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.

If the United States is to protect itself from the economic and the political threats created by this excessive dependence, we must reduce our reliance on foreign energy sources and on foreign oil as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

The reality is that the workforce relative to the number of people retired has shrunk and today in America there are only 3.3 working Americans paying payroll taxes to support each individual currently retired and collecting Social Security taxes.

But with a rate of return of 1.6 percent or less, or a negative rate of return, our children and our grandchildren, if we do not make changes, will in fact not have a secure retirement. Indeed, they will not have the funds when they go to retire to even minimally get by.

More than one-third of Mexicans in the United States own property in Mexico, nearly 80 percent send money home and 25 percent have a spouse in Mexico. Assimilation and becoming an American citizen are not the objective for many of them.

A recent Pew Hispanic survey found that more than 70 percent of illegal immigrants from Mexico are interested in a guest-worker program and then returning home.

Indeed, I think most Americans now know that in 1935 when Social Security was created, there were some 42 Americans working for every American collecting retirement benefits.

For example, in my own State of Arizona, an Israeli scientist is working with an Arizona company on a demonstration project involving a very fast-growing algae which can be used to power a biomass energy plan.

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.

These smugglers, many of them present in trafficking through my State of Arizona, create false Social Security cards, false green cards, visas and a variety of other fraudulent documents as an essential part of their smuggling activities.

We must send a very clear message that if you enter our country illegally and then you commit one of these offenses, you will be dealt with harshly and you will pay a heavy price for your conduct.

Business owners have made a strong case to me that they need guest workers. But none has suggested that these workers should be placed on a path to citizenship.

Most previous immigrants came to the United States to become Americans, with no intention of returning home. They relinquished their ties with their homeland. English was their key to prosperity, and they worked hard to master it.

American consumers benefit from free trade and investment.

Global fuel and consumption, however, is projected to increase by 100 to 150 percent over the next 20 years, driven largely by the rapidly growing Chinese and Indian economies; and this growth and this increase in demand will force prices even higher.

Health care comprises nearly 20 percent of our national economy, but outdated bureaucracy and red tape have stifled competition and raised costs. As a result, today more than 45 million are without any health coverage.

Under current law, there is no additional penalty for someone who enters the United States illegally and then commits either a crime of violence or a drug trafficking offense. They simply come under the same penalty as we have in current law.

Germany, I think, was first to substitute a Social Security program for its elderly based on this premise, that is, that we would tax workers to pay retirement benefits for those retired.

The good news is, Americans know firsthand the benefits of a free market - more choices, lower prices, higher quality - and there is no reason why we cannot help them see these same benefits in health care.

Putting a stop to internet gambling is a necessary reform that targets flagrant violations of state and federal laws.

We can still find middle ground, truly secure our borders, deal with those already here and address our labor needs. But those who advocate giving current illegal aliens and future guest workers a special path to citizenship must compromise.

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 do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

There's my education in computers, right there; this is the whole thing, everything I took out of a book.

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.

Nanotechnology will let us build computers that are incredibly powerful. We'll have more power in the volume of a sugar cube than exists in the entire world today.

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

The big question society will have to answer is whether it wants computers thinking like humans.

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.

I do two things. I design mobile computers and I study brains.

Well, we didn't have our original drummer on our last record. And most of that album was not played as a band in the studio. It was mostly the world of computers and overdubs. There was very few things played live or worked out as a band.

After a semester or so, my infatuation with computers burnt out as quickly as it had begun.

Learning can take place in the backyard if there is a human being there who cares about the child. Before learning computers, children should learn to read first. They should sit around the dinner table and hear what their parents have to say and think.

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

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

But I'm so slow on it because I find it terribly hard writing blind on computers. The computer speaks to me, but it's just so slow, I'm so terribly slow using it.

Why does everyone think the future is space helmets, silver foil, and talking like computers, like a bad episode of Star Trek?

Yeah, computers are going to take over the programming business because they have become so fast recently that they can solve the Halting Problem in five seconds flat.

You can involve yourself in electronics, computers, puzzles... there's a lot of creativity and brain working. There's a lot to model trains that people don't realize.

At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.

With our work at Kazaa, we began seeing growing broadband connections and more powerful computers and more streaming multimedia, and we saw that the traditional way of communicating by phone no longer made a lot of sense.

I got interested in computers and how they could be enslaved to the megalomaniac impulses of a teenager.

Well, my wife always says to me, and I think it's true, it's very difficult for us to understand the Elizabethan understanding and enjoyment and perception of form as it is to say... it would be for them to understand computers or going to the moon or something.

The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I'm talking about an organic computer - about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor.

We're getting so pulled in by computers and technology, and our kids have their face in the computers all day. The human relationship is being diminished by this.

The trick with computers I think, is to approach old and new things with the same reverence as you would like your favourite chair and not be seduced by the constant innovation otherwise you never do anything.

I'm projecting somewhere between 100 million and 200 million computers on the Net by the end of December 2000, and about 300 million users by that same time.

Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.