Slashdot Mirror
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."
Here's a handy chart for finding the balloons.
Nuclear engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
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
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!
My guess is, we're seeing half of a contest pitting high-end defense technology vs the "stupid cheap easy" solution.
SCENE: PENTAGON STAFF ROOM
Mil Contractor: "And so you see, with our latest satellite imaging systems, we can search and pinpoint the location of a human-sized target object within 10 days for a nation the size of the US or Russia."
Dumb General: "Wow. We need to spend some billions on this."
Smart General: "Pff. I bet you could do better by plain old "boots on the ground" spywork. You'd need a pretty big network of observers though..."
Smart 5-star general: "Well, boys, let's find out."
at least, this is a good enough story that I *hope* it's what's going on...
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.
Possibly to determine if they are able to focus in on an unknown individual who has managed to acquire certain specific information in a timely manner. I could see many anti-terrorism implications in an experiment of this nature.
Like this comment? I accept Bitcoin! - 153sc8UUBXyp12ofQqfAWDmJrzyiKCYC1x
I wonder what the agenda here is. It's surely not something as simple as finding how many people jump in their cars and go driving.
FTFA:
The DARPA Network Challenge is designed to mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet. "It is fitting for DARPA to announce this competition on the anniversary of the day that the first message was sent over the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet," said Dr. Regina E. Dugan, who made the announcement at a conference celebrating the anniversary. "In the 40 years since this breakthrough, the Internet has become an integral part of society and the global economy. The DARPA Network Challenge explores the unprecedented ability of the Internet to bring people together to solve tough problems."
But honestly, this discussion would not be nearly as amusing without the paranoia of /. getting turned up to 11.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!