"Smart" Billboards Debut in Sacramento 465
k0osh.CEOofCLIT writes "Remember the billboards in "Minority Report" that scanned your eyes and changed the advertisement based on your shopping preferences? The Sacramento Bee reports: "Soon, this sign along the Capital City Freeway will be able to change its message based on what radio stations motorists have tuned in.""Yeah, Chris can't spell. He and Rob should form a club. *grin*
Re:How is that possible (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps our UK friends can help here...doesn't the BBC use a similar technology to find people who aren't paying their TV license fee? I saw this happen on The Young Ones once.
Hang on, before you Troll... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Privacy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sensationalism/ Listening habits/Distraction (Score:2, Interesting)
How does this work? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm thinking of cases in totalitarian governments during the last 100 years where people huddled around banned radios trying to get the BBC, or of the case of the BBC roaming around trying to find people who have working televisions but don't pay their television tax. Could sensors like this be used by govt.s to determine from outside a house whether there was a functioning radio/television reciever? Could similar tech be used to locate illegal cell/police scanners or radar detectors (in areas where such things are illegal)?
Would it be possible for me to build such a scanner and then legally walk around seeing what passing cars are listening to and what people are watching on tv, just out of curiousity?
Is there a physics major in the house?
Perfect. Just PERFECT. (Score:2, Interesting)
WTF is it with advertising?
Is there ANYWHERE I can go, where I'm not going to be subject to obnoxious marketing?
I wish they'd spend their time, energy, and money on making advertising less intrusive and less obnoxious. Then I may actually pay attention to something I read.
If this keeps up, everywhere we go it's going to be like a trade show, where all the advertisers are just trying to make the most noise and flash the most lights to grab your attention away from the other guy.
What wll happen in the following circumstances: (Score:3, Interesting)
1) The car stereo is tuned in onto (eg. freq in MHz) 99.5FM while at the back seat, another person is listening to 110.5 FM.
2) The person has a TV installed instead of a radio.
3) A bus which has no radio passes by, but the passengers are listening to at least 10 different radio stations via mobile radios.
4) A police car passes by.
I got a few more possible situations, but these are the more interesting ones
Annoying "Active" Billboards (Score:2, Interesting)
(sorry if that last post was empty
Anyways
Re:Sensationalism/ Listening habits/Distraction (Score:3, Interesting)
Advertising agencies which selectively advertise on certain stations based on listener demographics would tend to disagree with you here. Sure, it's not an exact science, but every bit of information about a person helps fine-tune their demographic a little more and produce better ad targeting. NPR and punk rock, combined, tell a lot about you as a consumer, really -- from these two facts, we can glean some pretty good probabilities about your age and political leanings, for example.
Re:Downright Frightening (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess what I am trying to say is that these ads are not going to be targeted at *you*, but the current status of the highway's demographic ( although I guess if you do see a comercial for "the best head-bashing-bar-stools-in-town" you might want to reconsider stopping at the next truck stop)
Basically, in the morning commute, most people in Sacramento are probably listening to something easy like the Breeze 105.1 or perhaps an oldies station like Cool 101.9. The advertisers will probably want to put something up that is more targeted to the morning commuter (and will be able to determine this by the increase in friendly talk/music morning programs). Then, later in the day when local High Schools get out (but before the standard work day is done), there is in increase in 98 Rock and KWOD 106.5 (or even 102.5 or 103.3) and they can target a younger demographic. In actuality, this is not too much different then advertising on tv. There are lots of car comercials between 5 and 9. Between 11 and 2 there is an increase for accident attorneys and ITT Tech. 2-5 is filled up with toy comercials. etc...
As for suspicious activity, how many people really listen to pirate radio stations while driving on the highway? I would imagine that you would have to stay pretty stationary to receive such a weak signal.
Hell, who listens to the radio anymore anyways? Now, if they could peek into your cd player, I'd be a little more worried.
Two way street? (Score:5, Interesting)
My CRT emits RF. What happens when they can pick that up? Think thats far off?? Okay, what about WiFi? Can I write a program to sniff the 30-some odd WiFi hotspots in my neighborhood.. and based on their physical location and the data I gather, market too them? Why or why not??
Think the analogy doesn't apply? What about the sattelite internet that uses sattelite downlink and landline uplink.. that is broadcasting to all of north america.. more than any single radio station.. This could set a dangerous precedent, no?
Re:How does this work? (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't you think it would be amusing (for a while) to go out with your own transmitter and transmit false LO and IF signals, causing the billboards to think that there was suddenly an enourmous surge of traffic listening to country music? It shouldn't be too difficult to figure out the appropriate LO and IF frequencies to emulate someone listening to a local station, and it would be interesting to see how the advertising companies target markets according to their music tastes. For example, what do they think that people who listen to the opera will buy?
As well, I would be interested to see how the billboard company would respond to this (not to mention I would like to see all of their data infused with "anomalies"). I'm guessing they would try to sue your ass off by claiming that you were "stealing real customers" from them, but how well would that hold up in court?
A new protection product (Score:3, Interesting)
Originally the idea was to use a computer controlled multi polarized liquid crystal windshield system to align the crystals so that they have opposing polarity in each layer so as to block direct sunlight. Don't you just hate it when driving east in the morning or west in the afternoon and have to put up with sunlight in your eyes when it is below the visor level? Do you try to align your head so the sun is behind the rear view mirror? Well this idea would block the sun by tracking the direction it is at.
So I was thinking. Why not add some more smarts to the computer software and have it scan the field of view looking for tell-tale billboard signs, and automatically block them out, too?
Well, I can dream, anyway.
Spoofing (Score:5, Interesting)
Hours of fun, convincing the sign that everybody leaving the football game is listening to a PBS classical music station.
For more fun and games with Gunn oscillators, see also trolling for taillights [supernet.net].
Re:Privacy? (Score:2, Interesting)
Interesting. That's what we were always TOLD the detector vans were doing. But then recently I read Robert Littles _The Company_, a semi-fictional acount of the CIA in 1950-1990s and he sorta described a technique of snooping radio frequencies to find if any (Soviet) covert listening devices were operating in a given area. One of the characters suggested mounting this mobile listening post on a laundry truck and driving through a neighborhood. Which is exactly what the old detector vans looked like and did.
So this isn't old technology. In fact, with the European RDS (Radio Data System) which I happened to work on back in the early 90s, you could actually instruct the radio receiver to jump to a different tuning setting or hijack the "traffic signal" and pipe advertising into the receiver if the user happened to have traffic alerts switched on.
Maybe you could sue the guy driving behind you tuned to a different frequency under the DMCA for interrupting the advertising while you were reading it...?
STF
Parent is a fraud (Score:5, Interesting)
To the parent troll: your friends can keep modding me down, and I can keep reposting the truth over, and over, and over. I've got more karma than you have mod points, and once people take a look at this for themselves, you're going to start getting modded down. If I'm wrong, post a followup and tell Slashdot why I'm wrong, because trying to prevent my posts from being read isn't going to work.
Here's the content that was suppressed:
Aren't you the guy that claimed that you were head of Nintendo R&D, and then had someone else (a few articles back, IIRC) point out that they knew the person in charge of Nintendo R&D and that you weren'thim?
Furthermore, you've been giving what you claim is inside information [slashdot.org] about Nintendo on Slashdot, which I can hardly see the head of a corporate R&D division doing. I've worked in corporate R&D, and they're quite secretive, -- and more so the higher they get.
Finally, the heads of Nintendo's two R&D departments are, according to Planet Nintendo, Takehiro Izushi [planetnintendo.com](R&D section 1) and Kazuhiko Taniguchi [planetnintendo.com] (R&D section 2). There is no "Nintendo Advanced R&D" division that I could find any reference to, nor is the informal term "head" a title that is likely to be used in the formal Japanese corporate culture. Finally, I find it rather unlikely that a non-Japanese person such as yourself would hold such a high-ranking position at a large Japanese firm.
Finally, I find it beyond belief that the head of "Nintendo Advanced R&D" would beg [slashdot.org] on Slashdot for details of how modchips work, when there are engineers aplenty that have worked hard on exactly this problem present in hordes working in Nintendo's R&D departments.
Sir, I accuse you of being both a troll and a fraud! To the Foe list with you!
And, sir, I must say that I find your claim in your User Bio [slashdot.org] that you earned three PhDs in three years highly unconvincing.
Well (Score:2, Interesting)
because statistics weren't invasive enough?? (Score:2, Interesting)
I already have a pretty good idea what the data will show:
most popular @ morning: talk show featuring two overweight men with deep voices and 7th grade reading levels.
all other times: clearchannel station with greatest reception - impossible to differentiate listners' favorite genre since all of these stations will be playing "a mix of your favorites from yesterday and today's greatest hits!"
Hunting for trolls (Score:3, Interesting)
As to whether or not you believe me, I could care less.
And yet you care intensely as to what others think, as evidenced by your response and my almost immediately modded down first two exposes.
I have not given any inside information about Nintendo R&D whatsoever that is not available elswhere.
I see. Other than policy? You also claimed that what you were posting *was* an inside secret. You could be lying then, or you could be lying now...tkae your pick.
As for your other concerns, I work for a more secretive internal R&D organization within the company, apart from R&D1 and R&D2. This organization is a black one, much like the "Skunk Works" of your Lockheed Aircraft in the USA.
*snort* Okay, let's pick this one apart. Yet the *existence* of Skunk Works is hardly kept secret by Lockheed, though its actual work is not trumpeted. It is hard to imagine to benefit to a company in keeping the *existence* of a division secret. Yet even if I were to believe this, that the very existence of your division is a secret withheld by Nintendo from the rest of the world, then you have just contradicted yourself. You have claimed that no information not available elsewhere was released by you -- except, of course, the existence of your top-secret, black, utterly unacknowledged by Nintendo department. If this is so secret, why put it in your public bio *and* your signature? Indeed, the only sort of person who would gain at all from something like this would be a sham trying to gain undeserved respect.
We are looking at technologies now that are at least 1-2 generations beyond GameCube.
Ah. 1-2, eh? Well, *one* generation is exactly what you're calling "regular" R&D's goals. Your work cannot be all *that* hidden.
As for Japan, even they
You use "they", though you claim to work in Kyoto?
Nintendo, and Sony, and many other corporations
Circumstantial evidence, but Nintendo and Sony are the first two companies that most American gamers think of when they try to come up with the names of Japanese corporations.
Last I checked, Xbox is not a Nintendo product, hence, we would not have too much concern over it.
We "would" not? You mean, "if" you worked at Nintendo your group "would" not have too much concern? I believe the word you should have used is "do": "...we do not have too much concern...".
I won't even entertain your attacks on my academic credentials
Heh. Okay.
but if you read my bio and do some arithmetic, you will find that I started graduate studies at MIT five years before I got my first degree.
Oh, really? I had read your bio as claiming that you started *undergraduate studies* at the age of 16. Impressive, but not unheard of. So if we read your bio, you would have had to have completed all primary, secondary (or the Indian equivalents thereof -- I know little of the Indian sub-college education system, and undergraduate schooling by the age of 16. That is, while not entirely impossible, is very unlikely. You then completed three doctorates concurrently over the next nine years -- again, while not impossible, extremely unusual. I know only one PhD personally that peruses Slashdot, and he is younger than you claim to be -- most 42-year-old triple PhDs are unlikely to be blowing their afternoons posting to Slashdot.
I shall entertain no further correspondence with the boorish likes of you.
Convenient, that. It certainly saves you from having to, say, like to your three doctoral theses, or any of the papers that you wrote while working in academia. The funny thing is that at least in computer science, the overwhelming majority of published papers are also available on the Web. Google does an excellent job of indexing both PDF and PS format papers. Yet, strangely enough, I find no useful references to anyone by your name.
Oh, there's a Samir Gupta who was a management professor (not what you have any of your claimed PhDs in) who was co-author on a single rather basic distributed systems paper. Unfortunately, he was still in academia almost a decade after you claim to have left.
There's another Samir Gupta who worked for Renaissance Software, but graduated in '93...far later than you claim to have graduated.
You are, of course, free to point Slashdotters to any of your theses.
Or, of course, you could give up on this troll account, and start a new one. Perhaps your next one will be a bit more plausible, and you will make fewer mistakes.
If I had to guess, I'd place you as an undergraduate in college, probably in the United States.
Troll Hunting is the new, exciting Slashdot sport. See how many you can flush from the brush!
Re:Minority Report - RUINED (Score:2, Interesting)
Freaky.
Try this... (Score:1, Interesting)
To defeat detection of your own listening habits, make sure everything is well shielded, and install a preamp in the antenna line. A decent preamp will only pass signals in one direction so there's no way your LO signal can escape.