Joy Covey

Not having finished high school and having been fairly utilitarian in the way I went about college, I didn't have a deep liberal arts background. So we'd go to lunch and people would talk about their favorite seventeenth-century poets, and I'd be thinking, 'Could I even name five poets? From any century?'

I can't really speak to the other parts of the economy, but what I think is very true of the tech world is that it's easy for talented people - whatever their gender, age, or race - to rise up and succeed.

I didn't finish high school - left home when I was 15. I moved away to Fresno and worked as a grocery clerk. I went to college part-time at California State Fresno, and then ended up finishing in two and a half years because I wanted to get on with things.

Did you know there's a difference between being busy and being fruitful? Did you ever stop to think that just being busy - running around in circles all day but not accomplishing anything - is the same as wasting your time? It's frustrating to expend so much energy and time and not have any fruit from your effort!

I think what's going to hurt the Republicans enormously is the extremist position of Mitt Romney on the immigration issue and states like New Mexico, states like Colorado, Nevada, Arizona - and I think it's going to be the margin of victory for President Obama, a very narrow victory.

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.