IN the debate over global climate change, there is a yawning gap that needs to be bridged. The gap is not between environmentalists and industrialists, or between Democrats and Republicans. It is between policy wonks and political consultants.

Among policy wonks like me, there is a broad consensus. The scientists tell us that world temperatures are rising because humans are emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Basic economics tells us that when you tax something, you normally get less of it. So if we want to reduce global emissions of carbon, we need a global carbon tax. Q.E.D.

The idea of using taxes to fix problems, rather than merely raise government revenue, has a long history. The British economist Arthur Pigou advocated such corrective taxes to deal with pollution in the early 20th century. In his honor, economics textbooks now call them “Pigovian taxes.”

Using a Pigovian tax to address global warming is also an old idea. It was proposed as far back as 1992 by Martin S. Feldstein on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. Once chief economist to Ronald Reagan, Mr. Feldstein has devoted much of his career to studying how high tax rates distort incentives and impede economic growth. But like most other policy wonks, he appreciates that some taxes align private incentives with social costs and move us toward better outcomes.

Those vying for elected office, however, are reluctant to sign on to this agenda. Their political consultants are no fans of taxes, Pigovian or otherwise. Republican consultants advise using the word “tax” only if followed immediately by the word “cut.” Democratic consultants recommend the word “tax” be followed by “on the rich.”

Yet this natural aversion to carbon taxes can be overcome if the revenue from the tax is used to reduce other taxes. By itself, a carbon tax would raise the tax burden on anyone who drives a car or uses electricity produced with fossil fuels, which means just about everybody. Some might fear this would be particularly hard on the poor and middle class.

But Gilbert Metcalf, a professor of economics at Tufts, has shown how revenue from a carbon tax could be used to reduce payroll taxes in a way that would leave the distribution of total tax burden approximately unchanged. He proposes a tax of $15 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, together with a rebate of the federal payroll tax on the first $3,660 of earnings for each worker.

The case for a carbon tax looks even stronger after an examination of the other options on the table. Lawmakers in both political parties want to require carmakers to increase the fuel efficiency of the cars they sell. Passing the buck to auto companies has a lot of popular appeal.

Increased fuel efficiency, however, is not free. Like a tax, the cost of complying with more stringent regulation will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher car prices. But the government will not raise any revenue that it can use to cut other taxes to compensate for these higher prices. (And don’t expect savings on gas to compensate consumers in a meaningful way: Any truly cost-effective increase in fuel efficiency would already have been made.)

More important, enhancing fuel efficiency by itself is not the best way to reduce energy consumption. Fuel use depends not only on the efficiency of the car fleet but also on the daily decisions that people make — how far from work they choose to live and how often they carpool or use public transportation.

A carbon tax would provide incentives for people to use less fuel in a multitude of ways. By contrast, merely having more efficient cars encourages more driving. Increased driving not only produces more carbon, but also exacerbates other problems, like accidents and road congestion.

Another popular proposal to limit carbon emissions is a cap-and-trade system, under which carbon emissions are limited and allowances are bought and sold in the marketplace. The effect of such a system depends on how the carbon allowances are allocated. If the government auctions them off, then the price of a carbon allowance is effectively a carbon tax.

But the history of cap-and-trade systems suggests that the allowances would probably be handed out to power companies and other carbon emitters, which would then be free to use them or sell them at market prices. In this case, the prices of energy products would rise as they would under a carbon tax, but the government would collect no revenue to reduce other taxes and compensate consumers.

The international dimension of the problem also suggests the superiority of a carbon tax over cap-and-trade. Any long-term approach to global climate change will have to deal with the emerging economies of China and India. By some reports, China is now the world’s leading emitter of carbon, in large part simply because it has so many people. The failure of the Kyoto treaty to include these emerging economies is one reason that, in 1997, the United States Senate passed a resolution rejecting the Kyoto approach by a vote of 95 to zero.

Agreement on a truly global cap-and-trade system, however, is hard to imagine. China is unlikely to be persuaded to accept fewer carbon allowances per person than the United States. Using a historical baseline to allocate allowances, as is often proposed, would reward the United States for having been a leading cause of the problem.

But allocating carbon allowances based on population alone would create a system in which the United States, with its higher standard of living, would buy allowances from China. American voters are not going to embrace a system of higher energy prices, coupled with a large transfer of national income to the Chinese. It would amount to a massive foreign aid program to one of the world’s most rapidly growing economies.

A global carbon tax would be easier to negotiate. All governments require revenue for public purposes. The world’s nations could agree to use a carbon tax as one instrument to raise some of that revenue. No money needs to change hands across national borders. Each government could keep the revenue from its tax and use it to finance spending or whatever form of tax relief it considered best.

Convincing China of the virtues of a carbon tax, however, may prove to be the easy part. The first and more difficult step is to convince American voters, and therefore political consultants, that “tax” is not a four-letter word.

Illustration by David Simonds

IF YOU believe what they say about themselves, big companies have never been better citizens. In the past decade, “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) has become the norm in the boardrooms of companies in rich countries, and increasingly in developing economies too. Most big firms now pledge to follow policies that define best practice in everything from the diversity of their workforces to human rights and the environment. Criticism of CSR has come mostly from those on the free-market right, who intone Milton Friedman's argument that the only “social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” and fret that business leaders have capitulated to political correctness. But in a new twist to the debate, a powerful critique of CSR has just been published by a leading left-wing thinker.

In his new book, “Supercapitalism”, Robert Reich denounces CSR as a dangerous diversion that is undermining democracy, not least in his native America. Mr Reich, an economist who served as labour secretary under Bill Clinton and now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, admits to a Damascene conversion, having for many years “preached that social responsibility and profits converge over the long term”. He now believes that companies “cannot be socially responsible, at least not to any significant extent”, and that CSR activists are being diverted from the more realistic and important task of getting governments to solve social problems. Debating whether Wal-Mart or Google is good or evil misses the point, he says, which is that governments are responsible for setting rules that ensure that competing, profit-maximising firms do not act against the interests of society.

One after another, Mr Reich trashes the supposed triumphs of CSR. Socially responsible firms are more profitable? Nonsense. Certainly, companies sometimes find ways to cut costs that coincide with what CSR activists want: Wal-Mart adopts cheaper “green” packaging, say, or Starbucks gives part-time employees health insurance, which reduces staff turnover. But “to credit these corporations with being ‘socially responsible' is to stretch the term to mean anything a company might do to increase profits if, in doing so, it also happens to have some beneficent impact on the rest of society,” writes Mr Reich.

Worse, firms are using CSR to fool the public into believing that problems are being addressed, he argues, thereby preventing more meaningful political reform. As for politicians, they enjoy scoring points by publicly shaming companies that misbehave—price-gouging oil firms, say—while failing to make real changes to the regulations that make such misbehaviour possible, something Mr Reich blames on the growing clout of corporate lobbyists.

What will CSR advocates make of this? Few will dispute that government has a crucial role to play in setting the rules of the game. Many will also share Mr Reich's concern about the corrosive political power of corporate money. But Mr Reich has it “exactly backwards”, says John Ruggie of Harvard University. If citizens and politicians were prepared to do the right thing, he says, “there would be less need to rely on CSR in the first place.”

Thoughtful advocates of CSR also concede that companies are unlikely to do things that are against their self-interest. The real task is to get them to act in their enlightened long-term self-interest, rather than narrowly and in the short term. Mr Reich dismisses this as mere “smart management” rather than social responsibility. But done well, CSR can motivate employees and strengthen brands, while also providing benefits to society. Understanding and responding to the social context in which firms operate is increasingly a source of new products and services, observes Jane Nelson of the Prince of Wales International Business Leaders Forum. Telling firms they need not act responsibly might cause them to under-invest in these opportunities, and to focus excessively on short-term profits.

Intriguingly, Mr Reich looks back fondly to what he calls the “not quite golden age” in America after the second world war when firms really were socially responsible. Business leaders believed they had a duty to ensure that the benefits of economic growth were distributed equitably, in contrast to their modern counterparts, argues Mr Reich. What changed? Back then, big American firms enjoyed the luxury of oligopoly, he says, which gave them the ability to be socially responsible. Today's “supercapitalism” is based on fierce global competition in which firms can no longer afford such largesse.

Lenny Mendonca of McKinsey takes a different view of the post-war period. After the war business leaders realised it was in their enlightened self-interest to rebuild the global economy and reinvent the social contract, he says, and there is a similar opportunity today, given problems ranging from climate change to inadequate education, where firms' long-term self-interest may mean that they have an even greater incentive to find solutions than governments do. Certainly, in America, business leaders are advocating government action on education, climate change and health-care reform that is neither zero-sum nor short-termist, and which, indeed, may not differ much from Mr Reich's own preferences.

Though his book hits many targets, both bosses and CSR activists are likely to dismiss it as fundamentally unworldly and to agree with Simon Zadek, the boss of AccountAbility, a CSR lobby group. “The ‘whether in principle' conversation about CSR is over,” he says. “What remains is ‘What, specifically, and how?'”

THE costliest place in the world to get high is Japan, according to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime's annual World Drug Report. The street price of a gram of cannabis weed was $58.30 in 2005, over twice as much as in the next most expensive nation, Australia. Americans pay nearly twice as much as Canadians. Similar disparities occur in Europe. Although the Netherlands is the only Western country where cannabis can be bought legally, punters pay more there than in Germany or France. Prices are cheapest in developing countries, where enforcement is less strict.

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Torsten Silz/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The Mercedes-Benz F700 concept car is a rolling test bed of new environmental technologies, including the DiesOtto engine, which produces 238 horsepower and 295 foot-pounds of torque from just 1.8 liters.

FRANKFURT

European automakers, stung by criticisms from environmentalists and government regulators that they are late to the green party, will be using the 2007 Frankfurt motor show to showcase everything in their alternative fuel and powertrain arsenals.

The biennial show, the 62nd Internationalen Automobil-Ausstellungen Cars, will be held at the mammoth CongressCenter Messe Frankfurt convention center from Thursday through Sept. 23. Press preview days began Monday night and continue through Wednesday. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, will open the show to the public on Thursday.

Organizers boast the show will be “the leading international fair for sustainable mobility,” and millions of euros will be spent on lavish displays touting environmentally responsible motoring. The show, spread throughout 2.5 million square feet of exhibit area, is always brutal on the podiatric health of journalists, some 10,000 of whom have reportedly received credentials. They will have to hustle to see how many of the 88 world premieres they can attend; perfect attendance is impossible because with so many introductions packed into barely two press days, multiple introductions are scheduled simultaneously, at widely disparate locations.

To pound home the sustainability theme, press shuttles are various alternative fuel and propulsion vehicles. Journalists are also being offered “eco-training” classes to learn economical driving techniques. A BioFuels Bar has information about the advantages and possible uses of biofuels and also dispenses biofuel-themed drinks. And the physically fit can hike an “Environmental Trail” around the convention center (a complex of buildings so sprawling it is served by three train stations).

The stars of the show, not surprisingly considering the host country, figure to be the German automakers. Mercedes-Benz is planning to unveil as many as 18 products, including Bluetec diesels and hybrids with both gasoline and diesel engines.

The centerpiece of the newly emancipated DaimlerMinusChrysler is the F700 concept, an S-Class-sized vehicle with five doors and 40 miles per gallon economy. The F700 is a rolling test bed of new environmental technologies, including the DiesOtto engine. This four-cylinder gasoline engine, pronounced “Dees-Otto” (not De Soto), produces 238 horsepower and 295 foot-pounds of torque from just 1.8 liters , using a new technology known as homogenous charge compression ignition. The engine has two ignition modes — compression, under light loads, and spark at other times — to boost fuel mileage. The company said the DiesOtto engine has the strong low-end torque and fuel savings of a diesel, but with emissions that are lower than a diesel.

BMW is taking the wraps off a new X6 crossover, an X5-based S.U.V.-type vehicle, powered by a gasoline-electric hybrid engine. The “sporty, coupe-like” X6, to be built in Spartanburg, S.C., seats four and has five doors. Of interest here to enthusiasts is the much anticipated 1-Series coupe. The 1-Series offerings, the 128i and 135i, are throwbacks to the nimble, quick, shoebox-sized BMWs of 30 years ago. With the same 300-horsepower turbo engine that is in some 3- and 5-Series models, the 135i should be a rocket, perhaps even “a modern BMW 2002”, as Car and Driver magazine gushes.

Another important newcomer is the Volkswagen City Expert concept, which could be VW’s most important new vehicle since the New Beetle. VW will also show the production-ready Tiguan, a smaller Touareg-themed S.U.V., and BlueTec diesel models.

Audi is displaying a new line of diesel engines that the company said have the “cleanest diesel technology in the world.” The turbodiesel powerplants employ a fuel-saving, hybrid-like stop-start system and a chemical injection system to reduce nitrogen emissions. An all-new Audi A4 sedan is also making its debut, as is the A8, the brand’s flagship sedan that has had a facelift.

Not to be outdone by all this emphasis from German automakers on green technology, even Porsche is bringing out a gasoline-electric hybrid version of its Cayenne S.U.V. here. Relax, Porsche-philes, also on tap is the new 911 GT2, the most powerful street-legal 911 ever.

General Motors’s Opel division is in fact headquartered in Frankfurt and is introducing here an Agila minivan and a hybrid concept that will have G.M.’s E-Flex propulsion system (first shown on the Chevrolet Volt concept at the 2007 Detroit auto show). In this variation, an Opel Astra-like vehicle is equipped with the electric motors and a turbodiesel engine. Since Saturn seems to get everything Opel brings out, is this related to the Saturn plug-in hybrid that was announced at the ’06 L.A. Auto Show? Hmmm.

American manufacturers certainly have increased their presence here in recent years. G.M. is expanding its Euro-only Cadillac BLS line with an “estate” or station wagon version of the sedan. The Swedish-built car is essentially a Saab 9-3 wagon in a Caddy-lite disguise. Also showing here: A Chevrolet Aveo hatchback. No crowding, please. Over at Saab, there’s a hot new Turbo X to ogle.

Dodge continues to expand its offerings here with a new Journey crossover that it will sell in Europe. The Journey is built on a stretched Avenger platform and will replace the short wheelbase Chrysler Voyager minivan sold here.

Ford, in the midst of a product realignment that will bring many European versions of its cars to America, is showing two new concepts here. The Verve is supposed to be a sneak preview of the upcoming Fiesta subcompact, due in Europe next year and North America and Asia a year or two later. The Kuga concept is a Focus-based crossover that is nearing production form.

Jaguar, which Ford has on the block, is bringing out the latest vehicle that is supposed to save the company (after previous models failed to do so): the new XF sedan. Shown at Detroit as the sleek C-XF concept, the XF has been plumped up a bit — so people will actually fit in it — and equipped with a high-horsepower V-8. Can the XF make people forget the S-Type? What couldn’t?

Aston Martin, a company also already sold by Ford, is showing that there is indeed life after Ford, with the unveiling of its DBS flagship.

Rounding out the Brit contingent here is the new Mini Clubman, which is 10-inches longer, with three more doors, than a Mini. Alas, no wood-trimmed “shooting brake” wagon.

Other European manufacturers, which don’t sell in the United States, such as Peugeot, Renault, Fiat, Skoda, are also having important debuts here. Of special note is the too-cute Fiat 500.

Asian manufacturers have a solid lineup of Frankfurt introductions, too, including the Mazda6, Mitsubishi’s Concept-cX, Toyota’s unfortunately named Endo microcar, Nissan’s Mixim electric car, and a Honda Accord wagon that may be a design precursor for the next Acura TL. Hyundai has a Veloster coupe to show here, and Kia has a Sports Coupe Concept. Chinese automakers, two of which are already selling cars in Europe, also have displays.

Diana Ross
[Bild: Keystone]

Oscar-Preisträger Martin Scorsese und die Musik-Ikone Diana Ross erhalten in diesem Jahr den begehrten Kennedy-Preis, mit dem Künstler für ihr Lebenswerk ausgezeichnet werden. Das Washingtoner Kennedy Center gab die insgesamt fünf Preisträger bekannt.

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Neben Scorsese und Ross werden der Pianist Leon Fleisher, der frühere "Beach Boy" Brian Wilson und der Hollywood-Komiker Steve Martin geehrt. Die Preisträger sollen am 2. Dezember bei einem Gala-Empfang im Opernhaus der Kultureinrichtung gefeiert werden.

Zuvor wird US- Präsident George W. Bush die Stars im Weissen Haus empfangen. Zum 30. Mal honoriert das Kennedy-Center damit Künstler, die einen "lebenslangen Beitrag zur amerikanischen Kultur" geleistet haben. Kollegen und frühere Preisträger bestimmen, an wen der Preis geht.

2006 wurden unter anderem Hollywood-Starregisseur Steven Spielberg und die Country-Sängerin Dolly Parton ausgezeichnet. Auch die Schauspielerinnen Elizabeth Taylor und Katherine Hepburn, der Sänger Bob Dylan und der Tenor Luciano Pavarotti nahmen in früheren Jahren die Ehrung entgegen.

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IN MARCH 1986 this newspaper celebrated “The Charm of Nuclear Power” on its cover. The timing wasn't great. The following month, an accident at a reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine spread radioactivity over Europe and despair in the Western world's nuclear industry.

Some countries never lost their enthusiasm for nuclear power. It provides three-quarters of French electricity. Developing countries have continued to build nuclear plants apace. But elsewhere in the West, Chernobyl, along with the accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, sent the industry into a decline. The public got scared. The regulatory environment tightened, raising costs. Billions were spent bailing out lossmaking nuclear-power companies. The industry became a byword for mendacity, secrecy and profligacy with taxpayers' money. For two decades neither governments nor bankers wanted to touch it.

Now nuclear power has a second chance. Its revival is most visible in America (see article), where power companies are preparing to flood the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with applications to build new plants. But the tide seems to be turning in other countries, too. Finland is building a reactor. The British government is preparing the way for new planning regulations. In Australia, which has plenty of uranium but no reactors, the prime minister, John Howard, says nuclear power is “inevitable”.

Managed properly, a nuclear revival could be a good thing. But the industry and the governments keen to promote it look like repeating some of the mistakes that gave it a bad name in the first place.

Geopolitics, technology (see article), economics and the environment are all changing in nuclear power's favour. Western governments are concerned that most of the world's oil and gas is in the hands of hostile or shaky governments. Much of the nuclear industry's raw material, uranium, by contrast, is conveniently located in friendly places such as Australia and Canada.

Simpler designs cut maintenance and repair costs. Shut-downs are now far less frequent, so that a typical station in America is now online 90% of the time, up from less than 50% in the 1970s. New “passive safety” features can shut a reactor down in an emergency without the need for human intervention. Handling waste may get easier. America plans to embrace a new approach in which the most radioactive portion of the waste from conventional nuclear power stations is isolated and burned in “fast” reactors.

Technology has thus improved nuclear's economics. So has the squeeze on fossil fuels. Nuclear power stations are hugely expensive to build but very cheap to run. Gas-fired power stations—the bulk of new build in the 1980s and 1990s—are the reverse. Since gas provides the extra power needed when demand rises, the gas price sets the electricity price. Costly gas has therefore made existing nuclear plants tremendously profitable.

The latest boost to nuclear has come from climate change. Nuclear power offers the possibility of large quantities of baseload electricity that is cleaner than coal, more secure than gas and more reliable than wind. And if cars switch from oil to electricity, the demand for power generated from carbon-free sources will increase still further. The industry's image is thus turning from black to green.

Nuclear power's moral makeover has divided its enemies. Some environmentalists retain their antipathy to it, but green gurus such as James Lovelock, Stewart Brand and Patrick Moore have changed their minds and embraced it. Public opinion, confused about how best to save the planet, seems to be coming round. A recent British poll showed 30% of the population against nuclear power, compared with 60% three years ago. An American poll in March this year showed 50% in favour of expanding nuclear power, up from 44% in 2001.

Yet the economics of nuclear still look uncertain. That's partly because its green virtues do not show up in its costs, since fossil-fuel power generation does not pay for the environmental damage it does. But it is also because nuclear combines huge fixed costs with political risk. Companies fear that, after they have invested billions in a plant, the political tide will turn once more and bankrupt them. Investors therefore remain nervous.

How, then, to get new plants built? America's solution is to lard the industry with money. That is the wrong answer.

Nuclear and other clean energy sources do indeed deserve a hand from governments—but through a carbon tax which reflects the benefits of clean energy, not through subsidies to cover political risk. Exposure to public nervousness is a cost of doing business in the nuclear industry, just as exposure to volatile prices is a cost in the gas industry.

It may be that fears of nuclear power are overblown: after all, the UN figure of around 4,000 eventual deaths as a result of the Chernobyl accident is lower than the official annual death-rate in Chinese coal mines. Yet there are good reasons for public concern. Nuclear waste is difficult to dispose of. More civil nuclear technology around the world increases the chance of weapons proliferation. Terrorists could attack plants or steal nuclear fuel. Voters will support nuclear power only if they believe that governments and the nuclear industry are doing their best to limit those risks, and that such risks are small enough to be worth taking in the interests of cheap, clean energy.

One of the reasons why the public turned against nuclear power last time round is that it found itself bailing the industry out. It would be wrong, not just for taxpayers but also for the industry, to set up another lot of cosy deals with governments. The nuclear industry needs to persuade people that it is clean, cheap and safe enough to rely on without a government crutch. If it can't, it doesn't deserve a second chance.

Eric Striffler for The New York Times

WITH A LITTLE HELP Selin Semaan and Josh Weiselberg enlisted friends in designing his parents' summer house.

NORTH HAVEN, N.Y.

A FAMILIAR story: The parents of a young, hungry architect plan to build a house, and the young, hungry architect gets the job, a first major commission. But this time there’s a twist: the architect’s architect friends are all along for the ride.

Design schools are competitive places, pitting student against student as each vies for validation from the instructors. It is not uncommon to find one’s classmates hiding their models, locking up their drawings or otherwise treating their desks like some private Skunk Works.

There seems to have been a very different ethic at the Rhode Island School of Design, the well-regarded institution in Providence known as RISD (pronounced as RIZZ-dee), at least in the classes of 2001 and 2002.

Those years produced Josh Weiselberg and Selin Semaan, partners in life and work, and nearly a dozen of their friends whose art and design now complete Mr. Weiselberg’s parents’ sophisticated new house outside Sag Harbor. But before they could steer their clients toward art, furniture, light fixtures or even juice glasses designed by their talented coterie, Mr. Weiselberg and Ms. Semaan had to land the job.

Their future clients had other ideas. “They were about to go to a developer and buy a plan from a magazine,” Mr. Weiselberg, 28, said of his parents, Jane and Jack, who decided in 2003 to build a replacement for their old summer house nearby. “Being fresh out of school, I thought that was unacceptable.”

“Basically, we weren’t being considered for the job,” Ms. Semaan, 29, clarified. So the couple, who do business as TBD Design Studio (“We’re not married but we are incorporated,” Mr. Weiselberg said), started in on their own with no mandate, quietly preparing a design while, on a second front, they worked to open the elder Weiselbergs’ minds to the inevitability of an intrafamilial collaboration. A trip was made to the house Charles Gwathmey, then 27, built for his own parents in Amagansett, N.Y., in 1965. But the resistance continued. “They were like, ‘It’s just a stupid house,’ ” Mr. Weiselberg said. “They didn’t understand how much fun we’d have making this stupid house.”

After a final all-nighter in April 2003, the striving architects invited their future clients, their marks, to their East Village walkup for a formal presentation. “We had all the materials that RISD prepared us to have,” Mr. Weiselberg said, and they needed every drawing, rendering and model in the quiver. Mrs. Weiselberg was clear that she wanted an ivy-ready stone cottage with a pitched roof; her son and his partner were offering a different vision.

Technology, training and attrition carried the day. “He showed us a computer-generated view of the house and he put grass in front of it,” Mrs. Weiselberg said recently, standing in the open kitchen of her son’s recently realized dream. “We were awed. We didn’t know what to say. So we said O.K.”

“It wasn’t that they liked it,” the younger Mr. Weiselberg said, but that they “realized that they weren’t going to be able to move ahead without us, that we weren’t going to stop designing.”

So with the caveat that they not quit their day jobs — Ms. Semaan at Obra Architects, Mr. Weiselberg as a journeyman moving between progressive New York firms like Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis and the Architecture Research Office — the commission was granted and a fee agreed to, grudgingly.

“They never wanted to admit they were paying us,” Ms. Semaan said. “Probably because they never wanted to admit they had hired us.”

The Weiselberg parents remained anxious about their choice, particularly about abandoning their pitched-roof-and-stone expectations for TBD’s contemporary taste. After ground was broken in November 2005, Weiselberg father and son visited the site. “The look on his face was utter fear,” Josh Weiselberg said. “He saw concrete. He saw a hole. All he knew was that he was getting a grill on the screened porch and a pot filler above the stove.” It wasn’t until another visit, when the walls were framed in, that Jack Weiselberg realized he was getting a lot more from his son. “We went back when the sheathing was up and he could feel it,” the younger Mr. Weiselberg continued. “I started hearing things like, ‘Modern is the only way to go!’ ”

The move away from traditionalism opened the way for the rest of the RISD posse to contribute their talents. Andrew Hughes (class of 2001) produced the four hand-blown glass pendants that light the kitchen island. “I’ve known Josh’s parents almost as long as I’ve known Josh,” he said from his studio in Long Island City, Queens. “I knew they would be tough clients. But for what I do, my friends’ parents are important people.” A kitchen cabinet is stocked with dozens of his glasses.

Max Wang, Marcel Madsen and John Buckley (also class of 2001) of the Metropolitan Produce Corporation in Brooklyn designed a custom walnut slab table for the dining room, with two flitches connected by steel sutures. They also created an ash coffee table for the living room, described by Mr. Buckley as a “sliding grid of blocks,” and another, very much like it but made of Homasote, for the more relaxed family room upstairs. “The walls were down and there was a lot of cross-referencing between people,” he said of his time at RISD. “The atmosphere fostered working friendships.”

RISD is all over the walls, too. A painting by Alex Dodge (2001) — “The Hidden Power of Everyday Things #4,” an on-the-bottom-of-the-swimming-pool view that brings to mind Ben Braddock’s sulking plunge in “The Graduate” — hangs on the dining room side of the massive steel-sheathed hearth that anchors the main public spaces. It was purchased through the Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which is run by Rob Hult and Sam Wilson (both RISD 2001) and Ingrid Bromberg Kennedy. The gallery also supplied an acrylic-on-wood piece by Pali Kasi (RISD 2000) for the wall above the giant orange sectional in the family room.

The largest artwork in the house, a series of intricate drawings composed of tiny capital letters that coalesce, from afar, into a copse of bare tree trunks, is by an interloper: Gustavo Bonevardi, an architect who was one of the creators of the “Tribute in Light” memorial at the World Trade Center site, as well as Mr. Weiselberg’s first employer. The piece, called “Other Forests,” commands a full double-height wall of the living room. In a note to this reporter Mr. Weiselberg wrote: “Gustavo has been a great friend, even though he didn’t go to RISD.”

“Everyone says we’re a mafia,” said Piet Houtenbos (RISD 2001), a friend and classmate of Mr. Weiselberg’s beginning in the second grade at Manhattan’s Ethical Culture school and continuing through high school at Fieldston and design school in Providence. “We don’t mean to be a mafia, but I guess we are.” His well-known line of bamboo furniture for Modernlink is represented in his friend’s parents’ house, and he is the impresario behind the RISD cabal’s regular Friday night meetings at Fanelli’s bar in SoHo. He also supplied about 15 oil lamps, made from the casings of real hand grenades, for use in the adjacent pool house. “Josh just called and said, ‘Bring over some grenades!’ ” he said. “If you need stuff, and your friends do it, and they’re pretty cool, why not?”

At the end of a tour, the architects, their clients and this reporter find themselves in that pool house, which, from a position on its long couch, frames perfectly an oblique view back to the main house across the water. There is a long conversation about the house’s complex Lutron light control system, parents ribbing son. Parents don’t think they’ll ever figure it out. “I take the remote control and I can sit here and light it up in different ways,” son says, elated.

Asked about his work, Jack Weiselberg said he is “the chairman of a small, research-driven stock brokerage.”

“You could describe us as a small, research-driven architecture firm,” Josh Weiselberg replied.

Asked about the experience of having his son design his house, Jack Weiselberg said: “Am I glad I did it? Absolutely. Would I sell it? Absolutely.” Selin Semaan smiled. Josh Weiselberg blanched.

“I’d have to sign off on it too,” his mother interjected. “And I’m not.”

Reuters

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AS A piece of political theatre, one could not help admiring it. Without any warning George Bush popped up in Iraq on Monday September 3rd, accompanied by his defence secretary, Robert Gates, his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, as well as the commander of America’s forces in Iraq, for a meeting with the country'st prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki.

The choice of venue was significant. It took place in an American airbase some 120 miles (around 180km) west of Baghdad, in the heart of Anbar province. Until a few months ago such a trip would have been extremely risky if not impossible: Anbar was the crucible of the Sunni uprising against America’s presence in Iraq, and as dangerous a spot as you could find anywhere in the country. Mr Bush’s trip was designed to emphasise his claims that the “surge” of some 30,000 extra troops into Iraq—the reinforcements were directed at Baghdad, its periphery and at Anbar—is finally starting to show results.

The visit is part of the fuss that surrounds a report on the progress of the surge that the American commander, General David Petraeus, is expected to deliver to Congress next week, probably on September 11th, the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC. Ostensibly, the purpose of the meetings was to allow Mr Bush a final chance to assess the evidence before deciding, once the report is issued, what the direction of American policy should be thereafter. In reality he has said so often that he has no intention of withdrawing from Iraq that any substantial change of policy looks highly unlikely. Rather, the trip is aimed more at wavering Republicans, and even a few wavering Democrats, in the hope that they may moderate demands for an early American exit.

Anbar is worth some celebration. Partly because of growing revulsion at atrocities committed by al-Qaeda against “collaborators”—sometimes including children—and partly because of a more robust American presence, Sunni leaders there have turned against al-Qaeda's mainly non-Iraqi fighters. The level of attacks, both against American troops and against Iraqi civilians, has dropped substantially. That said, it was still impossible for Mr Bush to venture outside the vast and mightily-guarded desert airbase, just as he could not have visited any part of Baghdad outside the protected Green Zone. Even though the number of attacks in Baghdad has fallen off sharply, it remains a horribly dangerous place by any standards other than Iraq’s own.

Another reason for the visit lies in the luring of Mr Maliki, who leads a Shia-dominated government, to visit Sunni Anbar. While General Petraeus will have a certain amount of good news to report on the military front, he will not be talking to Congress alone next week. Also testifying will be Ryan Crocker, America’s ambassador to Iraq. He will have to admit that there has been extremely limited progress on the political front. Hopes of seeing an Iraqi government that brings together Shia and Sunni have consistently been frustrated.

Mr Bush and his team have tried everything they can, including both cajoling and insulting Mr Maliki, to get him to form a more representative government, and the meeting in the desert doubtless saw another push in that direction. But the prime minister heads a fractious coalition which opposes making the sort of concessions, particularly on government structures and the division of oil revenues, that the Sunnis would want to see before agreeing to join in. Mr Bush's flying visit will have made headlines, but is unlikely to alter anyone’s views.

EPA

A DECADE or so ago, thinkers and pundits were fond of discussing the emerging threat of cyber attacks as a matter of international affairs. The growing reliance of advanced economies on the internet, and the increasing use of the internet by governments and armies, seemed to offer vulnerability along with riches and convenience. The scare of the “Y2K bug” seemed to highlight the danger, at least until it became obvious that the bug was of no threat to anyone.

Now, despite preoccupation with more old-fashioned sorts of terrorism and war, is there, again, reason to fret about the cyber sort? Revelations this year that hackers successfully broke into Pentagon computers, followed by off-the-record confirmation by officials speaking to the Financial Times this week that the assailants were connected to China’s army, have brought the issue back to the fore. Reports suggest that the online intruders were probably engaged in espionage, downloading information. The ability to spy is threatening enough. But hackers may also discern vulnerabilities in computer systems and inflict damage. One fear is that hackers who peeked into the American government’s networks could possibly, one day, work out how to shut them down, at least for a time.

The Pentagon is presumably better able to protect itself against cyber attacks than most. Other targets have been shown to be more vulnerable. The potential impact of cyber-vandalism became obvious this year when Russian hackers unleashed the biggest-ever international cyber-assault on tiny Estonia, after the Baltic country caused offence by re-burying a Russian soldier from the second world war. “Denial of service” attacks, when huge numbers of visitors overwhelm public websites, crippled Estonian government computers. Some breathlessly called it the first direct Russian attack on a NATO member.

The Russian government claimed in that incident that the hackers were incensed ordinary Russians. But some experts said they saw Kremlin footprints. In the current Chinese case the script has been repeated; some at the Pentagon say they can pin the attacks on the People’s Liberation Army. Germany’s government has protested to China’s rulers, saying it too was once hacked by the PLA. Other governments, such as the British one, say that cyber-attacks are increasingly common problems. China, too, says it has been a victim of cyber-assault, and that it takes the issue seriously. In all likelihood—as with the more traditional spying of the cold war days—many countries are attempting some sort of cyber-attacks, while condemning others who do it.

Some of the more effective cyber snoops and vandals may not be government employees. Rather, as pirates would once loot on behalf of particular governments, a few of today’s more effective hackers may be freelancers acting perhaps with tacit official approval. But governments are also developing capability themselves. A Pentagon report this year on China’s military forces said baldly that the country was developing tactics to achieve “electromagnetic dominance” early in a conflict. It added that, while China had not developed a formal doctrine of electronic warfare, it had begun to consider offensive cyber-attacks within its operational exercises.

Cyber-attacks present an attractive option to America’s foes, as a form of guerrilla or asymmetrical warfare. In 2002 the Pentagon ran a war-game with the evocative title “Digital Pearl Harbour”. In it, simulated attacks showed only temporary and limited effect (for example shutting down some electricity supplies). But this week’s revelation may show that America has underestimated its Chinese rival.

The legal world has always been slow to keep up with technology, and the international law of cybercrime is no exception. The first international legal instrument on the subject was the Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime. It requires members to pass appropriate laws against cybercrime—including unauthorised access and network disruption, as well as computer-aided traditional crimes like money-laundering and child pornography. It also mandates a certain level of law-enforcement to prevent laxer jurisdictions from becoming cybercrime havens. But its reach is limited. It came into force in 2004 among just six Council of Europe members; others have since joined, including America at the start of this year. No other non-member of the Council of Europe has joined. This means that the Chinese shenanigans, whatever they were, continue to exist in a legal netherworld.

[Bild: keystone.ch]

Wer die in Kunststoff gepackte Festplatte unter dem Fernseher satt hat, dem bietet Toshiba neue Möglichkeiten, digitale Videos zu archivieren.

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[SonntagsZeitung] -  Die japanische Firma erweitert ihre Bonsai-SpeicherReihe mit dem Raivu eiei (ewiges Leben). Die Pflanzen stammen aus den Baumschulen des renommierten BonsaiMeisters Nobuichi Urushibata und werden bis zu 4000 Jahre alt. Der Speicherplatz beträgt 120 Terabytes. Mitgeliefert werden eine komplette Pflege-Ausrüstung und ein HDMIKabel für den Anschluss an den TV-Apparat. Die Nutzung von Pflanzen als Speichermedien geht auf die Technik zurück, die im Jahr 2007 an der Tokioter Keio-Uni entwickelt wurde. Damals gelang es einer Forschergruppe, Einsteins Formel der Relativitätstheorie «E = mc2» auf ein Bakterium zu speichern. Bonsais eignen sich wegen ihrer langen Lebensdauer besonder gut als Speichermedien.

Der Raivu eiei ist im Handel für 749Franken erhältlich.

[Bild: nokia.com]

Mit dem neuen Premium-Gerät setzt Nokia seine Tradition fort, einzigartige und sehr wertvolle Mobiltelefone aus hochwertigen Materialien wie Chrom, Edelstahl und Titan zu schaffen.

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[Bild: nokia.com]

[pd] -  Das neue Mobiltelefon ist ein Meisterwerk der Präzision aus dem Material, das Künstler und Handwerker seit Jahrhunderten gleichermaßen inspiriert: Glas.

Ein besonderes Erlebnis

Die Verbindung aus nahezu lichtundurchlässigem Rauchglas mit einzigartigen Elementen aus Edelstahl mit Soft-Touch-Finish macht es zu einem Erlebnis, das Nokia 8600 Luna zu berühren und anzuschauen. Die unter dem Glas sanft pulsierende Tastaturbeleuchtung verleiht dem Mobiltelefon bei Eingang eines Telefongespräches etwas Geheimnisvolles. Dieser "Herzschlag", kombiniert mit der Wärme des Glases und seinem Gehäuse aus Edelstahl, verwandelt das Nokia 8600 Luna in einen zuverlässigen Begleiter mit einer organischen, geradezu lebendigen Form. Wenn ein Anruf eingeht, erhebt sich die ergonomische Tastatur durch die einzigartige Schiebebewegung auf sanfte Weise aus ihrem Glas-Kokon.

«Die Leidenschaft zum Detail kennzeichnet jeden Schritt im Entwicklungsprozess des Nokia 8600 Luna. Wir haben jede erdenkliche Mühe in Kauf genommen, um mit der Oberfläche dieses Mobiltelefons ein außergewöhnliches Erlebnis zu schaffen, das alle Erwartungen übertrifft. Dies beginnt mit der angenehmen Glätte des Glases und der Wärme, die der Edelstahl in der Hand ausstrahlt, und geht hin bis zum angenehmen Gefühl, das die einzigartigen ergonomischen Tasten an den Fingerspitzen vermitteln", so Heikki Norta, Senior Vice President, Mobile Phones, Nokia. „Bereits der Name dieses Gerät hat eine ganz besondere Bedeutung: Wie das Nokia 8600 Luna selbst, huldigen wir mit diesem Namen der Göttin des Mondlichts, Luna – die bereits von den Römern häufig als eine geheimnisvolle, verführerische Schönheit in einem weichen, strahlenden Licht dargestellt wurde.»

Ergonomisches Design

Die Balance aus Ästhetik und Ergonomie, die das Design des Nokia 8600 Luna kennzeichnet, setzt sich in seinen wohldurchdachten Funktionen fort. Das erste Nokia Mobiltelefon mit einem einzigen Micro-USB-Anschluss ermöglicht nicht nur ein elegantes Design, dessen Erscheinungsbild nicht durch überflüssige Anschlüsse gestört wird, sondern sorgt beim User auch für größere Bewegungsfreiheit. So werden das Aufladen des Geräts und das Übertragen von Daten und Musik über eine einzige Verbindung möglich. Dank Quadband-Betrieb in GSM-Netzen kann der User mühelos unterwegs überall in Verbindung bleiben, während sich auf dem großen und hellen Display die mit der integrierten 2-Megapixel-Kamera aufgenommenen Fotos in brillanter Qualität darstellen lassen.

Das Nokia 8600 Luna wird voraussichtlich im Verlauf des zweiten Quartals 2007 erhältlich sein und ohne Steuern und Mobilfunkvertrag ungefähr 700 Euro kosten.

[Bild: xexoo.com]

Die neuen XEXOO Cases aus purem Gold machen aus jedem iPod oder iPod nano ein wertvolles Schmuckstück und das im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes. Das vorhandene Gehäuse des iPod wird ausgetauscht gegen ein Case aus purem 18 kt Gold.

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[pd] -  Fast 100 Gramm Gold werden für das XEXOO Case für den iPod nano von Hand verarbeitet. So viel Gold und Handwerkskunst hat natürlich seinen Preis, die Schmuckstücke sind ab 8.000.- Euro erhältlich

Individuelle Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten:
Noch exklusiver und individueller präsentiert sich die Signature Edition der XEXOO Cases. Zur Auswahl stehen verschiedene edle Materialien wie Gelb-, Rosé- oder Rotgold aus denen die Cases hergestellt werden. Auf Wunsch des Kunden werden Initialen, Wappen oder Logos aus Brillanten und Edelsteinen in das Case gefasst. Somit wird jedes XEXOO Case ein Unikat. Die Grenze der Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten liegt weniger bei XEXOO sondern mehr am Budget des Kunden.

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Die 17-Jährige geht im Dress mit der Nummer 79 auf Punktejagd
[Bild: holley mangold.net]

[daw] -  «Ich liebte Football von Anfang an», wird Holley in krone.at zitiert. «Nicht nur beim Zusehen, sondern auch bei meinen ersten Versuchen auf dem Feld. Ich fand es cool.»

Entsprechend hart, gezielt und diszipliniert trainierte sie, um in das High-School-Team von Kettering (USA) aufgenommen zu werden. Für ihre Leidenschaft nimmt Holley Mangold Strapazen, dumme Sprüche der Gegner und auch «Trophäen» in Form von Wunden gerne in Kauf.

Raue Sitten auf dem Feld

«Es geht wirklich rau zu beim Spielen. Das muss ich ehrlich zugeben», erzählt Mangold. Aber jammern, etwa über Schürfwunden und Prellungen, hört man 17-Jährige, welche seit kurzem eine eigene Homepage besitzt, nie.

Da sie ihr überdurchschnittliches Gewicht geschickt einsetzt, hat sich Holley in ihrem Team bereits viel Respekt als eigentlicher «Sturmtank» verschafft. Und die Burschen staunen, wenn die einzige Dame im Team satte 120 Kilo beim Bankdrücken stemmt.

Werden dereinst aus den nicht zu übersehenden Fettpölsterchen noch Muskeln, muss die angestrebte Sport-Karriere kein Traum bleiben.

When I first walked into the house the day I bought my iPhone, I had a moment of panic. After six months of media frenzy and amongst all of the excitement, I had lost sight of the fact that the 8GB iPhone I bought at a nearby AT&T store had set me back $600.

Not that I hadn't been warned; the price information was everywhere, sensationalized and vilified, even, by people who thought that the price tag outrageous. In my determination to pick up the phone as soon as they went on sale, I discounted the cost -- until I got home with it and realized that I spent serious money on something that might not live up to the hype.

A bit of background: I hate cell phones. They're a necessary evil in terms of convenience, but with each latest and greatest model I bought, I became increasingly critical. The last straw came after I was suckered in by the thin design of the Razr a couple of years ago.

While it was nice that the phone slid in and out of pockets with ease because of its size, using the Razr's software for anything other than making calls was an abject exercise in exasperation. Potentially useful features were hidden underneath menus and submenus and sub-submenus, it couldn't autosync with my Mac, Internet access was mediocre, and the user interface clunky. The only thing that prevented me boycotting Motorola products after buying the Razr was the fact that the company wasn't alone when it came to disjointed design.

Click to see video of iPhone in action.

As I waited for a worthwhile phone to appear, it dawned on me that cell phones were adding more and more capabilities, while the physical design and user interface continued to rely on unwieldy physical buttons. That alone seemed to limit what you could reasonably expect a phone to do well, even as music and media player functions were being added.

The problem seemed obvious: They were trying to be everything to everyone using an outmoded design that relied on keypads. The software, in turn, had to work with the layout of the physical buttons. And for anyone looking to watch movies and video, the screens were almost always too small. The result: clumsy hardware married to lousy software, new features without a new form.

Enter Apple Inc. On stage for his January keynote at MacWorld San Francisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled his answer to the problem, touting the iPhone as the ultimate phone, the ultimate iPod and the ultimate Internet experience. It looked like the iPhone might really be the first useful and user-friendly convergence device and, more importantly, might actually be worth my $600. But I had to wait six months -- until it went on sale June 29 -- to find out.

Best. Phone. Ever.
Now I know. The iPhone is the first phone I've liked in well over six years. To call the iPhone the best phone I've ever used is the biggest understatement of the decade. It's like saying Jupiter is big, or infinity a long time. From the moment you pick it up, you can feel the weight and sturdiness of the phone, inspiring the sort of confidence you get from a quality build. The display is gorgeously integrated, the streamlined face covered by glass. Finally -- a design worthy of being called a design!

But the attention to detail doesn't stop there. The iPhone as a phone is actually remarkable, given that you can easily swap between multiple calls, connect them, separate them, put some on private ... all without hanging up on any of the parties. I couldn't do that with any other phone before and always assumed that feature was faulty. These are among the details I've discovered with constant use of my iPhone over the past two months.

However, the beauty of the iPhone lies beyond its deliciously simple shell and goes way beyond being just a phone. That beauty -- and the iPhone's success -- lies with the way you interact with it. Use the multitouch screen, along with the changing set of "buttons" and icons that adjust themselves to the task at hand, and you can't help be reminded of classic science fiction, in which devices are so easy to use anyone can pick up anything and begin operating it. That's what the iPhone is.

That point hit home when my mother picked up my iPhone. Over the years, not a single device ever made it through my mother's hands without being returned to me with a frustrated laugh and a shrug. With the iPhone, once the screen lit up and my mother discovered that Swipe to Unlock really did mean swipe to unlock, she was sold.

And so was I. This is the first device to successfully integrate multiple layers of functionality with hardly any compromise on quality or ease of use. With the iPhone, you're not left wondering what this button does in that app. With its full-screen interface for every function and its incredibly simple iTunes integration and updates, it's easy to see why the iPhone looks to be a huge hit. After all, it isn't just the first convergence device to be brilliantly useful; it's also the first convergence device to be useful without requiring its user to be brilliant.

Not that it's perfect -- yet. But with Version 1.0 of the iPhone, Apple laid a solid foundation for future advances. As you read this, multitudes of developers are working to extend the functionality of the iPhone, some using Web 2.0 applications, others building native applications.

And there lies the true genius of the iPhone: OS X. Even with no official software development kit from Apple, because of iPhone's OS X foundation, the open-source community has been able to provide solutions to gaps in software that Apple has yet to release itself. Save for a couple of software updates labeled bug fixes, there hasn't been much in terms of major software announcements from Apple concerning the iPhone. The single exception was the addition of the Send to Web Gallery option, loosely tying the iPhone with Apple's recent iLife '08.

While it's clear that Apple is working to make the iPhone better, speculation about what Apple has up its sleeve remains just that: speculation. But the prospect of new applications and updates from Apple and independent developers is what makes the iPhone exciting to those who shelled out money to own one.

What needs fixing
That being said, there are a few tweaks that need to be made. The biggest issue for me is the inconsistencies in the user interface. There are certain capabilities that are available only in certain locations, yet not in apps where you think they'd make sense.

For instance, the landscape-mode keyboard works only in Safari. As nice as that is for browsing, wouldn't it make sense if all apps gained that function? I don't have any trouble typing on the virtual keyboard when the iPhone is in portrait orientation, but I could see how the larger-finger-friendly landscape keyboard mode would be beneficial to others.

Also peculiar: How come I can use the swipe gesture to delete e-mails, Short Messaging Service messages and even videos, yet I can't do the same with notes or bookmarks? This isn't a deal-breaking problem, but some consistency would be nice.

Another thing that bugs me is the inability to select multiple e-mails for deletion. Since the iPhone doesn't have spam filtering, I often find myself waking up to e-mail accounts filled with junk mail. Swipe deleting is fun for the first three e-mails. But after a bit, I found myself wondering why Apple didn't allow you to select multiple e-mails from within Mail and delete them all at once. Right now, you have to navigate to your in-box, click "edit," click the little red button next to each e-mail, and click "delete." Try doing that 25 times and see how long it takes.

And speaking of e-mails, I'd like to check one place for all of my e-mail accounts listed on the phone, yet the iPhone's user interface makes you go into each e-mail in-box individually. Certainly, the option for a universal in-box similar to the one in Mac OS X's Mail would be useful.

These quirks stand out because of how thoughtfully designed the interface is overall. After spending time with the iPhone, I've run into many more "ah-ha!" moments -- where the interaction surprises you with its intuitiveness -- than those "oh no" moments where the user interface falls short.

The beauty of the iPhone's design is that these interface quirks can be fixed because the entire interaction is based on a touch screen. When users call out these details to Apple, Apple can do something about them.

What can't be fixed (yet)
There are some shortcomings that can't be fixed in software, though, which may be a deal breaker for some. I'm referring to the lack of Global Positioning System (GPS) and 3G networking support. Since I don't live in a 3G area and most places I end up at have wireless anyway, I've not run into many issues.

Generally, AT&T Inc.'s EDGE (enhanced data rates for GSM evolution) network is acceptable for Maps, e-mail and, surprisingly enough, YouTube. It's with Web browsing that EDGE falls a bit short in terms of speed. But it's still good enough for light surfing.

The lack of GPS is offset by the functionally handy turn-by-turn feature in Maps. For some, this might not be enough, but for me, it does the job of getting me from Point A to Point B. Though lack of GPS hasn't stopped me from finding Maps enormously useful, I'd be one of the first in line if Apple ever released a separate GPS add-on, perhaps not unlike the Nike+ sports kit.

Another thing that can't be fixed in software is AT&T. While I haven't had as many dropped calls as I did with the Razr, there have been some dropped call issues. It's not to the point that it's annoying, but it does happen on occasion. Here's hoping that AT&T takes the cash it's receiving from the new members that have come on because of the iPhone and uses that money to upgrade and expand its networks.

The multifunction nature of the phone, along with the use of the touch screen, means there are some functions that actually require more steps than other phones. For instance, with my Razr, I'd flip open the phone and dial the number I wanted. If I was feeling brave, I'd even use the built-in contact manager, which was only a shortcut key away. In other words, making phone calls from the Razr didn't involve putting it into a "phone mode" as its primary function by default was making phone calls. (It was all of the other "features" that made me miserable.)

The iPhone requires a couple of extra steps. To make a call from the iPhone's default sleep mode, you have to first press the top button or the Home button to wake it up. Then, a swipe of your finger lets the iPhone know that you woke it intentionally, therefore unlocking the phone for use. From there, you have to click on the Phone icon before you can access your favorites, contacts, visual voice mail, recent phone calls or the keypad.

This might be an issue for some, but, personally, I've never really noticed. The extra steps -- a click, swipe and a tap before you're in phone app -- just give you more reasons to touch the screen.

And what about that screen? Mine looks as good and works as well as it did the day I brought the iPhone home. Even after two months of constant use, it looks new -- no dings, scratches or worn areas have shown up yet, a testament to the overall hardware design. Yes, the glass screen gets smudged from your fingers, and from your face when you hold it up to talk. But it's as easy to clean as any other glass surface, especially with the cleaning cloth supplied by Apple.

Convergence with thoughtfulness
In the end, Apple's latest device continues the company's tradition of rocking industry complacency, with the brilliance of the iPhone shining brighter the more you use it. The iPhone is physical proof that convergence with thoughtfulness really does work, actually making me -- after all of these years -- optimistic about the future of computing devices.

Watching others with the phone, you can see how its design seems to rekindle the joy people had for gadgets when technology first moved into the mainstream. Apple's efforts promise a future where technology works intuitively, making manuals -- and frustration -- a thing of the past.

Michael DeAgonia is a computer consultant and technologist who has been using Macintoshes for a decade and working on them professionally since 1996. His tech support background includes tenures at Computerworld, colleges, the biopharmaceutical industry, the graphics industry and Apple. Currently, he is working as an independent consultant at YourMacTek specializing in all things Macintosh.