We do need to rethink privacy. I think we need to fall back on (former Supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter's definition of privacy which is, "Privacy is the right to be left alone."

The difference between our collective generation and your generation (differentiating the reporters from the students) is that we poured our souls out on paper that got easily yellowed and lost. The danger is that many of your friends (nodding at the students) are putting intimate ideas in cyberspace journals. So when today's 15-year-old is 40, some friend is going to drag out all of that idiotic stuff at their class reunion.

We tend to use a new technology to do an old task more efficiently. We pave the cow paths.

The curse of cyberspace is that everything we want to preserve will get lost and everything we want to lose will be preserved.

I live on a canyon at the edge of San Mateo. We are fortunate to have lots of suburban wildlife as our neighbors, though I kind of wish the rattlesnakes would stop curling up by our back door.

When I lived in Japan in the 1980s, I once was mistaken for Paul Newman, and I didn't have much more hair than I do now. My first reaction was that staying in Japan might be good for my social life.

I would say digital technology probably doesn't have much impact on us so far. We've seen photographs of people from when they are alive. We see home movies. We have videotapes now and e-mails. When it's going to get interesting is in massively multiplayer online games where you have avatars (online personas). You could actually create an avatar that's semi-autonomous. It could do things for you while you get off the game to run the rest of your life.