NLclothing:
PROTIP: The key to happiness is doing whatever makes you happy, it will never be the same for everybody.

pawz68:
It's that easy.....really. I suppose the difficult part is that some people have a difficult time deciding what really makes them happy.

HaveSomeVictoryGin:
That and the fact that so many people confuse what makes other people happy with what makes themselves happy.

Attempting to say that this would result in a paradox as far as the universe is concerned is anthropomorphizing the universe to an absolutely unforgivable degree. Sure, it makes for a good time travel story, but the universe won't lose any sleep over it, any more than it does for me writing "The next phrase is false." "The previous phrase is true." "Both the previous phrases are true" "The previous phrase is true" There's no paradox. The universe doesn't suddenly go wonky, and cats mate with dogs, etc.

-- http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1731658&cid=33022950

Yesterdays SMBC had a good point:

You can not have any motivation or objective if you are going to travel otherwise the act of time travel is a paradox. SMBC put it thusly: if you are travelling to change some outcome, and you succeeded, you would not have had the motivation to time travel to make that change.

SMBC's conclusion was that only nitwits have the capacity to time travel and the fact that there seem to be so many confirms that time travel must be going on right now.

But another way to say this is, you can only choose objectives that either already happened in your past or are inevitable no matter what you do.

For example, You could however travel with the objective of sinking the Titanic, but not the objective of preventing the sinking. If you saved the titanic, it would never occur to you to try to save the titanic.

For example, If your objective was to save Abe Lincoln and you succeeded, then it never would have occurred to your pre-travel self that you needed to go back and save abe lincoln.

What all this adds up to I think is that time travel is still forbidden but observational time travel-- gathering information-- is not forbidden.

There is an interesting proof regarding the computability of any proposition by David Wolpert that shows time travel is forbidden unless the information you gain by doing so is probabilistic or faulty. That is he proves rigorously that it is not possible to answer any arbitrary true/false question about the past with perfect fidelity. Thus time travel that preserves information with fidelity is forbidden. Error prone time travel is however allowed.

-- http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1731658&cid=33023080

So I'm going to turn 23 next August, which is surprisingly unsurprising. Being older, and having insomnia is the root of all evil.

So that one night I was thinking about how my life progressed. Most of my childhood was spent in a small village near Hanoi. My family was poor at the time. Being poor is not exactly the best for my curiosity that the time, what it means was toys are the last thing one is gonna have, and birthdays are overly overrated. Luckily I had my own happiness digging through the old toy stack of my auntie who was trading old toys in bulk at the time. My older brother and I would spend the whole day opening old toys, harvesting batteries, sound chips, light bulbs, speakers, capacitors, motors and tied them together to make them work. We were toy-destroyers. We harvested to the point that when her husband wanted to get one random toy, he couldn't find a single one that worked. I remembered when I was 10, I teared up one of the rare toy that my Dad gave me: A cute digital alarm clock that can announce date and time. I managed to assembled the clock back, it worked fine after that, I think. But not for a very long time.

It is wonderful how the expose to circuit boards back when I was 6 shaped my path. I always wanted to know things to the very inner workings of them. So eventually I came to software and open source. Open source is great: You don't have to pay for money to have them, and you can see how software works. You can see how and why it works to the bare metal. Understandings of the inner workings of things are the fuel that empowered me, and without accessible materials like the little toys and open-source software, I wouldn't have known what I know today.

Now I think I was always a lucky kid. I was lucky to have the old toys, I was lucky to go with software instead of hardware, because with software, one does not need money to access the materials. Unfortunately, not everything is freely accessible. Toys aren't free. Circuit boards, speakers, motors,... everything else needs money.

I think electric ICs and boards can change the life of many other people, too. So I have a little idea, a project: giving out circuit development kits for high-school and college students who are curious but too poor to afford one every year. Circuits for the Curious. I'm pushing the project forward and I'm glad that there are many people who think that is great and supported my idea. So this year, I decided instead of spending money on my birthday, I would make my birthday someone else's birthday, by initially seeding 23 TI development boards to Vietnam. I estimated this would set me back about $200 each year -- it looks like no more birthday for me. But that's fine, I can bear with it.

I'm asking you for change. I believe that together we can change the lives of talented kids in Vietnam.

If you like to discuss, contribute, and support the project, feel free to contact me.

-- Archibald MacLeish

In general, Sony's products are good for a couple of reasons:

1, The battery life is stellar. Their products usually have extremely low power consumption.

2, Build quality is great. Sony's design are of the grown-ups: You can close your eyes to use their products.

3, They are stable. You don't find nasty bugs with their products.

4, Their products are durable and last long.

However, they have limitations:

1, They ain't cheap. You pay for what you get.

2, They have too many things to take care of. So they're not going to upgrade, add features to their products.

3, If you're delusional about their use of Linux (it's interesting to know that most of their products actually use Linux): Yes they do but they don't contribute back. And their products are not hackable. And nobody cares to hack Sony's.

4, They won't die if one of their products sucks. So they're not pushing anything hard, and they're just not the best choice in anything. It's like a man working for a job because his kids are starving and a man working for his leisure. The one that works harder is the one whose kids will die if he lose the job. Sony ain't the man.

PS: You don't need to hack the Nook to get Native Vietnamese support, it's built-in.

In California, my mother had raised me mostly alone. We didn't have many things, but she is warm and we were happy. We moved a lot. We rented. My father was rich and renowned, and later, as I got to know him, went on vacations with him, and then lived with him for a few years, I saw another, more glamorous world. The two sides didn't mix, and I missed one when I had the other. When I left Marco he gave me a gift: a small glass snail. I think it meant that I'd had my home all along: Snails carry their home with them wherever they go. - Lisa Brennan-Jobs, writer, Apple CEO Steve Job's daughter.

I used to live with my family back home in Vietnam. My parents are both educators. Our family was not wealthy; which means that I didn't get toys, travels, or anything as the reward for any of my good schoolwork. Honestly, that is a bad thing - I was a curious kid (and I will always be). Instead, my father would reward me by taking me to used-book shops or street-side book sales on Sunday evenings, once a month. He would guide and let me choose the books that I liked to have. Coming back home with a stack of old books, I felt like nothing even comes close to that experience in this world. I would sit at home and read all of them during the following weeks.

Now I'm far from home - now I have traveled half way around the world and am currently attending school here in Missouri. I make money on my own, so it's much easier for me to afford "toys" for big kids: computers, laptops, cameras, game consoles... I also have freedom to decide things on my own. I have new, good, true friends. I can't say that I'm not happy for what I have. But there is a new black hole in my mind. While I have found new ways to explore my life, and I have found places that I love; in nowhere including my old home do I have the firm feeling that it's really the place that I want to settle down. I always have the feeling of moving to somewhere else after some time.

I will never experience the life that I used to have no matter what happens. I wonder what life is all about. To me, it is a bunch of choices those sometimes don't mix together very well. I have made a choice to go far away from home. I don't know if it's even a smart choice, because I don't know what would have happened otherwise. I might as well make choices in the future, to move to somewhere else. Each of us has only one life and it doesn't sound very convincing to me that we are living in a parallel universe, or we could somehow reverse what we have chosen. I wish I was a snail, who can bring the home along the way.

Currently I'm listening to Under the surface. Beautiful.

I'm also considering putting the full-blown version or Parted Magic to it, because apparently PartedMini is not very useful. If you want to contribute, please let me know.

The github address of FlashMagic is at http://github.com/htruong/flashmagic

The client for version 0.1.0 can be still used with GenieMon 0.2.0.

Happy testing,