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NY Times Magazine with the story of the development of the iPhone. Believe it or not, Apple released the phone less than seven years ago.

The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa CruzMountains. It is one of the best places in Silicon Valley to spot a start-up tycoon speed-testing his Ferrari and one of the worst places for cellphone reception. For Andy Grignon, it was therefore the perfect place for him to be alone with his thoughts early on Jan. 8, 2007.

This wasn’t Grignon’s typical route to work. He was a senior engineer at Apple in Cupertino, the town just west of Campbell. His morning drive typically covered seven miles and took exactly 15 minutes. But today was different. He was going to watch his boss, Steve Jobs, make history at the Macworld trade show in San Francisco. Apple fans had for years begged Jobs to put a cellphone inside their iPods so they could stop carrying two devices in their pockets. Jobs was about to fulfill that wish. Grignon and some colleagues would spend the night at a nearby hotel, and around 10 a.m. the following day they — along with the rest of the world — would watch Jobs unveil the first iPhone.

But as Grignon drove north, he didn’t feel excited. He felt terrified. …

 

…Grignon had been part of the iPhone rehearsal team at Apple and later at the presentation site in San Francisco’s MosconeCenter. He had rarely seen Jobs make it all the way through his 90-minute show without a glitch. Jobs had been practicing for five days, yet even on the last day of rehearsals the iPhone was still randomly dropping calls, losing its Internet connection, freezing or simply shutting down. …

 

… Grignon knew the iPhone unveiling was not an ordinary product announcement, but no one could have anticipated what a seminal moment it would become. In the span of seven years, the iPhone and its iPad progeny have become among the most important innovations in Silicon Valley’s history. …

 

… It’s hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone — something Apple had never made before — he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked. Even though the iPhone wouldn’t go on sale for another six months, he wanted the world to want one right then. In truth, the list of things that still needed to be done was enormous. A production line had yet to be set up. Only about a hundred iPhones even existed, all of them of varying quality. …

 

… Remarkably, Jobs had to be talked into having Apple build a phone at all. It had been a topic of conversation among his inner circle almost from the moment Apple introduced the iPod in 2001. The conceptual reasoning was obvious: consumers would rather not carry two or three devices for e-mail, phone calls and music if they could carry one. But every time Jobs and his executives examined the idea in detail, it seemed like a suicide mission. Phone chips and bandwidth were too slow for anyone to want to surf the Internet and download music or video over a cellphone connection. E-mail was a fine function to add to a phone, but Research in Motion’s BlackBerry was fast locking up that market.

Above all, Jobs didn’t want to partner with any of the wireless carriers. Back then the carriers expected to dominate any partnership with a phone maker, and because they controlled the network, they got their way. Jobs, a famed control freak, couldn’t imagine doing their bidding. …

 

… Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s top hardware executive at the time, says there were even long discussions about how big the phone would be. “I was actually pushing to do two sizes — to have a regular iPhone and an iPhone mini like we had with the iPod. I thought one could be a smartphone and one could be a dumber phone. But we never got any traction on the small one, and in order to do one of these projects, you really need to put all your wood behind one arrow.”

The iPhone project was so complex that it occasionally threatened to derail the entire corporation. Many top engineers in the company were being sucked into the project, forcing slowdowns in the timetables of other work. Had the iPhone been a dud or not gotten off the ground at all, Apple would have had no other big products ready to announce for a long time. And worse, according to a top executive on the project, the company’s leading engineers, frustrated by failure, would have left Apple. …

 

… When Jobs started talking about the iPhone on Jan. 9, 2007, he said, “This is a day I have been looking forward to for two and a half years.” Then he regaled the audience with myriad tales about why consumers hated their cellphones. Then he solved all their problems — definitively.

As Grignon and others from Apple sat nervously in the audience, Jobs had the iPhone play some music and a movie clip to show off the phone’s beautiful screen. He made a phone call to show off the phone’s reinvented address book and voice mail. He sent a text and an e-mail, showing how easy it was to type on the phone’s touch-screen keyboard. He scrolled through a bunch of photos, showing how simple pinches and spreads of two fingers could make the pictures smaller or bigger. He navigated The New York Times’s and Amazon’s Web sites to show that the iPhone’s Internet browser was as good as the one on his computer. He found a Starbucks with Google Maps — and called the number from the stage — to show how it was impossible to get lost with an iPhone.

By the end, Grignon wasn’t just relieved; he was drunk. He’d brought a flask of Scotch to calm his nerves. “And so there we were in the fifth row or something — engineers, managers, all of us — doing shots of Scotch after every segment of the demo. There were about five or six of us, and after each piece of the demo, the person who was responsible for that portion did a shot. When the finale came — and it worked along with everything before it, we all just drained the flask. It was the best demo any of us had ever seen. And the rest of the day turned out to be just a [expletive] for the entire iPhone team. We just spent the entire rest of the day drinking in the city. It was just a mess, but it was great.”

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Leno: The National Zoo is closed due to the government shutdown. Only the pandas there are working because technically they work for China.

Fallon: After Congress failed to reach an agreement on a new spending bill, the federal government has officially shut down. So, roads won’t get fixed, public employees won’t be able to help you, and getting a federal loan for a house will be very difficult. But there will also be a lot of differences.

Leno: Obama has canceled his Asia trip, said he didn’t want to be in Indonesia not doing anything to solve the shutdown crisis when he could be at home not doing anything to solve the shutdown crisis.

Fallon: Michael Jordan says he could have beaten LeBron James one-on-one during his prime. James replied, ‘No kidding. I was nine then.’

Leno: How many are worried about the government shutdown? How many are more worried about the government starting back up?

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Time to look in on the IRS once again. The big news now is that obama’s chicago style IRS thugs went after Dr. Ben Carson after he had the temerity to criticize the one. Washington Times with the story.

Tea party groups, Franklin Graham, Christine O’Donnell, a pro-marriage group. And now Dr. Ben Carson.

The list of conservatives targeted by the Internal Revenue Service for audits, tax-exempt reviews or tax privacy breaches keeps growing, raising fresh questions in Washington about whether a scandal the Obama administration has blamed on bureaucratic incompetence and coincidence may in fact involve something more nefarious.

The latest revelation came Thursday from Dr. Carson, the renowned neurosurgeon who told The Washington Times that he was targeted for an audit just months after he gave a speech in front of President Obama that challenged America’s leadership. The agency requested to review his real estate holdings and then conducted a full audit.

In the end, the IRS found no wrongdoing, Dr. Carson said, but it raised his suspicions about being singled out for his speech.

“I guess it could be a coincidence, but I never had been audited before and never really had any encounters with the IRS,” Dr. Carson said in an interview. “But it certainly would make one suspicious because we know now the IRS has been used for political purposes and therefore actions like this come under suspicion.” …

IBD Editors say there’s no chance the Ben Carson audit was an accident.

… This is not a coincidence, any more than awakening with a severed horse’s head in your bed after being made “an offer you can’t refuse” is.

Someone — either within the IRS bureaucracy or above it — saw what Carson did, didn’t like it, and decided to make him pay. The American people must know who it was.

And there are two other crucial points to the victimization of this man who personifies the American Dream.

First, when a government is as big as ours has become, outrageous abuse from the soldiers of its financing machinery is inevitable, especially within a governmental climate that encourages it.

Second, there is no excuse for a president who’s been in office for more than four years failing to ensure that such outrages couldn’t happen.

Whether or not Obama instigated IRS abuse for political objectives, he is responsible for a culture within the bureaucracy that tolerated and even encouraged it.

Lois Lerner, recently fired from the IRS, can expect a pension with a lifetime value of $3,960,000. CNS News has this story.

Even before she retired last week, scandalized IRS official Lois Lerner’s compensation was already attracting attention.  While on administrative leave, federal rules allowed her to keep collecting a salary, one that reportedly totaled $177,000. So it was no surprise when speculation arose over how much Lerner could collect in federal pension benefits.

Unfortunately, that speculation, which initially projected a benefit of over $50,000, might be off by about half … and in the wrong direction.

National Taxpayers Union calculations show that Lerner could qualify for a starting pension at the annual equivalent of as much as $102,600, and up to $3.96 million over her lifetime.

The individual retirement choices of federal employees are not a matter of public record. However, precisely because NTU has been denied this information in the past (specifically pertaining to Members of Congress), we’ve developed the most accurate method available to provide solid estimates of how much federal employees can collect. …

CNS News also reports the IRS has only produced 10% of the documents demanded by congressional committees. 

 - The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee–which is probing the Internal Revenue Service’s discriminatory treatment of Tea Party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status–says the IRS has thus far handed over to the committee only about 10 percent of the documents the IRS itself has said are responsive to the committee’s demands for documents.

The committee subpoenaed the Treasury Department for relevant documents from the department and the IRS more than seven weeks ago at the beginning of August.

“To date, the IRS has produced to the committee only about 10 percent of all responsive materials that it has identified,” the committee’s majority staff said in a memo to committee members last Tuesday.

Committee staff confirmed to CNSNews.com today that the IRS has not produced a significant number of additional documents since that memo was circulated on Sept. 17, and that as of the afternoon of Monday, Sept. 23, the IRS’s total production of documents to the committee remained only about 10 percent of those the IRS has said are responsive

“In his letter of August 2, 2013, Acting Commissioner Werfel represented to the committee that the IRS has identified 660,000 responsive documents,” said the Oversight Committee majority staff memo. “The committee has received only 63,000 pages.” …

According to a WSJ OpEd, all of the IRS news has vanished from the three networks.

ABC, CBS and NBC have so far refused to report the latest bombshell in the IRS scandal – a newly released list from the agency that showed it flagged political groups for “anti-Obama rhetoric.” On September 18 USA Today, in a front page story, reported the following: “Newly uncovered IRS documents show the agency flagged political groups based on the content of their literature, raising concerns specifically about ‘anti-Obama rhetoric,’ inflammatory language and ‘emotional’ statements made by non-profits seeking tax-exempt status.”

Not only have ABC, CBS and NBC not reported this story they’ve flat out stopped covering the IRS scandal on their evening and morning shows. It’s been 85 days since ABC last touched the story on June 26. NBC hasn’t done a report for 84 days and CBS last mentioned the IRS scandal 56 days ago on July 24. …

Leonard Downie, former WaPo executive editor, details how reporters are learning to fight back against administration sleuths.

In the Watergate era, the Nixon administration’s telephone wiretaps were the biggest concern for journalists and sources worried about government surveillance. That was one of the reasons why Bob Woodward met with FBI official Mark Felt (a.k.a. “Deep Throat”) in an underground parking garage in Arlington, and why he and Carl Bernstein did much of their reporting by knocking on the front doors of their sources’ homes. Except for the aborted prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg for the leak of the Pentagon Papers, criminal culpability or pervasive surveillance were not major concerns, especially after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974.

Not so now. With the passage of the Patriot Act after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a vast expansion of intelligence agencies and their powers, the aggressive exploitation of intrusive digital surveillance capabilities, the excessive classification of public documents and officials’ sophisticated control of the news media’s access to the workings of government, journalists who cover national security are facing vast and unprecedented challenges in their efforts to hold the government accountable to its citizens. They find that government officials are increasingly fearful of talking to them, and they worry that their communications with sources can be monitored at any time.

So what are they doing? Many reporters covering national security and government policy in Washington these days are taking precautions to keep their sources from becoming casualties in the Obama administration’s war on leaks. They and their remaining government sources often avoid telephone conversations and e-mail exchanges, arranging furtive one-on-one meetings instead. A few news organizations have even set up separate computer networks and safe rooms for journalists trained in encryption and other ways to thwart surveillance.

“I worry now about calling somebody because the contact can be found out through a check of phone records or e-mails,” said veteran national security journalist R. Jeffrey Smith of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit accountability news organization. “It leaves a digital trail that makes it easier for government to monitor those contacts.”

“We have to think more about when we use cellphones, when we use e-mail and when we need to meet sources in person,” said Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor of the Associated Press. “We need to be more and more aware that government can track our work without talking to our reporters, without letting us know.” …