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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.
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
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?"
"We win" -- VE Day, 5/8/1945
Calculate the cost of that.
--Blair
"Hint: don't just count $."
Business.com (~8 bytes): $5,000,000
Natalie Portman's phone number (~9 bytes): priceless
> 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"
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
Yeah, so when i spend 200K on a house all i am buying is a bit of paper and a key.
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.
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.
How about 50 cents and some gum?
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.
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
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
Actually, that's pretty much true. All you get for your money is a piece of paper that says the Folks In Charge won't object to your occupancy of a particular plot of land and any structures on it. Of course, you attach a particular value to your ability to live somewhere without behing harassed or removed by force, but what it really boils down to is you giving the guy who currently has that piece of paper some money, and transferring that agreement to yourself.
DennyK
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
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!
Just a couple set-uid bits here and there made the Internet Worm possible.
The Folks In Charge, in this case, are the government. If they want it, they'll take it. A principle known as 'eminent domain'.
deus does not exist but if he does