You are not supposed to know this stuff...
'An anonymous reader sends a post by Finnish electronics hacker Oona Räisänen, who heard a mysterious digital signal in the audio accompanying a YouTube video of a police chase.
The chase was being filmed by a helicopter. Räisänen wrote:
"The signal sits alone on the left audio channel, so I can completely isolate it. Judging from the spectrogram, the modulation scheme seems to be BFSK, switching the carrier between 1200 and 2200 Hz.
I demodulated it by filtering it with a lowpass and highpass sinc in SoX and comparing outputs.
Now I had a bitstream at 1200 bps.
... The bitstream consists of packets of 47 bytes each, synchronized by start and stop bits and separated by repetitions of the byte 0x80.
Most bits stay constant during the video, but three distinct groups of bytes contain varying data."
She guessed that the data was location telemetry from the helicopter, so she analyzed it to extract coordinates.
When she plotted them and compared the resulting curve to the route taken by the fleeing car in the video, it was a match.'
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Government waste...?
"Phillip Swarts reports in the Washington Times that NASA is completing a $350 million rocket-engine testing tower at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi that it doesn't want and will never use.
'Because the Constellation Program was canceled in 2010, the A-3's unique testing capabilities will not be needed and the stand will be mothballed upon completion (PDF),, said NASA's inspector general.
The A-3 testintower will stand 300 feet and be able to withstand 1 million pounds of thrust (PDF).
The massive steel structure is designed to test how rocket engines operate at altitudes of up to 100,000 feet by creating a vacuum within the testing chamber to simulate the upper reaches of the atmosphere.
Although NASA does not expect to use the tower after construction, it's compelled by legislation from Sen. Roger F. Wicker (R-MS), who says the testing tower will help maintain the research center's place at the forefront of U.S. space exploration.
'Stennis Space Center is the nation's premier rocket engine testing facility,' says Wicker.
'It is a magnet for public and private research investment because of infrastructure projects like the A-3 test stand. In 2010,I authored an amendment to require the completion of that particular project, ensuring the Stennis facility is prepared for ever-changing technologies and demands.'
Others disagree, calling the project the 'Tower of Pork' and noting that the unused structure will cost taxpayers $840,000 a year to maintain.
'Current federal spending trends are not sustainable, and if NASA can make a relatively painless contribution to deficit reduction by shutting down an unwanted program, why not let it happen?' says Pete Sepp, executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union.
'It's not rocket science, at least fiscally.'"
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Here is the story I told you I would share tonight
Hey America We Saw You Naked And We Were Laughing!
Oh Ya Internet Justice
Kat Escapes A Dog Friend
Secret Autonomy App
Be Afraid Be Very Afraid...?
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