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Find DARPA's Balloons, Win $40K
coondoggie writes "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency today offered up a rather interesting challenge: find and plot 10 red weather balloons scattered at undisclosed locations across the country. The first person to identify the location of all the balloons and enter them on the challenge Web site will win a $40,000 cash prize. According to the agency, the balloons will be in readily accessible locations, visible from nearby roadways and accompanied by DARPA representatives. All balloons are scheduled to go on display at all locations at 10:00AM (ET) until approximately 4:00 PM on Saturday, December 5, 2009."
Not another balloon hoax!
Here's a handy chart for finding the balloons.
Nuclear engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
There should have been 99.
A big red balloon with guys waiting around it all day, yeah, that's not going to freak anyone out.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/31/boston.bombscare/index.html
Sorry to disappoint, but this is only 10 Luftballons.
I think you were looking for 99 of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Luftballons
The economy still sucks, DARPA; why are you wasting taxpayer money on bullshit like this?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Obviously, this is just an attempt to use crowdsourcing to find a bunch of lost weather balloons. In this day and age of gov't budget cutbacks, every balloon saved is a slightly bigger performance bonus at the end of the year...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Or maybe each of the ten weather balloons may or may not have a live six-year-old boy riding in it, and DARPA full well remembers what happened last time with just *one*.
Solomon
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
There's no real point to it. Here's what they did: There are five balloons around, numbered from 1-5, and four balloons numbered from 7-10. Just like the prank where you release a 3 pigs, painted with a "1", "3", and "4" into a high school.
They're just 5 months early.
Do I get an extra bonus if I pop them all?
What happens if people start setting their own balloons as decoys?
Either way we could have a lot of fun with this, we just need a few red balloons and volunteers to be "DARPA agents". Yes, of course we could just post disinformation, but wouldn't it be more fun to get participants to post disinformation with conviction and confidence be behind it? F'en with people is so fun.
Respect the Constitution
While the internet public at large is attempting to mobilize to find the red balloons, DARPA will be monitoring the 'net attempting to stay on top of an unknown number of organizations comprised of an unknown number of individuals coordinating using unknown protocols and communications channels. This will be valuable information similar to finding and shutting down terrorist cells. Expect the front-runner group to be infiltrated by a covert DARPA agent and some key people to "disappear" until after the deadline. (OK, did I go too far there?)
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I didn't know that. That's bad. Imagine all the four star generals sitting around twiddling their thumbs going, "If only we could bomb Russia, we'd get that last fucking star!"
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
The "trawling for information" idea is an easy one. Set a Google News alert for it. You can specify it to provide notifications for other things like website updates. I've already gotten a few, but they were all talking about the contest, and how it could be subverted. :)
I'm just trying to figure out where to buy an 8 foot red balloon. Since I already know the risks associated with being identified as a contestant, I'd rather play the other side, and give people a false target. I already have magnetic signs for DOD, FBI, DHS, and FEMA to put on my truck to allow easy movement depending on what the disaster is. :) The DOD sign should be close enough for folks to believe I'm DARPA. :) I'll taser any contestants who come close enough, so I can steal their lists (and wallets, and GPS devices, and laptops, etc, etc, etc). :)
(just kidding, I don't own a taser.)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.