pay for the source code, or the binary? If you're paying for the source code, I'm sure somebody, sometime, charged a full years salary to develop a Perl program 70 or 80 ASCII characters long. It could run hundreds of dollars a byte, easy.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
The launch codes that enable the president to launch a nuclear attack could probably be considered the most valuable "password" ever.
I would have to say the ENIAC and/or earlier computers had a much higher per byte cost. Thinking about how little memory they had. Hell some of the early computers only had a processor cache.
~ kjrose
I cannot remember the exact (or even approximate date) but at some point during the history of the British Empire (i believe between about 1550-1850) the King has a series of watchtowers built, streaching all the way from the atlantic ocean to London itself. The idea was to have the tower by the sea be on the lookout for the spanish Armada, and to light a signal fire in the tower to signal to the next tower, and to the next tower, and so on , until the signal reached London. The construction and staffing of these towers would literally have cost a King's forture, the equivelent of many billions or trillions of dollars today. And the entire purpose was to pass on the signal fire - a SINGLE bit of information. Not even a byte, just a bit. I believe this is the most costly piece of binary data ever transmitted.
I recall it was worth over $1000 a word when I blackmailed Cowboy Neal.
Both of my girls are wonderfull, but geez kids cost a lot (money, time, worry). Definitly not an investment to be made lightly, but the dividends can be enourmous at times. :-)
I'm willing to compete. I'll let you buy a shareware key good for 6,000,000,000 licenses. I'm just not sure why you would want to license one of my programs for every inhabitant of the planet. :)
It's not 20 bytes you're buying, it's the rights to the character file, which is a 4k file on an NT server.
Try http://www.egold.com
A while back, you used to be able to look at the daily gold transactions clearing, and I was rather impressed at the amounts being shoved around by a fifty cent transaction fee, or thereabouts.
There seems to be more finality to transactions there than at a bank, so you can perhaps more-accurately say that the account amounts are guarded by the bits of the encryption.
Its just like buying a serial number to register a peice of software. The number is just a means, like a cd is just a thing that carrys data. The real value is the fact that you can use that software without the police knocking your door down for software theft. Personally, i prefer to take the risk and get a serial generator :) If its an everquest (or whatever) account, then you really are wasting your money. Everyone knows that MMORPGs are the work of satan and his minions. If you really want peoples respect, don't spend stupid ammounts of money for a username and password, steal it from them for free instead :)
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Going by the measure that most seem to be using, money divided by the amount of actual INFORMATION stored, microsoft windows easily wins this competition.
$100/0 = infinity.
How about the source code to one of LLNL/LANL's nuclear weapons codes? One of those things is simply beyond price.
But hey, if you want to buy that many licenses, I'll even through in the source code for free. :-)
I've been seing some decimal on slashdot, which geeks hate. So I've been posting this reply. So, why are you using decimal here? Do you understand number bases? I think you don't, otherwise you would use hexadecimal. Repost in hexadecimal--you may use "0x" as a prefix or "h" as a suffix. Perhaps you can learn at this since it is possible you don't understand. Or perhaps you are too stupid to ever understand hexadecimal and will be stuck with decimal.
"Newtons per second" = 18 bytes
18-15 = 3 bytes.
That's nothing compared to the cost of a single panorama from the Venera probe series. Considering the number of probes they vapourised under testing here on Earth and killed on the way down to Venus, probably in the tens of megabucks per bit, for a few thousand bits.
They also sent back most of the first picture from the Moon after several failures and had the sender die partway through the image, using earlier, perhaps therefore costlier technology, but OTOH also had a bathtub rover (Lunakhod) up there running around for years taking holiday snaps.
Either project covers a lot of goats, a lot of sex, or both.
I don't know how you bitify handwriting, but the Yanks spent a bazillion dollars developing a pen that worked in vacuum at any temperature. The Russians used a pencil.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
"/."
There's two really expensive bytes. Just consider all the lost productivity. Oh the humanity...
--
Hint for moderators: laugh or don't laugh. not a troll.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Business.com went for $8,000,000, $666,666.66 ber byte.
USA: $300,000,000,000/year on 'intelligence' and still they didn't see 11/9 coming.
Sorry. I can't type today. I should say, "I'll throw in the source code . . . "
I'm going to go home and quit wasting bandwidth now. Otherwise someone out there is going to revoke my typing license.
I don't know how many bytes are in a typing license, but if you compare that to my lifetime potential earnings . . .
[Sorry, too much sugar today.]
Considering that what is actually for sale is just an username and password, which generally comes up to less than 20 bytes in total, this amounts to over $50 per byte.
If you consider how much the entertainment industry paid for the DMCA, it could easily be the most expensive 4 byte sequence there is. Say, for example, that $5 million was paid for it...this would come out to $1.25 million per byte, or $156250 per bit. (Note that I'm not trying to be a troll here. Depending on what angle you look at it from, there could be a certain degree of truth to what I just said, as sad as it may be.)
I'm sure the MPAA would put quite a large number on those keys...
And remember, the keys themselves have value as art.
Most expensive bit by bit thing? Duh, it's "What is six times nine".
Whole worlds have been thrown away trying to calculate that! Screw the answer, I want to know the question
I used to work for a credit referencing agency, and one of their desktop programs was installed from 7 floppies, and cost around $400k, so about $40 per byte.
Made me nervous when I accidentaly took an installation set home one day, though I'm not sure a mugger could have made full use of it...
While on the subject of money for information here is some weird inforation in money.
I don't believe in a conspiracy here, but that's a pretty strange coincedence. A friend refers to it as evidence of a higher power.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
As said by Melinda Gates. That's a lot for just one bit.
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
the pin number to bill gates chequing account?
or ma bitches phone numbers?
This is a fiction from Hollywood. For example, the commanders of a nuclear submarine can launch their nuclear weapons whenever they want to.
It has to be this way. Otherwise disabling the American nuclear arsenal would be as easy as killing the handful of people who have the codes, or even just blocking their communications.
It's interesting to think about the value that such things have. Essentially, the value lies, as I said, in the particular formation of data on Verant's servers, in San Diego (or wherever the actual machines happen to be, due to colocation). If you had actual physical access to those machines, you could simply create the data to be whatever you want -- a level 60 Barbarian Warrior with the best gear in the game, for example.
However, physical access to the data substrate is not feasible, for a variety of reasons. Only trusted employees are allowed physical access to that areas. Brute force may give you temporary physical access, but the variety of law enforcement agencies blanketing our society would (on average) put the kibosh on that fairly quickly. As a result, the only plausible way to create the data the way you want, is to use the relatively public interface mechanisms Verant provides -- namely, the game interface itself.
The amount of time and effort it takes, using that interface, to get the data into the form you want, is why the data has that value. A bad Verant employee with legitimate access to the data might also be able to create such value by quickly creating characters with such data, but they are unlikely to go long without getting caught.
Yeah, this all may seem fairly obvious, but did you ever actually sit down and think it through before? I didn't think so ;)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
How much did Deep Thought cost to build, just to cough up 42? That was one mighty darn expensive byte...
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
For a 25 byte cd key.. it's about $65,000. That's about $2600 (cool :)) per byte.
Any of these are billion dollar per bit pieces of information.
Winning lottery tickets.
Stock symbols.
How much would it be worth to have a few hundred bytes which would allow you to create certificates which would be trusted by almost everyone on the internet?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Comment removed based on user account deletion
To answer such valuable yes/no questions as:
Does communism work (circa 1906)?
Is it worth getting in a fight over Archduke Ferdinand (circa 1914)?
Will the world be better if I kill Hitler (circa 1935)?
Will the allies win (circa 1939)?
Should we commit to Vietnam (circa 1967)?
Should I invest in Microsoft (circa 1985)?
Should we fight the hijackers (circa 2001)?
I've got a few images in that format stored on my hd. Inside each tiff image there is one byte storing the version number. That single byte holds THE ANSWER. I think it's worth a LOT.
Pick six: six bytes.
$60 million say.
$10 million/byte isn't to shabby.
My slashdot password, 8 characters, Karma 50, $30 000. Mail me if you're interested, and I only take cash and/or United Linux licenses.
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
I agree very funny
// The fastest Alt-Tab in the West
Well, Sun swears that their operating system source code is worth exactly $80 million.
That might not work out to be more on a per-byte basis than the Everquest account, but try amassing 80,000 Everquest accounts worth one grand apiece.
I've heard various versions of this story over the years, but the best link I can find attributes it to a General Electric engineer named Charles Steinmetz (1865-1923):
One day a whole roomful of General Electric's most expensive machinery went out of order. By this time Steinmetz had retired, but the company's baffled engineers called him back as a consultant. Steinmetz ambled from machine to machine, taking a measurement here, scribbling something in his noteboook there. After about an hour, he took out a large piece of chalk and marked a large 'X' on the casing of one machine. Workers pried off the casing and found the problem at once.
When the company executives got Steinmetz's bill for $10,000, they were reluctant to pay it. "This seems a bit excessive for one chalk mark," Steinmetz was told. "Perhaps you'd better itemize your charges."
Within a few days, they received the following itemized bill:
Making one chalk mark $1.00
Knowing where to make one chalk mark $9,999.00
The Windows XP Professional CD weighs in at 512,342,016 bytes. According to the Microsoft site, it retails at $299.00 US. This is an approximate cost of $0.00000058359453385138727330143464165937 per byte. Cheap, perhaps? Consider this. Divide this by the cost most people pay for Linux or other free operating systems, and you'll find that Windows is more expensive by a magnitude approaching infinity.
- Shadow, the Laughing Orc
http://bomns.sf.net/
Also, let's consider this. A single bit, on or off, it doesn't matter, is perhaps the most expensive piece of data, now that Microsoft has patented Ones, Zeros.
- Shadow, the Laughing Orc
http://bomns.sf.net/
I have 2 items in my inventory.
0 - nothing.
1 - everything in existence.
You can buy everything (inventory item #1 - information value 1 bit) for [insert astronomically high price here].
Goods will be delivered after payment validated.
Consider the ramifications of "One if by land, two if by sea".
That must be one really big company...
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
It's either my first marriage license or the subsequent divorce papers.
LOL, confused the message number with the ID - my bad ;)
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
Are obviously the most valuable ones. Especially the ones that authenticate themselves (Chipcards, Digicash, etc). Break one and put your value of choice in there.
If I was to buy a copy of WinXP Pro, it would cost me ~$300 and my soul...
;-).
I think there's a divide by zero error in there somewhere, so I win by proving that every bit of WinXP costs you everything
-------------------------
It is the monkied monkey that monkies with another monkey's monkey. Monkey.
because it's the 50th bank account / credit card # post in this forum
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
a senator's vote
1/0
depending on the issue and the senator, it's a few tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. but don't be fooled, they're all for sale.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I'd have to say the most "expensive" bits of information had to be the notes that Klaus Fuchs passed from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. Estimates I've seen are that the material was no more than four dozen full pages, but that material was the key to allowing the Soviet Union to finish their Atomic bomb research years ahead of time (providing at least a 5-year jump). For an estimate of what the Manhattan Project cost, look here. For a conservative estimate, I'd say that those 50 pages (~2000 characters each = 100kB) saved some $10 Billion in research costs. And that's in 1945 dollars.
The German, Italian, and Japanese cypher codes were similarly valuable, though not quite as expensive to obtain.
Historically, I'd say that the $50 in trinkets that Dutch explorers paid to the Native Americans living on Manhattan Island for title to their island (ie, for the signature on the treaty giving the Dutch what became New York City) was the ultimate rip-off (or, great deal, depending on which way you look at it). Signature = ~25 bytes, with current value of the Manhattan Island real estate well north of $10 trillion.
As a side note, the US (and presumably the other nuclear powers) does NOT maintain the "Launch Codes" at the political level. These are AUTHORIZATION codes, which tell the military that a valid order to launch exists. The military maintains the actual launch codes (at different places for different weapon systems), so theoretically, it is possible to launch a nuclear weapon without permission. For obvious reasons, the military designs launch systems so this is as difficult as possible.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
How do you factor in the context of the info?
:-).
For example you have a program which costs $314, but it has to run under an operating system. How much value of the operating system to factor in. Without the operating system the program would be worthless (except emacs of course
Whether God exists (1/0).
Let's look at those little bits from florida (the renowned "missing chads"), which completely altered the course of the United States government for the following 4 years. Now *that* is some seriously Most Significant Bits.
I'm an individual! Just like everyone else!
Bill Gates' ATM PIN.
Let's remember, not all bits are created equal. Each bit of information is, potentially, the answer to a single yes-or-no question, and some questions are far more important than others. Hence, some bits are worth far more than others.
Let's also remember, economists (at least free-market capitalists) will tell you that a thing is worth whatever you can get someone to pay for it. This means, of course, that value and worth are nonsensical terms and you can't ask any reasonable questions about them.
If, however, you are not a free-market capitalist, you might subscribe to the Marxist definition of value: that a thing aquires its value based on how much human effort was put into the thing. In that case, the value of access to a well used MMORPG account could be quite substantial (how much is your time worth, mine is worth quite a bit).
Finally, we must consider that even for a single bit, the two possible values (yes or no) do not always have equal worth: I would have been willing to pay far more for the yes result of the above function than for the no result. Something very similar is true for the MMORPG accounts (base on how well the account has been used).
The actual results of a federal election are usually one simple table.
But getting those results! Especially when you include all the campaigns, the advertising, setting up and manning the booths, security of results, counting,.... not to mention the public service machinery behind it that has to instantly change their internal systems to match those of the new incumbents.
What about the value of a brand?
The winner? GE, with a brand value of $42 billion / 2 chars = $21 billion per character.
That's $2.6 billion per bit!
Brand values source: Finfacts
Can anyone think of an instance in which it takes more bits to express the dollar value of data than it takes to express the data themselves? Example: Seven bits are required to express the number 127. Add another byte to express a dollar sign (in ASCII), and you're looking at 15 bits to express $127. Has anybody ever paid more than $127 for 15 or fewer bits of info?
Just a couple set-uid bits here and there made the Internet Worm possible.
Back in late 1999, early 2000, Business.com for $7.5 million. $625k per byte of the name.
Back when there was such a thing as "domain name investing", there was a "land grab" in domain names, squatters were buying them up by the thousands...
You can still find them, in there pathetic little websites, trying to sucker $300 out of some fool who hasn't heard. The game is over, the land boom went bust, so get back in line, put your back into it boy. We need a thousand more lines of code out of you before sunrise, bonuses are cancelled, and all your friends are fired.
How much is business.com worth now?
The value of military intelligence is sometimes measured in human lives rather than purely in dollars. Occasionally people die to bring it back. Of course, almost any given soldier costs Uncle Sam about a quarter million in life insurance alone, so there is a conversion rate...
42!
We got a lot more out of it than 6 bytes of info, though. The costs were amazingly huge, but the benefits of the sacrifices made were truly unmeasurable.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Ask any Divorcee, I know some who paid millions for two bits:
"Will you Marry Me?"
"Yes" bit #1 (or in binary 1)
"Do you want a Divorce?"
"Yes" bit #2 (or in binary 1)
---PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE---
"Now, where's the damn 'any' key?"
Is (2^2^22)+1 composite or prime?
At the time this was computed it was the longest computation ever performed for a 1-bit answer (roughly as intensive as rendering a full-length Pixar film).
Not that I post on slashdot or anything.
...is that if you'd included a goatse.cx link, your post would be at -1, Troll instead of +4, Funny.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
the beeb report that the domain name squatter was fined USD65 million. If he pays (which hasn't happened and isn't likely) then the domain name (7 charactes so 7 bytes) works out at USD9.2 million per byte.
Regards Sinesurfer A Nerd is someone who lives for technology, A Geek is someone who lives for technology and loves it
Well being you can compress 100% random data 100:1 then theoretically you can compress an infinite amount of information into a single bit. You have to ask yourself, how much is all the information in the universion worth to YOU? Here it is: 1
Send your check or money order to the address included
(Yes it's broken, follow the link and read the commentary.)
BTW its sister volume is comming out soon, heres a sneak preview: 0
Some information costs many human lives to collect.
It's quite a few bits to be sure, but certainly some spendy bits.
LOL. I guess enough ppl followed the link that Bell.ca got slashdotted.
Yes or No can be done in one bit. Buy or Sell can be done in one bit.
:).
Just one logical bit can make a lot of difference.
Also if there is some unique irreplaceable data which is priceless and it's encrypted using strong encryption, the key would be worth a lot don't you think?
I suppose the question needs a lot more beer to make it seem fun
A true or false question would potentially be worth the most as it is only one bit. So for any suggestion here you could change it to: "Is ***** true?" or "Are there *****?" For example: "Does God exist?" or "Is there extra-terrestrial intelligence?" You could get a lot of money to suppress or divulge the answers to either of those questions.
/. post ever?"
More questions: "Did GWB do cocaine?"
"Did Clinton inhale?"
"Is this the best
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
I've seen EQ stuff sell for boatloads of cold US cash on playerauctions.com. The most interesting part about EQ is the numbers - - because of the level of off-game trades & sales, it's devalued the cost of plat (EQ's monitary unit).
Some may consider it cheating to purchase items for the game, but most of the players do. Checkout some of auctions on
www.playerauctions.com.
I could say that a friend and I once sold a 3.5" floppy disk for about $1535... but that would be silly. You could also say that we sold a screen saver, and that would almost be reasonable... But what we really sold was ~40 hours of development time. We did meet our client at a restaurant to hand over the disk for a check and a couple plates of pasta, but the "$1500 floppy" analysis is pretty short-sighted.
How many hours did it take to build up the Everquest character? How much did the create pay to play Everquest during the development period? Subtract the EQ bills from the sale price, then divide by the number of hours, and you get an hourly rate for Everquest character development services. I wonder what it works out to?
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
So make up a valuable question that can only be answered with yes or no. This will give you some value for your bit.
(Score:5, Not Funny)
Then there is always that long long integer that holds Bill Gate's fortune...
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
The guy had disabled the price reasonability checks so the order was sent though. Of course it matched against everything so it was impossible to reverse out the trade. Each point in the index is 25 Euros so the total loss represented by the trade is 91 million Euros. It didn't completely execute so the complete value wasn't blown, however, the reduction in the value of the DAX probably caused at least that amount of damage to index linked funds.
Swift passwords aren't bad either (Interbank transfer system) for value per byte if you have a larcenous frame of mind and access to their network. Don't even ask how much gets misappropriated and the transactions are irrevocable.
I'm sorry, but this story makes no sense to me.
Gee, I wonder how much "c" is worth. It's not only the name of a language that powers an economy, it also shows up in a good portion of data.
Or "1" and "0"... they're part of "c"... and ALL information! 1 must be worth a shitload!
How about those 7 digits on a million dollar bill.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
How about a major computer virus or worm?
Some of those have cost the economy millions of dollars!
All for just a few lines of script....
www.Beyond7.com Insane modern art water sculpture.
Actually, that's only true from one set of perspectives. Think of it this way: Your title to the house is merely a piece of paper that says that the house is yours. All it means is that you can get men in blue uniforms with guns to show up and kick other people out of the house if you want, assuming the political climate stays roughly equivalent to what it is.
This does not mean you "own" the house, any more than having control of the police force and the ability to break into people's houses, kill them, and take their property means you "own" the house (but then, when has that ever stopped anyone?)
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
As can be seen from previous posts, if the number of bits is small, calculations get very complex, speculative and ridiculous.
Lets pose this question another way: what would be the most expensive cd of floppy, containing some existing and theoretically obtainable data? Blueprints to something? National secrets? Sientific data?
And another intriquing idea: lets suppose it is in our power to construct a "black box", performing some calculation on input data and outputting the result in some constant time. Lets set limit to 1 Megabyte of input and output and 1 second of processing time. What kind of black box would be most valuable?
In the field of commerce, it is routine to pay a great deal of money for the single bit "buy/sell".
BugBear
Ignorance is curable. Stupid is forever.
The Apollo project.
One flag set (on the face of the moon). That is one bit of information or 1/256 of a byte. A total cost of 100 bilion $, makes 25,6 trilion $ per byte.
But it was worth it...
Ceci n'est pas un sig
It's not a "sale", it's a "share". ;-)
Actually, it's often a rental. Check out the EQ message boards and you'll see some horror stories about people "buying" characters, changing the password, then having the seller call up EQ customer support, say "I've forgotten my password," and having it reset, thereby reclaiming the character to be sold again. And there's not a damn thing that you can do about it, because EQ characters remain the property of EQ (Sony, actually) and can't be sold or transferred. All you can do is squeal that the seller is trading, get his EQ (and probably eBay) account pulled and try and get your money back (good luck).
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You mean like having sneakers glued by 10 year old vietnamese girls under unbelievable conditions in a factory operated by an "indipendant contractor".
You're right of course, that the only value is in the Nike brand. Who in his right mind would pay 180$ for a pair of sneakers that cost a couple of bucks to manufacture at most.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
42 rulez :)
How about Osama Bin Laden's whereabouts in GPS coords or long/lat? The FBI's offering $25 millon. 32 bits each for longitude and latitude should narrow it down to a beard's length.
So what are the letters USA worth?
Famously, the Rothschild brothers (who organised the finance for most of the 1815 alliance against Napoleon) got news of the victory at Waterloo back to London a day ahead of anyone else ... and did rather well.
That's only about $6,573,640,280 USD (6.5 trillion) adjusted for inflation for US/USSR alone!
At the Autofact show of 1985, GM and Boeing hosted a large demo booth. The goal of the booth was to prove that the now defunct MAP protocol really worked. They got 25 companies to spend money on the demo: a distributed system that took your name, packed (robotically) a tower of hanoi puzzle, printed your ID on the package, and gave it to you. The companies spent (I'm not making this up) $125 million US to develop the systems JUST for the 3-day show. (I'm counting costs that had no other value, this was show-specific.)
5,000 of the Tower-of-hanoi boxes were given away, and show particiapnts therefore called them $25,000 gifts, distributing the booth cost among its outputs. The puzzle itself had negligible value, so let's assign that $25,000 to the pesonalized IDs, typically about 25 bytes, per package. That's about $1,000 per byte.
While we're at it, please remeber that for most of the 1960's, mainframe memory cost 10 cents a bit, which was close to $4.50 a byte (there were check bits in those days, but computer memory was geenraly organized in larger "words" with far more than 8 bits per address). That's just the cost of storage before anything of value went into it.
I heard about a year ago that the value of coca cola in assetts is about 3 billion. By this I mean that if you added up all the property, investments and cash you could sell it for about 3 billion. However, their stock on the market (when I heard this about a year ago) is worth around 150 billion. The brand name and its solidity is worth far more than the company itself.
I agree with the original poster that successful branding is a tremendous commodity.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
Six US Apollo missions returned approx. 400 kilograms of lunar material to the Earth for study. Those samples gave probably several hundred KB of raw data: chemical and geological data (different than the untold TB or more of *analysis* of that data). The entire Apollo program also generated a huge amount of imagery and measurements of various physical characteristics, ie gravity, radiation, etc.
The Apollo program cost tens of billions of dollars, at a time when the United States was suffering from massive social instability, as well as the lives of three Americans who died. Also spurred the Soviet Union to spend a huge amount on its own largely unsuccessful lunar program.
Pretty expensive for a secret soundstage in Nevada.
Let's see, my new javascript function today brings 2000$, it's 451 characters, so that's 4.4 $ per byte. Damn, I feel ripped off ;)
Cheers,
T.
My other sig is Funny.
I periodically get a credit card offer from my alma mater, freely offering a $100,000 limit. If they're pushing a card with a limit high enough to buy a house on impulse, I'm sure I could negotiate a higher limit; maybe not in the millions, but likely a large fraction thereof. Ironically, my income is rather modest, so I don't understand why they keep offering me a card that could require several years of my net income to pay off.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
It is a stupid phrase, isn't it?
It's like a bank robber saying "dollar bills just want to be free".
I'm here to liberate your dollars and your MP3's.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
All told, my brother will have paid 250K+ for the letters esq after his name.
The ancient Greek messenger Pheidippides is said to have have run so fast to deliver a message of victory to Athens, that he died having delivered it. The message contained one bit: we won.
This is my World Wide Web of Whatever
Ehehehe, whoom! Right over your head, Colmore, so closely you got a buzz cut from it.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
If someone ever got Natalie Portman to post a message on Slashdot, then I bet the site would plain kneel, both emotionally and performance-wise.
Maybe it would be possible to get her to do a slashdot interview, if prodded correctly? After all, nerds constitute a large portion of her revenue stream. She owes us that.
Stop the brainwash
Keep in mind that one drug that saves a fraction of the people with heart disease or cancer being delayed a few years would cause more deaths than all the wars the US has been in plus all the needless deaths that drugs too early to market might cause.
What's that worth (not including the ": priceless!" stuff.)
I'm sure that's never happened, of course. Thirty million needless early deaths in the bush are worth one needless death in the front of cameras in the hand to a politician.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
Lat & lon from GPS. $14 billion per RAND for 6 bytes.
Pay a thousand dollars for the weakest possible character in the game: a loaded level 60.
If you want a powerful character, go create a level 1, where you can:
-- Fight hand-to-hand vs. a monster of your own level! Even if you are a wizard with no spells!
-- Get weapons and items off the monsters you can actually use!
-- Be more powerful compared to the monsters than you ever will be again!
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
Launch codes for US nuclear arsenal. With out them several trillion dollars of hardware doesn't work and/or US ripe for invasion/blackmail. With them you could destroy the rest. The codes to retarget them too is worth nearly as much.
Several movies valued just one nuclear bomb in at several billion.
----
Then again Clinton sold nuclear secrets to China for only 10 million donation to the DNC. (and chinese money to Arkansas teachers union and several major defense contractor and free trade to China and several hundred congressmen...)
Bill Gates credit card PIN number.
4 bytes (or 2 using compact BCD) worth a few billions.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
48 bits of ASCII code
Yes, but not 48 bits of information. Assuming that you're only getting the messages "We Won!" or "We Lost!", that's a *maximum* of 1 bit. Once you take into account the relative probability of hearing each message by that point in the war, you've actually got far less than one bit of information in the message "We Won!". By the time the allies were in Berlin, the actual amount of information had dropped to way below 0.0001 bits, given that by that time it would have been virtually impossible for them to lose, barring acts of fnord. So your figure of $13.35 billion becomes at the most $13.35 million. Still not a number to be sniffed at, admittedly, and it increases as you go backwards in time to a maximum value (to a blind observer, who doesn't take into account any differences between the two sides) of 1 bit of information in 1939.
Surely the value of information is always at least partially subjective? There's the example above somewhere of an EQ account, which presumably was sold to someone who had the intention of using it, rather than selling it. I doubt that the buyer's valuation of the information was based on any calculations of the value of the time that he/she could save by buying the account rather than building it up themselves - assuming an hourly rate for an IT professional who can afford to splurge on an EQ account, $1000 doesn't give nearly enough hours to build up the kind of account that would attract premium prices. It may, however, reflect the value of the time the seller put into it, although I doubt that, as well. Any estimates to the length of time needed? Any more than 200 hours, and we're into "Fries with that?" territory. Mind you, speaking as an impoverished student, that wouldn't surprise me...
Reality is the ultimate Rorschach.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here are two examples of one-bit messages that cost over $100M each.
1 bit message #1: Yes/no - did you detect the beacon signal from the Mars Polar Lander?
1 bit message #2: Yes/no - did you detect the beacon signal from Pioneer 10?
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
Oh yeah. Don't get me wrong, I hate WebLogic. But engineers seem to like it. Oh well.
Cancer and heart disease are very very tough problems, it's unlikely that any single miracle drug is going to make a significant dent in the death toll.
wheras a media frenzy over an unsafe, untested new drug could cause all kinds of harm...
no, i'll stick to skepticism and scientific accuracy, thank you.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!