I became a poet in Pittsburgh. When I lived in the South, I was a basketball player and primarily a jock. An English teacher essentially suggested that I send the poems that I'd been writing - really just for him - to a few programs, so that when I wound up in Pittsburgh, it's where I figured out that I could actually be a poet.

I realized that I loved using computers to create something, but being an architect just wasn't going to keep me interested. The idea of a life spent obsessing over bathroom details for an Upper East Side penthouse was pretty depressing.

It is an interesting fact that during my tour I was never allowed access to computers, radios, or anything else that I might damage through curiosity, or perhaps something more sinister.

From cell phones to computers, quality is improving and costs are shrinking as companies fight to offer the public the best product at the best price. But this philosophy is sadly missing from our health-care insurance system.

I grew up before computers. Computers are changing things, not all for the good.

I think the future of this planet depends on humans, not technology, and we already have the knowledge - we're kind of at the endgame with knowledge. But we're nowhere near the endgame when it comes to our perception. We still have one foot in the dark ages.

Space exploration promised us alien life, lucrative planetary mining, and fabulous lunar colonies. News flash, ladies and gents: Space is nearly empty. It's a sterile vacuum, filled mostly with the junk we put up there.

Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, 'toxic' financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.

I'm always working. I don't really set limits. I tend to go in bursts. And in between, I'm doing my taxes, answering the phone, and all those kinds of things. I waste a lot of time. Computers take a lot of time. I love computers.

The most interesting character to me is someone who is stuck in the no man's land between Belief and Unbelief, Faith and Faithlessness. I'm capitalizing like a German, but it doesn't matter whether it's faith in a person or in God, or belief in science or whatever, it's the desperate in-between state that makes for interesting dramatic tension.

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

And it was back in the mid-1980s, and as I point out in a piece, that was when we are spending about eight percent of our gross domestic product on health care. And even then, we had the impression that so much of the excessive, aggressive medical treatment that took place at the end of life was not only unnecessary but it was cruel.

I'm not really a knob-twiddler. I always work with an engineer; I'm not super hands-on when it comes to mixing boards and computers. I'm much more about what I'm hearing and what it needs to be like. I deal with songs and ideas and instruments.

Computers have become more friendly, understandable, and lots of years and thought have been put into developing software to convince people that they want and need a computer.

If somebody had told me when I was in graduate school, 'Brian, in 35 years you'll get a chance to fly the first commercial spacecraft with no computers,' I'd have said, 'I don't think so. People are not going to be that stupid.'

Today, computers help us making the music. It's really a tool.

My big influences are Joni Mitchell, and a lot of classical and Indian music, as well as Nina Simone and the personal blues and jazz of Billie Holiday. Other influences for me include Bjork, Nick Drake, and Sufjan Stevens.

I thought I was an old soul, and that I knew life, but then starting the real life, I figured I am completely new.

So a more sensible thing it seemed to me was to go to Silicon Valley and be pushing on the technology companies to accelerate the use of audio and music in computers.

If you're talking about a world in which everybody is connected by computers 24 hours a day, that exists right now.

Computers get better faster than anything else ever.

The heart of science is measurement.

Electricity is an example of a general purpose technology, like the steam engine before it. General purpose technologies drive most economic growth, because they unleash cascades of complementary innovations, like lightbulbs and, yes, factory redesign.

Technology has always been destroying jobs, and it has always been creating jobs.

There are lots of examples of routine, middle-skilled jobs that involve relatively structured tasks, and those are the jobs that are being eliminated the fastest. Those kinds of jobs are easier for our friends in the artificial intelligence community to design robots to handle them. They could be software robots; they could be physical robots.

I closely follow everything about user interface or human-computer interface: technology that makes computers closer to the way the human being actually functions.

Linguistics is a good way of defining the culture of a brand. The vocabulary used by sports and lifestyle brands - running, fitness, training, motorsports - is all about functionality, whereas the vocabulary of the luxury business - handbags, ready-to-wear - is all about the product.

Sustainable development is a fundamental break that's going to reshuffle the entire deck. There are companies today that are going to dominate in the future simply because they understand that.

Yet in this global economy, no jobs are safe. High-speed Internet connections and low-cost, skilled labor overseas are an explosive combination.

Many have left their families to defend our freedom. We salute their bravery; we express our appreciation and support to their families. And we pray for their safe return.

A dynamic economy begins with a good education.

What happened on September 11 compels us to focus on who we are as Americans, what we stand for, what really matters in our lives - family, friends, faith and freedom.

Google has placed its faith in data, while Apple worships the power of design. This dichotomy made the two companies complementary. Apple would ship the phones and computers, while Google would provide Maps, Search, YouTube, and other web tools that made the devices more useful.

Building a successful company (or living a happy life, for that matter) is not about embracing someone else's philosophy, but staying true to your own beliefs about the world and learning from the mistakes you make along the way.

Everyone was saying computers were going to be the future of art; everyone had to do something in this medium. And it was almost some sort of rebellion that I wanted to do these small, intimate drawings.

I'm trying to get through life without really knowing about computers, but I don't know if I am going to make it.

I remember having computers at my parents' house growing up. We had different desktop PCs, but my first laptop was an IBM ThinkPad laptop. It was big, bulky, slow and terrible.

Computers rather frighten me, because I never did learn to type, so the whole thing seems extraordinarily complicated to me.

People are good at figuring out what's attractive, and computers are good at quickly searching and finding. You put them together, and bang!

The basic idea of Games With a Purpose is that we are taking a problem that computers cannot yet solve, and we are getting people to solve it for us while they are playing a game.

Science fiction has done a really good job of scaring us into thinking that computers shouldn't get too smart, because as soon as they get really smart, they're going to take over the world and kill us, or something like that. But why would they do that?

Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.

The Web is actually a coming together of three technologies, if you like: the hypertext, the personal computer, and the network. So, the network we had, and the personal computers were there, but people didn't use them, because they didn't know what to use them for, except maybe for a few games.

We all grew up, our grandmothers and mothers had about three channels to watch, so we watched those soaps and now, a generation has grown up with the Internet and computers and video games.

Technology ventures can succeed with very little investment, unlike many other industries. A lot of the big Internet players like Google or Yahoo were started by a couple of guys with computers. Microsoft was started in Bill Gates' garage.

Technology requires knowledge and expertise more than it requires money.

They went back there, looked at all the computers, asked me to come in and tell them what all the computers were for specifically so they knew how to dismantle the network I had been running.

When they were done downloading all the information off each hard drive, they took all the computers, all the literature, and loaded everything into a big white truck and left.

And my real enemy is not to hold the specimen sterile, but it's the lighting. The light is our real enemy. So we have to work with very very poor lighting. But we can increase the light with computers.

That's the new way - with computers, computers, computers. That's the way we can have the cell survive and get some new information in high resolution. We started about five years ago and, today, I think we have reached the target.