It is a high bar to say that it's more fun than working on software because the work at Microsoft that both Melinda [Gates] and I did was thrilling. We were making breakthroughs and empowering people.

The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can't solve extreme poverty and disease, isn't just mistaken. It is harmful.

In the old generation, if one kid bought a PlayStation 2 and the other kid bought an Xbox, at his house you played PlayStation, at your house you played Xbox. Now that it's online, all those early buyers who... you want to play with, they've got their reputation online of who they are and how good they are at these games.

America and Japan are the two leading world economies in terms of technology and innovative products. And in software, information-age technology and biotechnology the U.S. has an amazing lead.

Software is different than other products um, partly because it's, it's not physical and, and partly because of its complexity. You can express in software millions of different cases and making sure that you handle all of them correctly is extremely difficult.

Sorghum is kind of unusual. It can go to very high heats, but it's not as productive in most environments as maize is.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.