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Oy:

(Hat tip: Conor)

“A documentary film by Jack Oatmon ( http://twitter.com/jackoatmon ).

A look into the hardware hacking community in Montreal, including the Foulab collective. Why are more and more hobbyists experimenting with hacks and circuit bends? What relationship does this imply about consumer society and technological advancement? Is this a real-world analog of ‘user generated content’?

Check out the lab: http://foulab.org/

Check out more music by XC3N: http://www.last.fm/music/XC3N“

Related posts:

1. New York City Hackers ...


2. Chariots Of The Gods, Classic 1970 Documentary Based On Von Daniken’s Book Of The Same Name ** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED ...


3. The Joseph Newman ‘Energy Machine’, Turning Matter Into Energy ...

Sonia Sotomayor, Pres. Obama's pick for the SCOTUS, heads to the Hill tomorrow for meetings with members. Per the WH, here is her busy itinerary:

Maj. Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)

Min. Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT)

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL)

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ)

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT)

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)

Reinaldo Normand is terrible at remembering dates, but Feb. 17, 2006, is one he won't easily forget. That afternoon he was chatting with colleagues during a break at the downtown So Paulo offices of Tectoy, a Brazilian gaming and electronics company, when an idea popped into his head. What if he were to make a living-room gaming console for emerging markets that would connect to the Internet over wireless phone networks and sell at prices middle-class families could afford? In Brazil, the choices weren't great: Consumers could pay $150 for a 20-year-old Sega console, $250 for a pirated version of Sony's nine-year-old PlayStation 2, or $1,000 for the latest Xbox 360 made by Microsoft.

Normand, who was then in Tectoy's mobile video games business, admits it was a crazy thought. In the $50 billion global video game industry, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo dominate the console market. They have spent billions of dollars developing the technology and marketing the machines and games that go with them. Their brands are well known globally. It would be financial suicide for a no-name with no money to take on such formidable tech giants.

But a half-hour later, Normand called his boss, Stefano Arnhold, who was traveling in Europe on a business trip. "I told him, 'We need to do this,'" Normand recalls. "'This will be a billion-dollar company. We need to find investors in America.'"

Multimillion-Dollar Investment

A day after Normand's epiphany, Mike Yuen was at his office in San Diego, writing up a business idea that bore similarities to Normand's. As a manager in the gaming division at mobile-phone chipmaker Qualcomm, Yuen had often heard developers complain that playing games on the tiny screens of mobile phones was an unsatisfying experience. He was determined to do something about it.

Two men, separated by nearly 9,500 kilometers [5,900 miles],...

Geithner told China yesterday that the Obama Administration was committed to bringing down the US deficit.
Really?

Barack Obama will quadruple the deficit this year.

Geithner also told China that Team Obama wants to bring down the deficit next year from 12.9% of GDP this year to 3% of GDP next year (a near impossibility)...
Or, in other words, back into Bush territory.

In response, China told Geithner to show them some numbers!
Bloomberg reported, via Bizblogger:

In an interview with Bloomberg Television May 21, Geithner said the administration?"s goal is to cut the budget shortfall to 3 percent of gross domestic product or smaller. That would be down from a projected 12.9 percent this year.

Seventeen of 23 Chinese economists polled in connection with Geithner?"s visit said holdings of Treasuries are a ?Sgreat risk? for the nation?"s economy, according to a Chinese state media report yesterday. Still, the majority argued against quickly cutting them, the Beijing-based Global Times reported.

Geithner, 47, needs to show how the U.S. can prevent the value of China?"s investment from being eroded by a weaker dollar or by the inflation that might be stoked by the stimulus money being pumped into the U.S. economy, according to Yu.

?SIt will be helpful if Geithner can show us some arithmetic,? he said.

...The Treasury released a transcript May 30 of a briefing Geithner gave last week at the Foreign Press Center in Washington. In it, he said he will stress with Chinese officials that he?"s intent on maintaining the dollar?"s strength.

?SI will, of course, make it clear that we are committed to a strong dollar, that we are committed to bringing our fiscal deficits down over the medium term to a sustainable place, to a sustainable level,? Geithner said in the briefing May 27. ?SWe believe in a strong dollar. A strong dollar is in the U.S. interest.?

This doesn't sound good at all.
No wonder China is concerned.

The US has lost 16,000 jobs each day since Obama signed the Spendulus Bill and sunk the US economy further into debt.

Howard Kurtz previews a two-part prime-time series -- Inside the Obama White House -- airing on NBC tomorrow and Wednesday "that so far has produced 150 hours of tape.

Said host Brian Williams: "There's stuff we've never seen of how the White House operates. We were pretty stunned at how much we were able to record and how natural events seemed to be."

About the Author: P.J. Crowley serves as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs.

Last week, I began my tenure as the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs.  I am humbled and exhilarated by the task before me and am grateful for the trust and confidence President Obama and Secretary Clinton have placed in me.

Almost 20 years ago, I was assigned to Germany, one of the highlights of my 26 years serving with the U.S. Air Force.  I have been contemplating those days as I prepared for this assignment.  During my time in Germany, the Berlin Wall ceased to divide East from West.  The people of East and West Germany literally pushed until the wall was breached and ultimately removed.

In the aftermath, when given a choice, the people of Eastern Europe rejected Communism and moved swiftly to associate themselves with the rule of law, market economies and responsible and accountable governments.  This success was due in no small measure to institutions like the United States Information Agency, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, which helped foreign publics understand that they could have the rights and opportunities of free people.  This was public diplomacy at its best, and proved to be a cornerstone of our policy of containment.  Now, Secretary Clinton’s focus on using smart power – the full compliment of diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural tools is leading us back to a balanced approach to foreign policy that served us well throughout our history.

As we know, global challenges hardly disappeared with the end of the Cold War.  Today, we continue to combat extreme ideologies in an expanding conflict in Afghanistan while dealing with festering violence in Iraq.  Success in this current struggle will require the same kind of patience, determination and skill that we demonstrated during the Cold War – identifying a clear, peaceful and modern alternative to the people of the world, reinforcing our strategic narrative while diminishing that of extremist insurgents.  As Secretary Clinton stated in her recent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the State Department is seeking the resources to deploy a new strategic communication strategy to buttress our foreign policy.  Ultimately, we cannot succeed unless we build and sustain public support at home and around the world.

Today’s global communications environment is dramatically different than it was even a few years ago.  A digital image can be transmitted from anywhere in the world at an instant, as we saw with the cell phone image of the execution of Saddam Hussein and its impact.

One of my goals is to have the State Department communicate its message more strategically.  In order to do this, we must be dynamic and use all available means both old and new media - traditional methods such as the Daily Press Briefings as well as experimenting with new media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and video through the Internet.  The culmination of this effort will be a virtual presence that is engaged in a global dialogue, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in all corners of the world.

Given the expanded nature of the communications environment, Secretary Clinton decided to restructure the Bureau of Public Affairs.  I will serve as the Assistant Secretary, but not as the every day spokesman for the department.  One of my foremost responsibilities will be to ensure that public affairs informs public policy.  This is why you’ll hear me repeatedly coming back to the idea of a strategic communications plan.  My task, working with Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Judith McHale and the newly designated spokesman, Ian Kelly, will be to serve as the senior advisor to the Secretary, contribute to the administration’s interagency strategic planning and lead the Bureau of Public Affairs and the dedicated public affairs professionals at the State Department and around the world.  I am an avid Red Sox fan.  Judith is a Yankees fan and Ian, a Cubs fan, but we are united by a higher calling and significant challenges.

Tackling these global challenges – extremism, nonproliferation, climate change, global health and food security just to name a few – will require, as Secretary Clinton has said repeatedly, coordinated, international partnerships at the government-to-government and people-to-people levels and all variations in between.  In order to build and sustain such partnerships, we must communicate effectively.  Effective communication is a two-way street, so as much as I look forward to keeping you informed on new initiatives, I’m even more eager to hear your ideas.