twisted76017

Isn't it interesting that Capitalism beats Socialism in Darpa Networking Contest? MIT offered it's players a personal stake in the contest. Jeremy Irish squashes all forms of capitalism, in favor of pushing his socialist agenda. Capitalism wins again.

Not sure why Jeremy Irish would close my original post except for his own personal/company benefit. My Original post was here: Let's win the DARPA Network Challenge! My offer still stands: anyone who wants to contribute balloon locations to my post will share equally and your post or message will serve as legal claim if my submission wins. If you want to contribute your share to charity (after you pay the taxes), that's your business.

Seems like a "BallonBoy" Incident may need to be incited. That's a sure way to get on every front page. The sample pictures of the balloons show one of them moored in a public park with a number underneath it. https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/gallery.aspx Photos posted (12/2/09) I'm not on Facebook or Twitter, any clues coming from there?

I'm in Texas so that makes both ends and the middle, but I haven't devised a way to solve this riddle. I have google wave but don't think that will help much in locating the balloons.

You have to send in the coordinates of the balloons

Anyone who would like to participate can submit the location of any sightings to me and we will share the winnings between the participants who submit the first coordinates via responses to this posting. Your post will serve as legal claim via timestamp of your submission. Let's win this thing! http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10406752...ag=2547-1_3-0-5 A new DARPA contest is using balloons to test our social-networking skills. After kicking off the Internet 40 years ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is again tapping into the Net for a new challenge. The DARPA Network Challenge will award $40,000 to the first person who can identify the latitudes and longitudes of 10 red weather balloons positioned at different parts of the sky across the continental United States. The 8-foot balloons are scheduled to lift off on Saturday at 7 a.m. PST and remain in their locations throughout the day, until sunset. The contest will be open until December 14, so contestants will have a little more than a week to gather up and submit their answers. But the contest has a twist. Since no one person can identify all 10 balloons across the States in one day, challengers will need to rely on social networks to team up with others to pinpoint the locations of the balloons. DARPA's goal here is not to see if people can answer the question but to gauge how we use social networks to resolve a problem. "We are not interested in the balloons. We already know where those are," Norman Whitaker, DARPA's deputy director of transformational convergence technology, said in a statement. "It's the techniques people use to solve the challenge we're focused on. We have people who are going to be actively watching from the sidelines to see how this plays out." Whitaker is hoping the contest will offer insight into how the Internet and social networks can help people build teams and collaborate with each other to solve real problems and challenges. DARPA is leaving it up to the contestants to best figure out how to work with others to track the balloons. One example posed by Whitaker is that of using a Web site to offer a portion of the prize to anyone who shares info about the locations of the balloons. Another idea is to work with a charity and donate your winnings. People can also naturally ask for help through Web-based tools such as Facebook or Twitter, connecting via computers or smartphones. Although the challenge may be tough, Whitaker believes that at least one person will be able to solve it, whether it takes five minutes or all day. But if no one responds with the locations of all 10 balloons by the December 14 deadline, the agency will reward the $40,000 to the first person who tracked down at least five of them. DARPA isn't sure yet what it will do with the information it finds. But that's never stopped the agency before. "We're DARPA," Whitaker said. "We like to do things that are really out of the box." The agency enjoys a history of out-of-the-box challenges. Past contests have set up races between unmanned, robotic vehicles, including DARPA's 2005 Grand Challenge and its 2007 Urban Grand Challenge. Are you willing to take the DARPA challenge? How would you use the Internet and social networks to win the prize?

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