MIT is governed by a second, even higher rule: the inalienable right of academic freedom.

If you take any world problem, any issue on the planet, the solution to that problem certainly includes education. In education, the roadblock is the laptop.

Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.

Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they ... can never be without some element of education.

National law has no place in cyberlaw. Where is cyberspace? If you don't like banking laws in the United States, set up your machine on the Grand Cayman Islands. Don't like the copyright laws in the United States? Set up your machine in China. Cyberlaw is global law, which is not going to be easy to handle, since we seemingly cannot even agree on world trade of automobile parts.

When things are digital, they're all 1's and zero's, and so they commingle in ways we didn't anticipate and you could do things that were not like publishing or television, or computers, but were some intersection of those and that got known to be convergence, so between the switching, or trading of places and the convergence, you have today's media.

I've spent my whole life worrying about the human-computer interface, so I don't want to suggest that what we have today is even close to acceptable.