I know that historically our foundation has had great relations with all the administrations.[Bill] Clinton administration did a lot of outreach. The greatest rise in U.S. foreign aid was under the [George] Bush administration, that's where we got the AIDS initiative, which is called PEPFAR.

If we [the USA] don't innovate in education, it's literally going to mean less people get to go have that education at a time when more people are going to want it. We've got to put courses out on the Web, we've got to put interactive learning out on the Web.

You can go overboard in how quickly you might expect new technologies to transform people's lives. But I very much believe the way software is used, the way information gets distributed, will be dramatically different within 10 years. There is fire to go with all this smoke.

About three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more 'user-friendly'... Their best approach so far has been to take all the old brochures and stamp the words 'user-friendly' on the cover.

Training the workforce of tomorrow with today's high schools is like trying to teach kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe.

My broad sense of this is that authors like Smil really paint the clear picture, and once you see that, it's kind of Oh, of course. That's such a primal thing to all these physical services that we take for granted.