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What is stopping someone from setting up their own 8 foot red weather balloon, and throwing everyone off?
It’s in the rules
Balloons will be in readily accessible locations, visible from nearby roadways and accompanied by DARPA representatives.
So they would have to spoof the DARPA rep as well :eek:
Hey, those kind of thoughts lead to thick rulebooks!
I believe the “updates” will expand the 2-page rulebook to handle this sort of behavior.
Maybe you will need to signal the DARPA rep somehow?? Will the DARPA rep be wearing a DARPA “uniform”?
That’s a ton of money. I agree, with a bunch of people from teams, there is a ton of great thinkers all around the nation.
Team 423 proposes a collective effort on the part of FIRST teams.
Report a balloon location to us.
The first team to report each good one gets one share in the $.
If I get a few responses, I will make a team entry with DARPA: ‘FIRST Consortium for DARPA’
Charlie Affel, Mentor, 423
caffel@aol.com
I think this is the basic idea originally proposed by Greg…
[edit]
From the Facebook group previously posted
Not to deflate the excitement here, but I would be quite surprised if anyone in FIRST actually found any of the balloons at all. Think about it. Yes, FIRST is big, but it’s not THAT big. There are a lot more areas without FIRST than there are with it. And of all the people in FIRST, only a small fraction visit this site regularly. Think about this too: The balloon could be one block from your house, and if it was a block in the direction you never drove, you’d never know it was there.
The balloons will be found by the entire informed and online population of the US as a whole. The person to claim the prize will be the one with the best real-time monitoring and verification of reports of these balloons. I doubt even if you had one million people specifically on the lookout for these all day long, that they alone would find more than 5. The country is just too large.
As we speak, sophisticated code is probably being written to track, analyze, and log any mention of a red balloon on ALL of the internet’s most popular real-time places (such as this forum). The winner will be the person/group that is able to obtain, organize, and verify the results of their massive web-crawl the fastest, while placing decoy information all over the internet simultaneously.
And that’s why it’s a network challenge…
Now that wouldn’t be graciously professional! 
But unfortunately, most of the world out there wouldn’t know that… 
Another thread in th Chit-Chat discussion just started on this subject:
you weren’t supposed to tell anyone else. now I might not win. haha
So where is the money going? I’d suggest $1000 to each team that kicks in a location, and the balance to FIRST to use as they see fit.
I’ll cover manchester…
I have SAT’s tomorrow:mad: so I might just swing by the millyard to check if there are any red balloons/odd deliveries to the FIRST building.:rolleyes:
I disagree. We are all FIRST participants but are doing this outside of FIRST, don’t get confused. We are using CD and Facebook for this mission, so if any goes to support an entity besides the people working to find the ballons, it should be those two.
So the winner recieves 40 grand and the tax man gets,what, 25% on gambling winnings. Oh, and the winner gets bumped up to a higher tax bracket. I’m just guessing but the winner is going to be busy on april 15th looking for tax shelters.
Found this in another thread…
Of course, a group of kid’s at MIT won the 40 k. kinda sad for the rest of us. Oh well.
It didn’t necessarily have to be sad. If you reported a balloon you got $2,000 bucks, and if you referred a balloon reporter you got $1,000 bucks, and if you referred the referrer of the reporter you still got $500 bucks, so on and so forth. Pretty neat idea, obviously effective. 
Yeah, if everyone was referred down the chain completely, $37500 goes to the people who found the balloons, and $2500 goes to charity. MIT just provided the website for 10 groups of people to meet up.
Centennial Park in Atlanta - is that a clue?