The reason societies with democratic governments are better places to live in than their alternatives isn't because of some goodness intrinsic to democracy, but because its hopeless inefficiency helps blunt the basic potential for evil.

Computing has gone from something tiny and specialized to something that affects every walk of life. It doesn't make sense anymore to think of it as just one discipline. I expect to see separate departments of user interface, for example, to start emerging at universities.

Chefs think about what it's like to make food. Being a scientist in the kitchen is about asking why something works, and how it works.

Cooking is an art, but all art requires knowing something about the techniques and materials. Using modernist techniques, you get more control, and that allows you to be more artistic, not less!

Some article called me the most feared man in Silicon Valley. Good Lord! Why? My teenage boys got a kick out of it: 'Dad, how could this be true? You're not even the most feared person in this house.'

Movies such as 'Citizen Kane' and 'The Front Page' portrayed an era when driven newspapermen would do anything to get a story. The U.K.'s rough-and-tumble Fleet Street remains something of a throwback to that era, as demonstrated by the recent phone-hacking scandal - which led to the demise of yet another century-old paper, the 'News of the World.'

Economists want their discipline to be a science, and they have nailed down a few precepts, but many of their debates are still clouded by ideology.