My kids (9 yr old girl, 11 y/o girl, 13 y/o boy) said it was the best movie they have ever seen. They are not super familiar with Looney Tunes. It isn't uncommon that they would see something and immediately it becomes their favorite movie, but the discussions afterward were different.
I loved it (52 y/o dad). I've been fascinated by it since hearing a few years ago about the tax write off situation.
A bit of extra context: since seeing MacGruber, I want to see anything with Will Forte (I know that's misguided, but I can't help it).
I loved macgyver growing up (unusual I know) and I found macgruber just incredibly mean spirited, like, it wasn't a parody that loved its source material and audience, it felt like it hated it.
> MacGruber is a 2010 American action comedy film based on the Saturday Night Live sketch of the same name, which itself was a parody of action-adventure television series MacGyver.
How did you think this was some kind of independent original thing???
I want to have this debate. This might be the MOST important thing ever discussed here on HN. Let's get this SOLVED!
If you look at the name, sure. But, the ENTIRE premise of MacGyver was that Richard Dean Anderson would ALWAYS come up with some strange scientifically accurate combination to get out of a hairy situation. MacGruber is about an elite strike force guy whose wife is killed on their wedding day, and then this pain drives the entirety of the movie. The characters have no origin story in common, and no references to MacGruber can be derived from MacGyver.
From MacGyver: "Resourceful and possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of the physical sciences, he solves complex problems by making things out of ordinary objects, along with his ever-present Swiss Army knife, duct tape, and occasionally matches."
SPOILER ALERT: I suppose the carrot in the ass COULD be considered a clever approach to a problem. But, I just thought it was evidence of MacGruber doing somthing ridiculous. And, clearly he used this often in the past, and it is not an ad-hoc clever assessment of something in the moment. Maybe he could have picked weeds in one scene, stuck them in his butt, then Ryan Phillipe could have used fake flowers, or something. Otherwise, you get no points for that one.
MacGyver has none of the rage that is SO important to MacGruber. His origin story: "The show follows Angus MacGyver, played by Richard Dean Anderson, who works as a troubleshooter for the fictional Phoenix Foundation in Los Angeles and as an agent for a fictional United States government agency, the Department of External Services (DXS)." NOTHING in there to indicate he is using emotional pain to drive an episode.
The only real satire I see is this: "He favors non-violent resolutions and prefers not to handle firearms due to the accidental shooting death of one of his friends when he was 12." Clearly, MacGruber does not have any such qualms about violence, and he also hates guns. But, you can't parody one characteristic by taking the exact opposite (violence), and then parody another characteristic (guns) by making that characteristic identical to the original. It ISN'T RIGHT!
Also, let's talk about Jack Dalton. He's the womanizer, and his eye twitches. And, his get rich quick schemes. That could have been mined for gold in this "parody."
If it is a parody, then Will Forte is insanely lazy. I'm willing to accept that might be the case, but then you need to refer to it as a lazy parody.
Bring it on, wredcoll. I'm waiting like a ninja and wolverine combined.
My kid (9yo) had seen a couple of Roadrunner cartoons on Youtube, no more than that. e.g. I don't think he's ever seen a Sylvester-Tweety cartoon. It didn't matter, he enjoyed the movie a lot. Beyond the very basics of Coyote and Roadrunner, which everyone picks up very quickly- and if you don't they do a great modern version in the opening minutes to bring you up to speed- the movie doesn't need deep knowledge of the WB cartoon universe. It's not like the MCU that way.
And the fact that it reinforced a message his mom and I have been trying to teach him (about the importance of not letting failure keep you from trying again) was a bonus for us.
I took my 7- and 10-year old and they enjoyed it, especially the 10yo. We watched a couple hours of Looney Tunes compilations on YouTube the day before to introduce them to the characters.
They will be entertained. I laughed harder than my 6 year old, he enjoyed it and probably also enjoyed seeing dad splitting sides. I think for your range they’ll understand and like it more. YMMV
My five year old who has never seen a Looney tunes cartoon thought it was hilarious. (It made me think he'd probably love actual Looney tunes cartoons!)
It's a technology. What you could do with it, and what you should do with it are completely different things.
If you follow the links there is a lot of information about the trial, including a whole series of documents identifying the legal framework that authorises LFR, including rationale under GDPR, Data Protection etc.
Of course, this technology could be used for bad purposes. But within a democracy, policing happens with the consent of the people, expressed through various channels including legal (parliament and local government) and police commissioners. What is interesting is the way that these frameworks are used to constrain the purpose and extent of this processing. For example, at the moment the images on the watchlist can only be drawn from custody images.
The police already have powers to seize CCTV and door-cam imagery in order to investigate crime. They need a warrant from a judge - so it isn't justified without good reason such as serious crimes. This is the way you constrain these things - you put the regulatory framework around them. You can't put the technology back in the box, so you put rules and expectations around how it is used.
Putting it kindly, this is an incredibly optimistic interpretation of how historically the government and police have used their powers. There is a long and consistent history of UK police abusing powers, stretching legal definitions and using technology to target those outside the original mandate of a law or investigation.
Antiterrorism and anti-disorder laws sold to the public as needed to prevent serious threats have been used extensively outside of what I think most would consider reasonable to surveil people, restrict freedoms and harass. The prime example are the stop and search laws, used to search a large numbers of people, predominantly based on racial stereotype, with zero impact on terrorism.
Remember that the Met police is known to be institutionally racist & sexist. It is not an organisation to be trusted.
In the UK if you keep your mouth shut during an investigation, it may harm your defense. There is zero right against self-incrimination. It is also the place where you can be jailed for not providing the PIN to your phone. I could go on.
How does that make us not a democracy? You are confusing the constitutionally based US system with the parliamentary based UK system. They work differently. We have elections typically every 4-5 years and elect a new government. That's the democracy bit. The laws that our elected representatives make are sometimes good, and sometimes bad. But they are made by the people we elected.
I mean, quite a lot of people want that or think they want it in many Western societies. They want the police to be able to find criminals, they want their kids kept off social media, they want terrorists' comms to be intercepted, they want 'immigrants' to not be able to claim benefits, they want voters to be required to produce ID, they want all manner of joined-up information state capabilities and they don't give a shit if they're surveilled and caught up in it until/unless it bites them in the ass.
And the thing is that they're not necessarily wrong to want some of those things, but they don't understand or don't care about collateral damage or what you might perceive as a lack of freedom. So they will happily vote for it.
Democracies vote to shoot themselves in the foot all the time. Look around you.
My point is that the technology exists, for good or ill, and we cannot put the genie back in the bottle.
What we can do, and should do as a society, is decide on how that technology should be used. And that means regulating it, in the same way that we regulate other technologies. For example, we regulate cars. Not just who can use them, but how they have to be constructed too. And we also place limits on how the authorities can use them, for example the rules that the police must obey when in an emergency response situation.
We are a democracy, so these rules are made by the people we have elected. so when it comes down to it, yes, this is what we as a people have asked for. And we are responsible for the conditions that the police can use this technology under.
FWIW, the capabilities and resources that the police have to track us 24/7 are an order of magnitude less than Google or Meta has. And they are an awful lot less accountable.
Google can block access to your Google account, which is enormously disruptive for many people whose online lives are built around it. In some ways it could be more disruptive in the long term than an arrest.
In principle, yes, but the lock in is real. Most non-technical people who have decades' worth of important data and credentials linked to their Google Accounts can't easily move away from them. Depending on personal circumstances, it's not difficult to imagine some international moves being easier than losing all your Google accounts. I've moved internationally several times, but I can barely contemplate what would happen if I lost my GMail.
> In the UK if you keep your mouth shut during an investigation, it may harm your defense. There is zero right against self-incrimination.
By "may harm your defence" what is meant is that Miranda was modified to inform people who are arrested that magistrates and juries are fully allowed to infer that you might be seeking to mislead the court if you didn't tell the police something significant that you later rely on as a defence in court. You're still allowed to do it, and they are allowed to conclude it is sketchy. That's the point of the modification.
Juries do and did this anyway.
The modified Miranda doesn't say you have no right against self-incrimination; it now warns you that if something is crucial to your defence it might be in your interest to mention it so the jury doesn't think you are trying to shine them on.
It's important to understand that this happens in the context of a country that does not have a plea bargaining mechanism. Cases go to court if it is in the public interest that they do (and the police don't decide this). But you can still no-comment your way through an interview and you aren't going to be bullied by a prosecutor into accepting a plea deal.
Of course but that is not really what I am asserting; I was just responding to an American in terms that are understood.
UK suspects on arrest are, nevertheless, read their rights in what is colloquially understood here as a "Miranda warning". It's my understanding that "Miranda rights" are a sort of colloquial shorthand in lots of countries, because we all see US crime procedurals.
(It's actually called "The Caution", and US Miranda rights were inspired by an earlier version, though AFAIR we borrowed back some changes that were influenced by the Miranda wording, before the contentious modification about "may harm your defence")
The subsequent "they modified Miranda" fuss made quite a bit of international news when it was introduced, with Americans sniping at us about changing it, arguing we'd taken away the right not to self-incriminate, etc., that we'd sullied the grand tradition of English Common Law, all that rather ironic snarking from the country that pioneered the abusive plea bargain system.
The Caution read at arrest is actually shorter in the UK; it doesn't mention that the cautioned have a right to an attorney or one will be appointed for them. They do, but the duty sergeant at the police station tells them that when they are booked.
You WILL be charged for not giving the PIN to your phone in an investigation. It’s a strict liability offence which means there’s no legal defence.
The only realistic protection here is a “decoy” partition, a partition that provides access to a separate installation of the OS. That gives the device owner plausible deniability that their real system even exists.
> You WILL be charged for not giving the PIN to your phone in an investigation. It’s a strict liability offence which means there’s no legal defence.
Again, no, not just "in an investigation".
It has to be an investigation that has reached the point where they have gone to a judge and got permission to serve written notice. The judge will ask them if there is a necessary and proportionate reason. There is then a timeframe in which you have to respond.
Police can't simply demand your PIN and charge you if you don't comply.
It doesn't make it OK if a judge says you have to incriminate yourself or face jail time for not doing so. So either way you're screwed if it gets to that.
This just isn't true... you've heard of "no comment" right? And the ability for the police to invoke the requirement for you to provide your PIN is behind the tests of specific legislation. You're not automatically required to provide it.
This. It's all within a democratic and legal framework, from GDPR to organisational policies. The source is the police themselves informing the public of the trial. The actual camera setup is bright yellow in the middle of the concourse, it's not hidden. They haven't hidden this technology, a private company hasn't deployed this technology. As citizens you have some control. It's probably not perfect, but there's humans in the loop. You have recourse to complain, to write to your PM, to take a different route (because they are pre-warning you). This IS democracy.
I think it takes time for demand to build. Certainly cities like London have seen huge growth in bike use. In my own home town(which is by no means flat) I'm seeing lots of cargo bikes, especially around tge school run.
To your point on bike owners not contributing to the economy. They probably have a similar income, and are paying similar taxes. They are still buying groceries. But where they choose to spend their money is different. It's all still economic activity though.
So for context. Nigel Farage (Populist right wing UK politician, leader of the Reform party) has been accused of not following parliamentary rules around disclosure of donations - which are designed to ensure transparency of decision making and potential influence. Basically, he received £5M from a crypto billionaire. He claims that it was (a) a personal donation (not needing to be declared according to the rules), (b) before he was in parliament, and (c) he was not involved in politics. His opponents say that personal donation rules are meant for family members, and that while he might not have been in parliament he was President of the Reform party at the time.
So the whole thing is in front of the Parliamentary Standards Ombudsman who will report to the Parliamentary Standards Committee. That committee can recommend a penalty of a suspension from parliament (which is then voted on by the House). If he is suspended for more than 10 days, then a recall petition can be launched - and if that gets more than 10% of the registered voters in the constituency (which it would), then there is a by-election to decide whether he is fit to serve.
So Farage has announced that he is resigning his seat (causing a by-election), in which he will stand. he claims that he is accountable only to the voters in his constituency (Clacton). All the other major parties have announced that they will not field candidates against him, claiming he is trying to avoid / pre-empt a suspension and a recall by-election. The only other announced candidate is Count Binface - a 'joke' candidate.
Interestingly, it also turns out that at least theoretically (and with a precedant from 1842) his resignation could be blocked. You cannot actually resign your parliamentary seat between elections - you can only be disqualified. And due to UK history, the main reason for disqualification is holding an appointment from the Crown (i.e. the King, not the more general sense of "the Crown" as the government). So if you want to resign your seat, you apply for one of a couple of reserved crown appointments - the usual one is Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds. That disqualifies you, and then there is a by-election. Now it turns out that these appointments are controlled by the Treasury, which is part of the Government (which of course is just the majority faction in parliament). There is a case from 1842 of the Treasury refusing to make a Crown appointment to stop a by-election. It has been suggested that parliament could vote to stop the appointment (and therefore the by-election), at least until the Parliamentary Standards Committee report has come out.
> he claims that he is accountable only to the voters in his constituency
To add to this,
* Mr Farage's logic seems to be that if
If he is accused of a financial crime then he can pick the jury who will try him, finding the most sympathetic audience. And if this jury goes his way, all future financial crimes can be answered with "the people have spoken!"
A pro-sleaze campaign, a vote to specifically endorse ongoing corruption is not very common. And not strictly speaking admissible in a court of law.
It's gamesmanship to avoid due process. The prosecutors should not play along. Kudos to the political parties who are not playing along.
* Mr Farage made this move shortly before this was reported: "Farage’s £5m gift reported to UK crime agency over money laundering concerns" , and he knew that was coming, as "Farage was given a deadline of 1pm on Tuesday to respond .. He gave a video address at 2pm"
* Mr Farage in this speech claimed that he was "most attacked politician in the country". It's true that he had a milkshake thrown at him. Meanwhile, 2 sitting MPs have been murdered, Jo Cox and David Amiss, among other serious incidents such as arson.
* It is quite possible that Mr Farage is in fact taking money by unfriendly foreign governments, to influence UK politics to our detriment. Is there a word for that?
Its deeply offensive to call 'Count Binface' a joke, he a more serious and more electable candidate and a better candidate for PM then Farage. Please keep your right wing extremest views to yourself, Farage is the joke candidate.
But remember that "efficient" in terms of P and NP is about scaling. P == NP doesn't necessarily mean that a practically efficient algorithm can be found. The polynomial exponents involved may be large: O(N^1000) does eventually scale better than O(e^N), but that doesn't mean it is practically useful!
This is pretty unrelated to the topic at hand, but people say that as if its a cop out answer to the conundrum, however i think it would be both the most intersting and most unlikely outcome to the whole p vs np saga. Possibly even more crazy than the answer being uncomputable.
Think about what that would mean. It essentially amounts to a loop nested 1000 times would be enough. 1001 tumes is more than needed, 999 times is enough. Having high transition points like that in math is super rare and interesting. Things are usually either a small number or infinity; almost never a large number. Like i can't think of any non contrived polynomial time problems you would actually want to solve that are worse than n^20, let alone n^100 (excluding cheating by fixing one of the parameters as part of the problem). I don't know what such a result would mean but it would be fascinating.
One correction I'd make to the article's taxonomy: Ruby is an object oriented language not an Algol. Its inspiration is Smalltalk, and much of the standard library naming comes from that route (eg collect rather than map).
Ruby is object oriented from the ground up. Everything (and I do mean everything) is an object, and method call is conceived as passing messages to objects.
While Ruby is most often compared to Python (an Algol), they come from very different evolutionary routes, and have converged towards the same point in the ecosystem. I think of Ruby as a cuddly Alpaca compared to Python's spitting camel.
Since Python introduced new style classes, it also became a pure OOP language, even though it might not look like it at "Hello World" level, all primitive types have become objects as well.
I have found the definition of OOP to be fuzzy. For example, I don't see why having methods would make a data type object oriented. I associate OOP with factories, inheritance, using classes in places that might be functions otherwise, and similar abstractions.
Perhaps this is the counterfactual: I program in Python regularly, but don't program in an OOP style; I use dataclasses and enums as the basis, in a way similar to Rust, which by some definitions can't do OOP. So, if Rust can't do OOP (assumption) and I can write Python and Rust with equivalent structure (Assumption), does that mean Python isn't strictly OOP?
Rust can definitely do OOP, not only I could easily convert "Raytracing in one Weekend" from C++ into Rust, while keeping the same design, Microsoft has no issues adding a Rust projection for COM/WinRT, which are OOP ABIs.
However that is not the same as Python, which is 100% OOP, when using basic stuff like numbers, from Python language semantics those things are object, and there is the whole machinery in place even for basic stuff like addition.
And yes OOP is fuzzy from CS point of view there are multiple approaches and it doesn't get reduced to the way C++ and Java do it, just like FP and LP are fuzzy as well.
Some folks would swear if it isn't Haskell or Prolog, than it isn't FP or LP, when a CS book and programming language evolution will be more fuzzy.
That seems like a pretty lame gotcha--saying "Aha! The language you write in uses your hated paradigm under the hood" seems to invite the immediate response of "So? I don't use it."
I think the choice to identify a specific ur-language as "Object oriented" throws people off since OO is just a style of programming in the same way that procedural is. I don't think it's useful to say that Python and C++ are both the same kind of language because they both have multiple inheritance, rather that's just an observable commonality, like noticing that both Delhi and Vegas are too hot. Yeah, but I don't think that's because they're the same kind of place...
Object-oriented programming is less of a syntax and more of a philosophy. While Erlang’s syntax belongs to the ML family, its creator, Joe Armstrong, argued that Erlang aligns more closely with the original OOP philosophy defined by the inventor of Smalltalk than Java does: 'The essence of object-oriented programming is messaging, not classes and inheritance.'
How does this help? 99% of the population aren't technically minded enough. Most people just buy a wifi router, plug it in (maybe having read the instructions) and that's it. They have neither the skills nor the inclination to update firmware.
The real problem is: assuming that firmware can be updated, how do you run a nationwide update programme overcoming a population that doesn't really care or have the skills to do it.
Vehicle safety standards (mandated annual safety checks like the UK MoT test) is the closest analogy I can think of - in the UK you can't insure your car without a valid MoT. If you were serious, then maybe tying ISP access to updated router firmware would be the way to go.
Are there are other flavours of proton still to be discovered? Can you (theoretically) build a proton with any two quarks selected from {up, charm, top} and one selected from {down, strange, bottom}?
> Particles with † next to their names have been predicted by the Standard Model but not yet observed.
---
There are some technical details, because QM rules makes everything more complicated and you can potentially have a mix of quarks. I (mis)remember something weird in barions, but I can't find what it was.
Another one: Is this newly discovered particle stable, or does it only exist for a short time before transforming in some way? I didn’t see any mention of that in the article.
Is it theoretically possible to have atoms with 4x the proton mass, starting with hydrogen at atomic weight 4? Pu-239 could theoretically have an atomic weight of 521 instead of 239… Wild!
It's not stable, and no it's not theoretically possible.
A proton is the lightest stable baryon, and thus the only only stable one. It's not a coincidence - in particle physics if a lighter elementary particle is possible the heavier one will ALWAYS decay into it. "Whatever is not forbidden is mandatory." (Combination particles like atoms are more complicated because there are other things that might force the particle to exist.)
The closest example I can remember is that you can have atoms with muons instead of electrons for a shot time ~2.2E-6 seconds, that is a pretty long time for for an unstable particle. You can do some chemistry in that "long" time. (Can you put a muon around a heavy atom like gold and get some extra time for special relativity corrections?)
If you want to replace protons, I guess you can try with "strange" particles instead of "charmed" particles. The difference of mass is small, like only a 10% more instead of a x4 increase. In particular, the sigma particle (up+up+strange) has a half life of ~2E-10 seconds that is shorter than the half life of a muon but much longer that the half life of this new particle. (I can find the number, but let me handwave a ~~~1E-22 seconds(???).)
reply