My personal philosophy is that people should be extremely selfish for the first half of their life and extremely unselfish for the second half because then they can do the most good.

When I was 13, I thought I was pretty hot stuff because I knew BASIC programming, self-taught on the family's Commodore 64. One of my crowning accomplishments was writing a silly little program that showed a crudely-drawn Space Shuttle lifting off in a cloud of pixelated smoke.

It's common in rural Ireland to pick up a nickname that relates to an animal, bird, or a spider. Mine became 'scorpion' because I fought back, and scorpions are docile creatures until pushed too far.

If you look at any normal organization, the CEO is the person with the highest E.Q. The person with the highest IQ is often in the back room running the financials or the operations. That's topsy turvy.

The internet is a great way to get on the net.

Basically, if you want to have a computer system that could pass the Turing test, it as a machine is going to have to be able to self-reference and use its own experience and the sense data that it's taking in to basically create its own understanding of the world and use that as a reference point for all new sense data that's coming in to it.

I guess I would just say that in general, one of my weaknesses is that I love everything. There's too much of everything to keep up with it all. I get bored with Silicon Valley technology a lot. I've always had much more of a draw to the people who are doing things for love than the people who are doing things for money.

One of the things that I'm trying to do is use the position that I'm in... to encourage the next generation of girls to think about the Internet as a career opportunity.