And there it goes.
(Credit: WPEC-TV Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)
Car chases are exciting, but fraught.
One slip of the wheel, one errant pedestrian, one drunken driver, and difficult consequences may follow.
Police in Iowa and Florida, however, seem to have taken the counsel of Q from the “Bond” movies.
Instead of constantly hurtling after potential madmen, they have found an entirely new method of tracking their cars.
It’s called Starchase. Essentially, it’s a cannon that fires “bullets” that are sticky GPS devices.
CBS 12 offered an example in real life of how it’s done.
Iowa state trooper Tim Sieleman seemed rather mesmerized. He told CBS 12: “If you had told me 16 years ago that I would have had a cannon on the front of my car, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
Officers in St. Petersburg, Fla., also are testing the system. As ABC News reports, the operation of the compressed air gun (not too unlike the sort that fires T-shirts into the crowd at NBA games) is quite simple.
While TV broadcasters like CBS and Fox continue their legal battle against Aereo and its leased microantenna-to-internet streaming scheme, Bloomberg reports cable companies are watching more closely than ever. Since they’re currently paying retrans fees for a lot of the same content networks …