R.L., why do you fear having to win prizes before getting to continue living off of taxpayers who are still robbed at gunpoint to subsidize your pretentious, often unproductive and certainly nerdy busy-work? That's about the most sensible conclusion that one can derive from your following reaction:

>>>An award would would change nothing...<<<

Well, if you'd remove your self-serving Hawaiian pork-barreling blinders, you'd recall that prizes' availability leverages around 40 times their amount in terms of private sector investment pursuing them. Go ask Burt Rutan, or even DARPA (whose Grand Challenge recently leveraged a 50:1 investment despite how they disqualified many teams early on). So although you'd be scared of the plethora of new competitors, taxpayers would benefit. Just because taxpayers' benefiting isn't a priority of yours doesn't make it incoherent to posit that it's a high priority. Do you feel foolish for having publicly stated that prizes' offering would change nothing? Keep digging yourself into a deeper hole for reformers to increasingly see. It's for the good of your industry, albeit not for you.
Next, you whined:

>>>And besides what you are suggesting is something you have protested before- government spending money on something that brings no physical benifit to the people...<<<

I'm humoring you by temporarily agreeing that at least some of what you produce is more than just busy work and also a mere excuse for a pork-barreling Congress to funnel others' hard earned dollars into the frivolous but strategically located state of Hawaii. It is YOU who disagrees that your work deserves funding if it doesn't lead to the winning of prizes, and that is precisely why you maliciously attack prizes advocates like me (even as you're becoming increasingly cornered). The more you fight the wave of reform, the more it becomes obvious that we need it to wash out your favoritism & nepotism-laden niche. Next, as for:

>>>>How would you even determine a winner? By most planets discovered?<<<<

What in the heck's wrong with my initial proposal to reward the discovery of each additional planet? Perhaps the fact that we'd be paying for results, not busy work employing folks who ego-massage and whine about how important their work is to an unappreciative taxpaying populace. Leave it to you to complicate matters more than they need to be in a feeble attempt to confuse and discredit. You've been spending an AWFUL lot of time working equations lately. Maybe that's why you recently had a brush with the LAW? I bet you weren't being condescending to lawyers regarding your supposed superiority when your own inferiority caught up with you.

>>> you hijack threads to inanely prattle about your vague incoherent agenda. <<<

Why would I try to compete with you when you're the most practiced at it? Anyhow, please keep attacking me without provocation or intellectual justification like you typically do. It will make it easier to make you have to actually PRODUCE for a change for as long as you expect to continue leeching off of our taxdollars.