The government is there day in and day out, if you want all kids to have education, if you want to run courts, if you want to have an army, if you want to have roads, you've got to have the taxation system that funds everything that you expect.

Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book 'The Most Powerful Idea in the World.'

If you go back to 1800, everybody was poor. I mean everybody. The Industrial Revolution kicked in, and a lot of countries benefited, but by no means everyone.

The vision is really about empowering workers giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.

Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it's digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules - not just for governments but for private companies.

Depending on how quickly you get ocean rise, you have people who live in river deltas [at risk]. Bangladesh is largely a river delta, and the rising sea level means that when storms come in, the human sanitation is backing up, the ability to farm, it's destructive-type situations like you saw in New Orleans with Katrina. You're increasing the frequency of that stuff in low-lying areas fairly dramatically.

Success on the Web require high-level corporate understanding of the Internet's capabilities and support of early test-and-invest projects.