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?"

Goat Sex

[T3kno]

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.

$1G/B

[Erotomek]

I had to pay $4G for changing only 4 bytes of my bank account state, that's $1G/B!

Dont know whether I would put a price to it

[cOdEgUru]

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 ???!!!

Selling accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

Karma: 50, two of them. Bids, anyone?

Maybe...

[Zen Mastuh]

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.

Re:Credit Card Numbers

[YourFavoriteBandSux]

Can individuals actually *get* a credit limit in the millions of dollars? Who are these people? I guess my *real* question is, who's impulse-buying million-dollar ticket items?

/. quick run down of expesnive info

[bilbobuggins]

Everquest Account (~20 bytes): $1500

Business.com (~8 bytes): $5,000,000

Natalie Portman's phone number (~9 bytes): priceless

it must be....

[r00tarded]

bill gates' ATM pin.

Re:Slightly misleading calculation

[gwydi0n]

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...

You paid $500,000+ for an Everquest House?!? Damn - I hope you got one that's at least over 1MB and has "pets" in the basement :P

Gwyd

Re:/. quick run down of expesnive info

[SirSlud]

> Natalie Portman's phone number (~9 bytes): priceless

Should that read 'Natalie Portman's Call Screener (~9 bytes): worthless'? ;)

Re:The most value has got to be in passwords...

[Telastyn]

The winning lottery #.

"I do"

[sisukapalli1]

These have been arguably one of the most expensive bits in human history.

S

Re:Credit Card Numbers

[nurightshu]

When I was in college, I worked for First Data corporation as a translator for international credit card transactions. One afternoon my coworker, Ahshif, waves across the cubicle at me to jack in on his line and listen to the transaction.

This Saudi kid is putting a two million dollar transaction on his Visa card! Ahshif is translating between the merchant and the credit card's bank when the bank asks, "What's this purchase for?"

"Well," the merchant replies, "I'm selling him seven Rolls-Royces. Five are for a charity auction, one is for his father, and one is for himself."

I'll never understand the rich, I guess.

Re:Slashdot accounts

[iamplasma]

How about 50 cents and some gum?

Re:enigma

[browse]

Build a man a fire and hell be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

Re:Brand Naming

[Pig Hogger]

My guess for most bucks for the bit would be in the field of Brand Naming. Companies pay naming firms tens of thousands of dollars to come up with new words like "Lucent", "Pentium" and "Infiniti".

It is not that "easy"... Such names come attached with thousand-page long reports explaining in detail the market research behind the name.

Some years ago, a friend of mine did a logo for a BIG company. The logo looks like a head with an ellipse going though it. It came about in a totally unrelated office, er, "event" (everyone was drunk) when someone was clowning and put an old UHF TV antenna around a bust of Lenin. Voilà, instant multi hundreds$$$$ logo.

The hard part was then writing up all the bullshit to "explain" the newfangled logo...

DMCA (unfortunately)

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

00101010

[peacefinder]

How much did Deep Thought cost to build, just to cough up 42? That was one mighty darn expensive byte...

Re:Goat Sex

[Tempura_Roll]

I'm selling all my Slashdot karma 50 accounts for $1/each. Any takers?

$10,000 for one bit (of chalk)

[Krelnik]

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

Worst Story Ever

[Anonymous Coward]

This has got to be the dumbest thing to hit slashdot in a long time. This makes case mods look like valuable news.

Re:Go / No-go on a new drug

[colmore]

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.