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Until Recently, Over 98 Percent Of Teachers Just Got One Word Of Feedback: Satisfactory. If All My Bridge Coach Ever Told Me Was That I Was 'satisfactory,' I Would Have No Hope Of Ever Getting Better.

-Bill Gates

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Until Recently, Over 98

Bill Gates

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Until Recently, Over 98 Percent Of Teachers Just Got One Word Of Feedback: Satisfactory. If All My Bridge Coach Ever Told Me Was That I Was 'satisfactory,' I Would Have No Hope Of Ever Getting Better.

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More From Bill Gates

Steve Jobs' Ability To Focus In On A Few Things That Count, Get People Who Get User Interface Right, And Market Things As Revolutionary Are Amazing Things.

Eradications Are Special. Zero Is A Magic Number. You Either Do What It Takes To Get To Zero And You're Glad You Did It; Or You Get Close, Give Up And It Goes Back To Where It Was Before, In Which Case You Wasted All That Credibility, Activity, Money That Could Have Been Applied To Other Things.

I Hope Someday What People Can Do With Their Lives Depends On Their Talents And How Hard They Are Willing To Work, Rather Than On Where They Happen To Be Born.

Microsoft Research Has A Thing Called The Sense Cam That, As You Walk Around, It's Taking Photos All The Time. And The Software Will Filter And Find The Ones That Are Interesting Without Having To Think, 'let's Get Out The Camera And Get That Shot.' You Just Have That, And Software Helps You Pick What You Want.

For Africa To Move Forward, You've Really Got To Get Rid Of Malaria.

Make Sure People Get Educated, Help Out With Health Emergencies. Those Things, The Government Should Do. That's 96 Per Cent Of The Economy, Those Two Sectors.

Digital Reading Will Completely Take Over. It's Lightweight And It's Fantastic For Sharing. Over Time It Will Take Over.

Information Work Is Thinking Work.

I Don't Think There's A... Boundary Between Digital Media And Print Media. Every Magazine Is Doing An Online Version.

Bitcoin Is A Technological Tour De Force

This [philanthropy] Work Is Even More Fascinating. It Requires Us To Think Harder About How We Build Partnerships, Who We Get Behind. And Yet We Get To See Progress That In Some Ways Is Even More Profound Than The Great Advances That Digital Technology Has Provided.

If We [the Usa] Don't Innovate In Education, It's Literally Going To Mean Less People Get To Go Have That Education At A Time When More People Are Going To Want It. We've Got To Put Courses Out On The Web, We've Got To Put Interactive Learning Out On The Web.

If There Was An Epidemic, That Definitely Would Make People Accept Vaccines. I Wouldn't Hope For That, Of Course, But If You Wanted People To Love Vaccines, An Epidemic Would Remind Them How Magical They Are.

I Think (the Internet) Is Contributing To Chinese Political Engagement..access To The Outside World Is Preventing More Censorship.

I Think It Makes Sense To Believe In God, But Exactly What Decision In Your Life You Make Differently Because Of It, I Don't Know.

We Work With Whoever Is Elected. Some Will Bring A More Generous, Open View Of The World Than Others.

As You Improve Health In A Society, Population Growth Goes Down. You Know, I Thought It Was... Before I Learned About It, I Thought It Was Paradoxical.

I'm Truly Saddened To Learn Of Steve Jobs' Death. The World Rarely Sees Someone Who Has Had The Profound Impact Steve Has Had, The Effects Of Which Will Be Felt For Many Generations To Come. For Those Of Us Lucky Enough To Get To Work With Him, It's Been An Insanely Great Honor. I Will Miss Steve Immensely.

Success Is A Miserable Teacher. It Tempts Intelligent People To Believe They Cannot Lose. And It Is An Unreliable Guide To The Future.

Eventually You Won't Think Of 'the Internet Business.' You'll Think Of It More Like News, Weather, Sports, But Even That Taxonomy Isn't Clear.

Bill Gates' Success Factors For Microsoft 1. Long-term Approach 2. Passion For Products And Technology 3. Teamwork 4. Results 5. Customer Feedback 6. Individual Excellence

America And Japan Are The Two Leading World Economies In Terms Of Technology And Innovative Products. And In Software, Information-age Technology And Biotechnology The U.s. Has An Amazing Lead.

In My Parents I Saw A Model Where They Were Really Always Communicating, Doing Things Together. They Were Really Kind Of A Team. I Wanted Some Of That Magic Myself.

The U.s. Couldn't Even Get Rid Of Saddam Hussein. And We All Know That The Eu Is Just A Passing Fad. They'll Be Killing Each Other Again In Less Than A Year. I'm Sick To Death Of All These Fascist Lawsuits.

Killing Each Other

I've Been Very Lucky, And Therefore I Owe It To Try And Reduce The Inequity In The World. And That's Kind Of A Religious Belief. I Mean, It's At Least A Moral Belief.

The Outpouring Of Support From Millions Of People In The Immediate Aftermath Of The Earthquake In Haiti Has Been Impressive.

We [us] Are The Biggest Per Person, By A Substantial Amount, Greenhouse Emitters, And We Give The Most Foreign Aid, Not Per Person But In Absolute. This Is Another Issue Where Hopefully We Will Take A Long-term Approach Which, Even Though We Sometimes Have A Hard Time Doing That, It's Easier For Us, As A Rich Country With This Kind Of Scientific Depth, Than It Is For The Poor Countries Who Will Suffer The Problems.

If I Only Had Two Dollars Left I Would Spend One Dollar On Pr.

When The Pc Was Launched, People Knew It Was Important.

Security Guys Break The Mac Every Single Day. Every Single Day, They Come Out With A Total Exploit, Your Machine Can Be Taken Over Totally.

If Somebody Is Considering Being Willing To Go Out And Work In The Field In Global Health, Those Are A Particular Class Of Heroes Because It's Hard To Work In Those Places. Our Foundation Gets So Many Of Our Learnings From People Who've Been Out There And Seen, "this Tool Is Not Going To Work There, There's More Of A Problem Here Than You Know." You Should Really Get Involved In That.

I Love Building The Products, Seeing People Use The Products But You Know Along With Success Comes The Need For A Dialogue With The Government.

Employers Have Decided That Having The Breadth Of Knowledge That's Associated With A Four-year Degree Is Often Something They Want To See In The People They Give That Job To.

No One Will Need More Than 637kb Of Memory For A Personal Computer

I Have A Nice Office. I Have A Nice House... So I'm Not Denying Myself Some Great Things. I Just Don't Happen To Have Expensive Hobbies.

We Are Always Saying To Ourself.. We Have To Innovate. We Got To Come Up With That Breakthrough... We're Only Paid For Breakthroughs.

Lectures Should Go From Being Like The Family Singing Around The Piano To High-quality Concerts.

By 2018, An Estimated 63 Percent Of All New U.s. Jobs Will Require Workers With An Education Beyond High School. For Our Young People To Get Those Jobs, They First Need To Graduate From High School Ready To Start A Postsecondary Education.

I Have To Say That In 1981, Making Those Decisions, I Felt Like I Was Providing Enough Freedom For 10 Years. That Is, A Move From 64k To 640k Felt Like Something That Would Last A Great Deal Of Time. Well, It Didn't - It Took About Only 6 Years Before People Started To See That As A Real Problem.

Microsoft Is Not About Greed. It's About Innovation And Fairness.

Imagine The Disincentive To Software Development If After Months Of Work Another Company Could Come Along And Copy Your Work And Market It Under Its Own Name...without Legal Restraints To Such Copying, Companies Like Apple Could Not Afford To Advance The State Of The Art.

Exposure To The Reproductions [of Corbis-owned Fine Art Photographs] Is Likely To Increase Rather Than Diminish Reverence For The Real Art And Encourage More People To Get Out To Museums And Galleries.

Vaccination Is Pretty Special Because You Can Do A Vaccination Campaign Anywhere In The World. All You Are Doing Is Gathering Women From The Villages, Getting Them The Vaccines And Asking Them To Go Around And Find The Children.

Your Customers Get Better When You Do.

Service Culture

When Making Choices, Or Setting Policies About The Economy, Education Or Medicine, Society Is Best Served By Electing People Who Are Particularly Hardworking, Intelligent And Interested In Long-term Thinking.

I Don't Think You're As Capable Of Handling Lack Of Sleep Or Whatever Challenges You Throw At Your Body As You Get Older. However, I Never Missed A Day Of Work.

At Microsoft There Are Lots Of Brilliant Ideas But The Image Is That They All Come From The Top - I'm Afraid That's Not Quite Right.

I Don't Think There's Anything Unique About Human Intellience. All The Nuerons In The Brain That Make Up Perceptions And Emotions Operate In A Binary Fashion.

The General Idea Of The Rich Helping The Poor, I Think, Is Important.

Know Your Numbers' Is A Fundamental Precept Of Business.

I Don't Have A Magic Formula For Prioritizing The World's Problems.

Software Is More Important Than Hardware.

It's Paradoxical That, When You Have Better Health, Families Choose To Have Less Children, Because They've Been Having Enough Children So That They Can Be Sure That A Few Of Them Will Survive And Take Care Of Them. So As Health Improves, Then All The Other Problems Are Dramatically Easier To Tackle.

If I Will Start All Over Again I Would Chose Network Marketing.

Network Marketing

In Fact, Batteries Haven't Improved Over The Last 100 Years As Much As They Would Need To In Order To Make That Happen. So I'm Invested In A Lot Of Battery Companies - And There's A Lot That Exists I'm Not In. They're All Having A Tough Time Achieving It.

Nigeria Has Moved Into Low-middle-income, But Their North Is Very Poor, And The Health Care Systems There Have Broken Down.

A Breakthrough In Machine Learning Would Be Worth Ten Microsofts.

The Potential Financial Reward For Building The 'next Windows' Is So Great That There Will Never Be A Shortage Of New Technologies Seeking To Challenge It.

I'm Not Big On To-do Lists. Instead, I Use E-mail And Desktop Folders And My Online Calendar. So When I Walk Up To My Desk, I Can Focus On The E-mails I've Flagged And Check The Folders That Are Monitoring Particular Projects And Particular Blogs.

Until Recently, Over 98 Percent Of Teachers Just Got One Word Of Feedback: Satisfactory. If All My Bridge Coach Ever Told Me Was That I Was 'satisfactory,' I Would Have No Hope Of Ever Getting Better.

There Are More People Dying Of Malaria Than Any Specific Cancer.

I Like My Job Because It Involves Learning. I Like Being Around Smart People Who Are Trying To Figure Out New Things. I Like The Fact That If People Really Try They Can Figure Out How To Invent Things That Actually Have An Impact.

Life Is Not A Continuous Process, There's Some Sort Of Finite Number Of Achievements That Defines Your Life.

There's Always A Tricky Issue When You Get Into Stolen Material Or Pornography. The Laws For Online Publishing The Same As For Print-based Publishing, Where If You're Hosting Certain Types Of Things And Somebody Notifies You About That.

Don’t Tax My Income, Tax My Consumption.

The Intersection Of Law, Politics, And Technology Is Going To Force A Lot Of Good Thinking.

We Have Over 60 Million Machines That Can Take The Same Diskette, Plug It In And Immediately Ah, That That Software's Working. And So It's Created The Worldwide Software Industry That... That Is So Very Competitive And Moving So Quickly.

Living On $6 A Day Means You Have A Refrigerator, A Tv, A Cell Phone, Your Children Can Go To School. That's Not Possible On $1 A Day.

Everyone Knows About Black Friday And Cyber Monday. Now Help Me Spread The Word About Giving Tuesday!

I Don't Generally Read A Lot Of Fiction.

If You Think Your Teacher Is Tough, Wait Till You Get A Boss.

I Keep Bumping Into That Silly Quotation Attributed To Me That Says 640k Of Memory Is Enough. There's Never A Citation; The Quotation Just Floats Like A Rumor, Repeated Again And Again.

Take Agriculture, Where We Haven't Done Much, Or Sanitation; Saying, "okay, We Will Be Able To Make A Really Huge Effort There." It Really Energized The Foundation And Half Of What We've Gotten Done In This Last Decade Is Because Warren [buffett] Trusted Us.

The Common Thread For Everything I Do Is This Idea Of A Web-services Architecture. What Does That Mean? It Means Taking Components Of Software And Systems And Having Them Be Self-describing, So That You Can Aim Them, Ask Them What Their Capabilities Are, And Communicate With Them Using A Standard Protocol.

In This Business, By The Time You Realize You're In Trouble, It's Too Late To Save Yourself. Unless You're Running Scared All The Time, You're Gone.

Funny Inspirational

Energy Innovation Is Not A Nationalistic Game.

I Believe The Government Has The Right To Recover From The Heirs To The Fortunes Of Its Most Successful Citizens Some Portion Of Those Fortunes.

Our Work In Global Health Is About Things Like Cutting Childhood Deaths, And Every Year We Continue To Make Progress There.

Don't Let Yourself Be Lulled Into Inaction.

The Leader Needs To Create An Environment In Which People Can Analyze The Situation And Develop A Good Response.

Natural Epidemics Can Be Extremely Large. Intentionally Caused Epidemics, Bioterrorism, Would Be The Largest Of All.

Personally, I'd Like To See More Of Our Leaders Take A Technocratic Approach To Solving Our Biggest Problems.

Life's Not Fair, Get Over It!

It's Not Easy To Remember, But Ibm Was The Computer Industry When I Was Growing Up. You Loved 'em. You Hated 'em. You Knew What They Were Doing. They Had Set A Standard For Mainframes. They Also Set A Standard For Great Sales Focus And Heavy Product R & D.

Microsoft Has Had Many, Many Successful Products. I'm Committed To One Company. This Is The Industry I've Decided To Work In.

Life Is Not Fair Get Used To Used To It

Good High School Graduation

Two Years From Now, Spam Will Be Solved.

The Fact That There Was No Catastrophic Pandemic In Recent History Does Not Mean There Won't Be Another One. And We Are Certainly Not Prepared For The Next Pandemic.

You Have A Meeting To Make A Decision, Not To Decide On The Question.

If I Think Something's A Waste Of Time Or Inappropriate I Don't Wait To Point It Out. I Say It Right Away. It's Real Time. So You Might Hear Me Say 'that's The Dumbest Idea I Have Ever Heard' Many Times During A Meeting.

Vision Without Execution Is Daydreaming.

China Has Many Successful Entrepreneurs And Business People. I Hope That More People Of Insight Will Put Their Talents To Work To Improve The Lives Of Poor People In China And Around The World, And Seek Solutions For Them.

I Don't Think There's Anything Unique About Human Intelligence.

Melinda [gates] Has Been My Partner In Raising The Kids And I Went From Before I Met Her, Intentionally Having An Unbalanced Life, To Having A More Balanced Life With All Sorts Of Fun Things That She And I Do Together.

By 2035, There Will Be Almost No Poor Countries Left In The World.

I'm Certainly Well Taken Care Of In Terms Of Food And Clothes ... Money Has No Utility To Me Beyond A Certain Point. Its Utility Is Entirely In Building An Organization And Getting The Resources Out To The Poorest In The World.

It's Energy Intensification, Where We Essentially Have, Through Our Light Bulbs And Cars, The Manpower Of [hundreds Of] People Working On Our Behalf, Helping Our Food Being Created, Helping Our Materials Like Steel And Plastic And Wood And Paper Be Created. Our Lifestyles Are Incredibly Energy Intense.

Microsoft Has Had Its Success By Doing Low-cost Products And Constantly Improving Those Products And We've Really Redefined The It Industry To Be Something That's About A Tool For Individuals.

To Be Born Poor Is Not Our Fault, But To Die Poor Is Crime

Success Is A Lousy Teacher. It Seduces Smart People Into Thinking They Can't Lose.

I Never Took A Day Off In My Twenties. Not One.

Like A Human Being, A Company Has To Have An Internal Communication Mechanism, A "nervous System", To Coordinate Its Actions.

Today, We're Very Dependent On Cheap Energy. We Just Take It For Granted - All The Things You Have In The House, The Way Industry Works.

We Had Planned To Integrate A Web Browser With Our Operating System As Far Back As 1993( Filing Its First Court Responses To Federal Antitrust)

If People Want Capital Gains Taxed More Like The Highest Rate On Income, That's A Good Discussion. Maybe That's The Way To Help Close The Deficit.

People In Business Understand Paying Money To Be More Efficient. You Can Bootstrap Markets Where The Devices Are Too Expensive At First Because These Are So Valuable To Some People.

What We're Really After Is Simply That People Acquire A Legal License For Windows For Each Computer They Own Before They Move On To Linux Or Sun Solaris Or Bsd Or Os/2 Or Whatever.

Only Through Focus Can You Do World-class Things, No Matter How Capable You Are.

Eventually We'll Be Able To Sequence The Human Genome And Replicate How Nature Did Intelligence In A Carbon-based System.

With Nuclear Weapons, You'd Think You Would Probably Stop After Killing 100million. Smallpox Won't Stop. Because The Population Is Naïve, And There Are No Real Preparations. That, If It Got Out And Spread, Would Be A Larger Number.

Like Many Others, I Have Deep Misgivings About The State Of Education In The United States. Too Many Of Our Students Fail To Graduate From High School With The Basic Skills They Will Need To Succeed In The 21st Century Economy, Much Less Prepared For The Rigors Of College And Career. Although Our Top Universities Continue To Rank Among The Best In The World, Too Few American Students Are Pursuing Degrees In Science And Technology. Compounding This Problem Is Our Failure To Provide Sufficient Training For Those Already In The Workforce.

Our Flame Is Taking The Normal Depleted Uranium - The 99.3 Percent That's Cheap As Heck, And There's A Pile Of It Sitting In Paducah, Kentucky That's Enough To Power The United States For Hundreds And Hundreds Of Years. You're Taking That And You Are Converting It To Plutonium - And Then You're Burning That.

I Love Nuclear. It Does This Radiation Thing That's Tricky. But They're Good Solutions. You Know, It Was Interesting; Recently, In Connecticut This Natural Gas Plant Blew Up 11 Guys. It Just Blew Them Up.

What Destroys More Self-confidence Than Any Other Educational Thing In America Is Being Assigned To Some Remedial Math When You Get Into Some College, And Then It's Not Taught Very Well And You End Up With This Sense Of, 'hey, I Can't Really Figure Those Things Out.'

Self Confidence

You Don't Have To Own A Tv Network To Go Out And Do A Cool Show.

If Your Culture Doesn't Like Geeks, You Are In Real Trouble.

The Year I Was Born, 1955, The First Big Disease-eradication Program In The World Was Declared For Malaria. After About A Decade Of Work, They Realized That, At Least In The Tropical Areas, They Did Not Have The Tools To Get It Done.

When A Country Has The Skill And Self-confidence To Take Action Against Its Biggest Problems, It Makes Outsiders Eager To Be A Part Of It.

Self Confidence

The Software Is Where The Magic Is. If You're Going To Have All This Power Be Simple Enough, Appealing Enough And Cool Enough, It's Going To Be Because The Software Is Right.

Investing For The Poor Requires Participation From The Entire Community.

Make It Just Like A Mac.

I Feel Certain That The Personal Computer Is As Revolutionary In Terms Of The Way It Will Change The Way We Work, Learn, And Entertain Ourselves As Any Of These Previous Advances.

Even For The Very Best Programmers Ah, Sometimes You'll See Someone Else's Program Or Somebody Will Come Along And They'll Show You What Can Be Done In A Simpler Way.

Over Time, Yes, Countries Will Need To Look At Specific Gmo Products Like They Look At Drugs Today, Where They Don't Approve Them All. They Look Hard At The Safety And The Testing. And They Make Sure That The Benefits Far Outweigh Any Of The Downsides.

The Most Interesting Biofuel Efforts Avoid Using Land That's Expensive And Has High Opportunity Costs. They Do This By Getting Onto Other Types Of Land, Or Taking Advantage Of Byproducts That Aren't Used In The Food Chain Today, Or By Intercropping.

What's Amazing Is, If Young People Understood How Doing Well In School Makes The Rest Of Their Life So Much Interesting, They Would Be More Motivated. It's So Far Away In Time That They Can't Appreciate What It Means For Their Whole Life.

I Believe That Every Life Is Valuable. That We Can Make Things Better. That Innovation Is The Key To A Bright Future. That We're Just Getting Started.

Here Are Economies Like China's Economy Where It's Less Than A Tenth [of A Percent] Today, Although It Is Growing, Is Quite Small, Because Of The Notion That The Government Takes Care Of Everything, And Europe And China, Philanthropy Has Not Been Nearly Of The Same Scale.

The Billion People Who Wake Up Every Day Trying To Figure Out If They Have Enough Food To Eat Won't Be At Davos.

Well, No One Gives Aid To Zimbabwe Through The Mugabe Government.

It's Fantastic That Microsoft In The Cloud Space Is One Of Very Few Companies That's Got The Critical Mass, The Particular Emphasis On Helping Business Customers Get Up To That Cloud With All The Unique Requirements They Have. It's Very Exciting.

The Us Really Has To Get Out In Front. We Are The Biggest Per Person, By A Substantial Amount, Greenhouse Emitters, And We Give The Most Foreign Aid, Not Per Person But In Absolute.

As For Drugs - Well, Gates Was Certainly Not Unusual There. Marijuana Was The Pharmaceutical Of Choice.

The Belief That The World Is Getting Worse, That We Can't Solve Extreme Poverty And Disease, Isn't Just Mistaken. It Is Harmful.

Who Decides What's In Windows? The Customers Who Buy It.

Globalization Has Made Copper And Other Minerals More Valuable, And Ghana And Kenya Have Recently Discovered Mineral Resources.

Software Was Changing So Fast, So Unbelievable, That That Got Very Quick Adoption.

We Have Two Other Countries, Pakistan And Afghanistan - Again It's The Instability That Is A Problem There. So Over The Next Several Years, We Expect To Drive The Number Of [polio] Cases Back Down To Zero Because That Is Likely To Be The Second Disease After Smallpox That We Completely Eradicate.

Should Surveillance Be Usable For Petty Crimes Like Jaywalking Or Minor Drug Possession? Or Is There A Higher Threshold For Certain Information? Those Aren't Easy Questions.

Whenever You Have A Few Setbacks, The Idea That Half As Many Children Are Dying Now As Back In 1990 And So... It Was Over 12 Million A Year, Now It's Less Than 6 Million A Year. We Have A Clear Path To Get That Under 3 Million A Year And We Know What To Do. And This Generation Of Young Africans Is A Very Large Group.

We Get Comfort From Those Who Agree With Us, But We Get Growth From Only Those Who Don't Agree With Us !

In American Math Classes, We Teach A Lot Of Concepts Poorly Over Many Years. In The Asian Systems They Teach You Very Few Concepts Very Well Over A Few Years.

When You Write A Piece Of Software You Assume A Certain Type Of Hardware. If You Assume Hardware That's Too Powerful Then You Can't Sell Many Copies Cause Very Few People Have That Machine. If You Assume Hardware That's Too Simple Your Product Can't Do As Much.

Part Of The Magic Of Economic Growth Is How You Educate People, And The Leading Economies Have To Stay In Front Of That. From An Economic Point Of View, It Affects Competitiveness And Creates Jobs. Or From A Social Justice Point Of View, You Can Take Someone In The Bottom Tier Of Income And Let Him Compete To Be A Doctor Or Lawyer. The Education System Is The Only Reason The Dream Of Equal Opportunity Has A Chance Of Being Delivered - And We're Not Running A Good Education System.

Death Is Something We Really Understand Extremely Well.

Software Is A Great Combination Between Artistry And Engineering. When You Finally Get Done And Get To Appreciate What You Have Done It Is Like A Part Of Yourself That You've Put Together. I Think A Lot Of The People Here Feel That Way.

Whenever You Have Multiple Devices Including Multiple Pcs That You Want To Share Information With, It's Always Been A Bit Complicated.

As We Have Taken Diarrhea And Pneumonia Down, Even Malaria Down Quite A Bit, The Portion Of The Days That Are Very Early In That 5 Years - The First Month, The First Day - It's About Half Now. Yet That's The Part We Understand The Least.

The Nuclear Industry Has This Amazing Record, Even Equipment From Generations One And Two. But Nuclear Mishaps Tend To Come In These Big Events - Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, And Now Fukushima - So It's More Visible.

Information Technology And Business Are Becoming Inextricably Interwoven. I Don't Think Anybody Can Talk Meaningfully About One Without The Talking About The Other.

Bitcoin Is Mostly About Anonymous Transactions, And I Don't Think Over Time That's A Good Way To Go. I'm A Huge Believe In Digital Currency... But Doing It On An Anonymous Basis I Think That Leads To Some Abuses, So I'm Not Involved In Bitcoin.

In K-12, Almost Everybody Goes To Local Schools. Universities Are A Bit Different Because Kids Actually Do Pick The University. The Bizarre Thing, Though, Is That The Merit Of University Is Actually How Good The Students Going In Are: The Sat Scores Of The Kids Going In.

If Africa Seeks Prosperity, It Must Provide For The Health And Nutrition Of All – Including The Poorest.

I Think That Society Has To Be Careful Not To Shift All Of Its Resources To The Elderly Versus The Young. I Get Very Concerned When People Talk About Cutting Education Budgets.

Our Modern Lifestyle Is Not A Political Creation. Before 1700, Everybody Was Poor As Hell. Life Was Short And Brutish. It Wasn't Because We Didn't Have Good Politicians; We Had Some Really Good Politicians. But Then We Started Inventing - Electricity, Steam Engines, Microprocessors, Understanding Genetics And Medicine And Things Like That. Yes, Stability And Education Are Important - I'm Not Taking Anything Away From That - But Innovation Is The Real Driver Of Progress.

I Want To Admit That I Am An Optimist. Any Tough Problem, I Think It Can Be Solved.

The Barrier To Change Is Not Too Little Caring; It Is Too Much Complexity.

The Most Meaningful Way To Differentiate Your Company From Your Competitors, The Best Way To Put Distance Between You And The Crowd Is To Do An Outstanding Job With Information. How You Gather, Manage And Use Information Will Determine Whether You Win Or Lose.

I Think There Will Be Pcs At Every Price Point.

(on Being The World's Richest Man) I Wish I Wasn't ... There's Nothing Good That Comes Out Of That. You Get More Visibility As A Result Of It.

We Flew Down Weekly To Meet With Ibm, But They Thought The Way To Measure Software Was The Amount Of Code We Wrote, When Really The Better The Software, The Fewer Lines Of Code.

We're Responsible For The Creation Of The Pc Industry. The Whole Idea Of Compatible Machines And Lots Of Software - That's Something We Brought To Computing. And So It's A Responsibility For Us To Make Sure That Things Like Security Don't Get In The Way Of That Dream.

It's The Poorer People In Tropical Zones Who Will Get Really Hit By Climate Change - As Well As Some Ecosystems, Which Nobody Wants To See Disappear.

Anything That Someone's Interested In Should Be Very, Very Easy To Call Up Onto The Screen. And In Fact The Computer Over Time Will See What You're Interested In And Make That Immediately Available Without Your Having To Be Give Any Commands At All.

Test Scores Aren't Perfect, But Having A Test Score For Math Or Reading Or Other Things That We Can Objectively Measure Is A Meaningful Component That Makes A Lot Of Sense.

There's No Such Thing As Going To A Soapbox And Saying, 'the Government's Corrupt,' And Not Having The Intelligence Service See Your Face. In The Digital World, That Can Be Done.

Intelligence Services

Software Is Definitely Engineering. It's Different In That We Take On Novel Tasks Every Time. It's Not Like Building A Certain Bridge That Is Virtually Identical To Some Previous Bridge Or Some Previous Building.

Paper Is No Longer A Big Part Of My Day. I Get 90% Of My News Online, And When I Go To A Meeting And Want To Jot Things Down, I Bring My Tablet Pc. It's Fully Synchronized With My Office Machine So I Have All The Files I Need.

Really Advanced Civilization Is Based On Advances In Energy.

Advanced Civilization

I Feel Pretty Stupid That I Don't Know Any Foreign Languages. I Wish I Knew French Or Arabic Or Chinese.

It’s Been Proven That Of All The Interventions To Reduce Poverty, Improving Agricultural Productivity Is The Best.

In A Budget, How Important Is Art Versus Music Versus Athletics Versus Computer Programming? At The End Of The Day, Some Of Those Trade-offs Will Be Made Politically.

The End Of The Day

I Try To Make Time For Reading Each Night. In Addition To The Usual Newspapers And Magazines, I Make It A Priority To Read At Least One Newsweekly From Cover To Cover. If I Were To Read What Intrigues Me- Say, The Science And Business Sections - Then I Would Finish The Magazine The Same Person I Was When I Started. So I Read It All.

And Knowledge Management Is A Means, Not An End.

If You Really Could Take The Co2, When You Burn Hydrocarbons - Coal, For Example - If You Could Really Capture The Carbon And Sequester It - They Call It Ccs - If The Extra Capital Cost, Energy Cost, And Storage Costs Over Time Didn't Make It Super Expensive, Then That's Another Path That You Could Go Down.

Only A Few Businesses Will Succeed By Having The Lowest Price, So Most Will Need A Strategy That Includes Customer Services.

Students Deserve Great Teachers. And Teachers Deserve The Support They Need To Become Great.

The Pc Has Improved The World In Just About Every Area You Can Think Of. Amazing Developments In Communications, Collaboration And Efficiencies. New Kinds Of Entertainment And Social Media. Access To Information And The Ability To Give A Voice People Who Would Never Have Been Heard.

When I Was Trying To Figure Out Why Lives Have Improved So Much In The Last 300 Years, Where We've Gone From A Third Of Kids Dying Before 5 To - By 1990 It Was Down To 10% - Now It's Down To 5%. And Saying Why, Over All History, There Were Smart People, But That Number Didn't Change. Average Life Span Didn't Change. What's Magical About What's Been Deemed The Industrial Revolution? It's Really Energy Intensity.

There Is No Doubt That As An Economy Grows In A Great Way Like India Has, That You Have To Step Back And Change Your Tax Systems, Because You Start To Get More Disparities Of Wealth.

Married Life Is A Simpler Life. Who I Spend My Time With Is Established In Advance.

This Is A Very Exciting Time In The World Of Information. It`s Not Just That The Personal Computer Has Come Along As A Great Tool. The Whole Pace Of Business Is Moving Faster. Globalization Is Forcing Companies To Do Things In New Ways.

Security Is, I Would Say, Our Top Priority Because For All The Exciting Things You Will Be Able To Do With Computers - Organizing Your Lives, Staying In Touch With People, Being Creative - If We Don't Solve These Security Problems, Then People Will Hold Back.

Your School May Have Done Away With Winners And Losers, But Life Has Not.

Long-term Vision And Product Strategy.

Well The Global Fund, Because Of How Well It's Worked On Not Only Aids, But Also Malaria And Tuberculosis, I'd Say It's Well Accepted. I Mean, It's Not Politically Controversial That This Is A Great Humanitarian Effort. But Budgets Are Very Very Tight.

Think Of Business As A Good Game. Lots Of Competition And A Minimum Of Rules. You Keep Score With Money.

Our Teachers Deserve Better Feedback.

The Vision Is Really About Empowering Workers Giving Them All The Information About What’s Going On So They Can Do A Lot More Than They’ve Done In The Past.

We've Got To Put A Lot Of Money Into Changing Behavior.

As I See It, There Are Two Great Forces Of Human Nature: Self-interest, And Caring For Others. Capitalism Harnesses Self-interest In A Helpful And Sustainable Way, But Only On Behalf Of Those Who Can Pay. Government Aid And Philanthropy Channel Our Caring For Those Who Can't Pay. But To Provide Rapid Improvement For The Poor We Need A System That Draws In Innovators And Businesses In A Far Better Way Than We Do Today.

People Want To Watch Whatever Video They Want To Watch Whenever They Want To Watch. If You Provision Your Internet Infrastructure Adequately, You Can Do That.

Intellectual Property Has The Shelf Life Of A Banana.

Energy Is Very Primal Stuff And There Are A Lot Of Leads That Are Promising, Still At A Fairly Risky Stage, But Over The Next Decade Some Of These Breakthrough Approaches Are Going To Pay Out, And U.s. Research And U.s. Leadership On This Should Be Part Of How It Gets Solved.

There Is No Author Whose Books I Look Forward To More Than Vaclav Smil.

Giving Money Effectively Is Almost As Hard As Earning It In The First Place.

Software Is Inherently Complicated. If You Say To Somebody I Want An Airline Reservation System, To Really Say What You Want In Terms Of Overbooking And Fares, And Different Airlines Communicating With Each Or Schedule Changes, It's Immensely Complex. And So You Can't Write A Program That's Any Simpler Than That Full Specification.

Well, Jobs Are A Great Thing. You Have To Be A Bit Careful: If You Raise The Minimum Wage, You’re Encouraging Labor Substitution And You’re Going To Go Buy Machines And Automate Things - Or Cause Jobs To Appear Outside Of That Jurisdiction. And So Within Certain Limits, You Know, It Does Cause Job Destruction. If You Really Start Pushing It, Then You’re Just Making A Huge Trade-off.

I Have Seen Firsthand That Agricultural Science Has Enormous Potential To Increase The Yields Of Small Farmers And Lift Them Out Of Hunger And Poverty.

Hunger And Poverty

The Main Thing That's Missing In Energy Is An Incentive To Create Things That Are Zero-co2-emitting And That Have The Right Scale And Reliability Characteristics.

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