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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."
Shhhh! It's for the TV show!
The CB App. What's your 20?
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.
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