Billboard Advertising Banned Products In Russia Hides If It Recognizes Cops 86
m.alessandrini writes: In response to a ban of food imported from the European Union, an Italian grocery in Russia hired an ad agency to create a billboard with a camera and facial recognition software, that's able to change to a different ad when it recognizes the uniform of Russian cops. Gizmodo reports: "With the aid of a camera and facial recognition software, the technology was slightly tweaked to instead recognize the official symbols and logos on the uniforms worn by Russian police. And as they approached the billboard featuring the advertisement for Don Giulio Salumeria’s imported Italian goods, it would automatically change to an ad for a Matryoshka doll shop instead."
Good heavens (Score:5, Informative)
"Billboard Advertising Banned Products In Russia Hides If It Recognizes Cops"
Can anyone translate that indecipherable gibberish into English?
Re:Go to school (Score:2, Informative)
I'm not even a native english speaker, but here you go:
"A billboard in Russia advertises banned Italian products, but switches to ads for Matryoshka dolls [google.fr] when its camera spots a cop."
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Re:Good heavens (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason this sentence is bad is because it's a so-called garden path sentence.
You parsed ‘banned’ as the main verb with subject ‘billboard advertising’ but in fact ‘banned’ is a participle acting as an adjective to ‘products’.
These sentences are called garden path sentences because they lead you along the ‘garden path’ which seems neat and kept and trimmed on both sides until it turns out to be a dead end and you should have taken a left somewhere.
Re:Good heavens (Score:5, Funny)
Parse error: Invalid path, garden not found.
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Would these work better?
Banned Products Billboard Advertising In Russia Hides If It Recognizes Cops.
or
Billboard Advertising of Products Banned In Russia Hides If It Recognizes Cops.
The second seems rather incorrect to me.
It might be easier to just pick a word which is strictly an adjective, such as:
Billboard Advertising Illegal Products in Russia Hides if it Recognizes Cops.
Or, even simpler:
Billboard Advertising Illegal Products Hides if it Recognizes Cops
The problem is that "banned" can be a verb or a participle. "Illegal" is strictly an adjective.
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While it may give grammar nazis fits, a slightly non-standard use of commas could eliminate the ambiguity in the original headline:
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While it may give grammar nazis fits, a slightly non-standard use of commas could eliminate the ambiguity in the original headline:
I'm not convinced that your sentence isn't perfectly grammatical, but I'm not enough of a grammar nazi to diagram it. :)
Re: Good heavens (Score:2)
"Russian Billboard, Advertising Banned Products, Hides if it Recognizes Cops"
Re:Good heavens (Score:5, Informative)
And once you finally do parse it, it still isn't accurate. The billboard doesn't hide itself; it hides its message.
"Russian Billboard hides banned products advertisement when it recognizes cops." - one word less, unambiguous, and accurate.
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Simple, short, clear: "Russian Billboard detects Cops!"
Headlines are supposed to be simple and short. Other alternatives are:
or:
Sentences with dependent clauses are often more difficult to read than sentences without dependent clauses. Thus, the first sentence "Russian Billboard detect Cops!" is very straightforward to read. The second variation is slightly mor
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I wholeheartedly endorse your terseness but you have somewhat chucked the bambino out with the bathwater. There needs to be some context that makes detecting cops significant. Maybe "Dodgy Russian billboard detects cops"?
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It's perfectly correct albeit somewhat convoluted English.
Although it is saying that the billboard hides (intransitively), which is something different from hiding (transitively) the advert.
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Its like mini blinds.
Shows imported meat ad, when cop is spotted on camera the slats rotate showing the doll ad.
We have these mini blind style rotating ads on I-75 in Georgia. But this is new being triggered by camera instead of timer.
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"Billboard Advertising Banned Products In Russia Hides If It Recognizes Cops"
Can anyone translate that indecipherable gibberish into English?
An electronic billboard that shows ads for banned products changes what it shows when it sees cops coming.
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"Billboard Advertising Banned Products In Russia Hides If It Recognizes Cops"
Can anyone translate that indecipherable gibberish into English?
An electronic billboard that shows ads for banned products changes what it shows when it sees cops coming.
Or - Facial recognition allows black market billboard to avoid the police.
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Can anyone translate that indecipherable gibberish into English?
Can anyone translate that indecipherable gibberish into English?
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"Billboard Advertising Banned Products In Russia Hides If It Recognizes Cops"
Can anyone translate that indecipherable gibberish into English?
I think the Amish are writing the stories now.....
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The advertiser believes the cops play with dolls!
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Simple! ... ohh wait!?!
In Russia, billboard changes you
Re:EU food ban? (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, but they "cheat" a lot - for example, Belarus has made a mint serving as a reshipping platform for European goods. And for some reason they left Iceland off their list even though we supported the sanctions against them. Still, it's caused major food price inflation (unsurprisingly). Seems kind of a weird way to punish Europe, it seems obvious it's going to have a lot more effect at home than abroad - Russia's trade in food goods with Europe makes up far more of its imports than Europe's trade in food goods with Russia makes up of its exports. But I guess they didn't have a lot of options for "retaliation". I mean, Gazprom is already nearly going broke as it is, turning off the spigots would have rapidly ensured that it did. Oil and gas make up half of their government budget and 2/3rds of their exports - it'd sure punish Europe, but it'd also be economic suicide.
I think they're really hoping that the sanctions will just expire and they'll be able to go back to raking in western capital again. Because if they don't expire, barring some huge unexpected oil price surge, those reserve funds are going to dry up. They expect it to be down to under $40B by the end of this year [rbth.com]. What they're going to do when it runs out, I have no clue. They need dollars and euros to buy the goods that their undersized industrial sector can't manufacture. China's a help but not a solution; they don't have the lending power of the US or EU to begin with, and their goal seems to be more exploiting Russia over the situation than offering friendly aid. For example, they got Russia to agree to the cutthroat rates on the proposed "Power Of Siberia" pipeline that they'd been trying to get for years and to let them own greater than 50% stakes on fields inside Russia. They got Russia to sell them their most advanced air defense system despite the objections of the defense industry over concerns that China would do what they always do with new technology - reverse engineer it and then produce it domestically. But who else are they going to turn to? China's basically becoming Russia's "loan shark". And at the end of the day, if it came down to it and China had to chose between the Russian market and the 20-fold larger market of the US and EU? It's not even a contest.
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The import ban for food was supposed to hurt Poland - the loudest supporter for sanctions - first and foremost, and I think that worked out pretty well. I still remember Poland begging other EU countries to buy as many of their apples as possible. It also hurt Greece a lot, making this a problem of the whole euro-zone.
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hey expect it to be down to under $40B by the end of this year [rbth.com]. What they're going to do when it runs out, I have no clue
They'll start slashing welfare to stabilize the budget. That's why the rhetoric about how the evil West is once again trying to destroy Russia is still in full force... so that when they start starving the more vulnerable parts of the populace, there's an established external enemy to blame.
The other option? That would be war, the ultimate excuse.
Of course #1 does not preclude #2. It might just defer it.
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
In Soviet Russia, ad recognize you! Wait.. what?
Great idea (Score:2)
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Don't be so far to believe! (Score:5, Informative)
As pointed out on a news website (which I can't remember where for the moment), the whole thing appears staged, and they 'police' are probably acting (or actors).
It is not illegal in Russia to sell the western goods, it's just illegal to import them, under the current self-imposed Russian sanctions. There is no reason why the shop can't advertise the food, and there is no law that the police can use to stop the food from being sold.
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damn. .. should have been 'fast to believe' not 'far to believe'....
and I've been around here long enough to know that I should always preview the post first!
Re:Don't be so far to believe! (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a link to a BBC article where some doubts are also expressed on this being real.
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-32828359/ [bbc.com]
Re:Don't be so far to believe! (Score:5, Funny)
Of course it's not a real thing, it's a stunt. It would never work in any practical sense, and the fact that they have publicised it doesn't exactly help them keep its nature secret from the police. It's just marketing. How much would this much coverage have cost if paid for as TV advertising?
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If you it actually was forbidden to sell food, you would not see this story. The Russian government does not fuck around. You may be able to bend laws in central Russia, but not Moscow.
But I can see that the store may have some trouble, since the perception that buying EU food is impossible may well be wide spread. This add campaign basically is clever advertising and a bit of critique of the situation.
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Thanks. Also, it is rational to do a run-around of dictators and their laws.
Next up on Slashdot: Cool new system detects people hiding from police in attics!
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Not to mention that it's so easy to defeat (plaincloths officer) that no person in their right mind would use the technology to fool police.
Re:Don't be so far to believe! (Score:4, Funny)
OK. So we all agree it's just a stunt.
So the real headline should be "Billboard used for advertising".
Huh? You mean there are shops that (Score:2)
specialize in Matryoshka dolls?
Re:Huh? You mean there are shops that (Score:5, Funny)
Just one shop. It's inside another, slightly larger, shop.
Great - real world adblock (Score:5, Funny)
Totally fooled the cops! (Score:2)
If only there was some way for police to disguise themselves. Or if there was some way to see this advert from a distance. Thank goodness there isn't, or this advert would appear to be nothing more than an advertising stunt.
Advertising by Obi Wan Kenobi! (Score:2)
Speed traps (Score:2)
If they detect a police car parked behind the billboard, they switch to a large picture of a policeman parked behind the billboard.
Gratuitous (Score:1)