If anyone has any suggestions about how to set up a proper tax structure to let interested individuals send donations to this cash prize, I’d appreciate it. We didn’t exactly expect even the limited level of interest this has received, and we’re trying to respond to it quickly. Mike’s traveling cross country right now and is a little hard to reach. He’ll be active on the site again on 10/19. I’m covering as the guest admin.

Also, people have brought up patents; we’re not looking to steal anyone’s work, just to encourage. Any suggestions for how to deal with these concerns?

The whole point is not to pick up a single something cheap and surplus on eBay or at a garage sale; it’s to design something that could be scaled up such that every household or every schoolchild could have these items. Remember ‘chemistry sets’ as a kid? Mike’s looking for something like this for the modern era.

I can be reached at montuori (at.) caltech (dot@) edu

I grew up in a household where the hot water heater was set to 180 degrees F. If you turned on the hot water, you got scalded. Trust me – you only do it once and yet somehow I turned out just fine!

Open source and capitalism are not mutually exclusive. If I put forth the effort to invent something so useful that it could advance science, surely someone would want to buy it, I sure as hell would not want some other guy to step in and use my idea to make that money without having shared any of the R&D costs. So yes I would patent any such idea as well as open source it for non commercial purposes. Then if joe schmo or a school district wanted build it for $100 then they could do so, the patent would allow me (or the company I sell the patent to) to manufacture devices and sell them for a profit (though still much less than present devices).

Its a mute point though, I highly doubt anyone would be able to design a device to make liquid nitrogen for less than $200 let alone $100 due to the cost of materials necessary to make a heat exchanger.

All these communities conveniently arrived when there was a market. No group or person built them out of general interest and just one day found they where making money off ad revenue and other stuff. Also do the operators really look like guys who have been in garages and bedrooms coding and soldering the last 20+ years? They look like trust fund babies with geek satire compared to your average kernel dev and engineer who was in the trenches when smart people where generally hated.

Most of the people at the forefront right now where watching MTV and partying while the real hackers where progressing the IT industry through the 80s and 90s. Most of these people wouldn’t even be able to tell you some significant figure from an innovative developer scene without googling.

Bottom Line is who gives a s**t..It wouldn’t surprise me if this thing makes the guy some money though; more than the bounty he offers. I’m not going to build refined efficient tools though and give them to some social figure.

This is with everything though. Even employees try to screw each other in some way from burger king to presidential campaign teams.

It’s about more than the cost of materials. It would take a long time and a ton of effort(much more than $100 worth even at half of minimum wage) to make any one of these things for the prices he’s specifying.

Accounting for cost of materials, you’d be losing money to do any one of these. At least find a rich aunt or grandma willing to put up $1000 or something for the award.

Yea, Aztraph liquid nitrogen burns are bad…. I have thankfully small scars from the said substance (Hutrts like hell!!!) Exposure to eye will instantly cause blindness. Bad containment and a sudden warming of liquid nitrogen could cause a small explosion.

but what hapend to the birds ?