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When I Say "an Energy Miracle," I Mean That There Will Be Some Form Of Energy Whose 24 Hour Cost Really Is Competitive With Hydrocarbons Given, Say, 20 Years Of Learning Curve. You Invent It, Then You Look At How Much Its Costs Go Down Over The Next 20 Years, That It Really Beats Hydrocarbons.

-Bill Gates

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When I Say "an

Bill Gates

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When I Say "an Energy Miracle," I Mean That There Will Be Some Form Of Energy Whose 24 Hour Cost Really Is Competitive With Hydrocarbons Given, Say, 20 Years Of Learning Curve. You Invent It, Then You Look At How Much Its Costs Go Down Over The Next 20 Years, That It Really Beats Hydrocarbons.

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I Don't Generally Read A Lot Of Fiction.

There Are Websites That Any Government Wants To Block. The Truth About The Internet Is That It's Extremely Hard To Block Anything - Extremely Hard. You'll Never Get Perfect Blocking.

My Fascination Is Broadly With Biology And The Fact That Our Increased Understanding Of Biology Allows For Breakthroughs In A Broad Set Of Diseases.

We All Learn Best In Our Own Ways. Some People Do Better Studying One Subject At A Time, While Some Do Better Studying Three Things At Once. Some People Do Best Studying In Structured, Linear Way, While Others Do Best Jumping Around, Surrounding A Subject Rather Than Traversing It. Some People Prefer To Learn By Manipulating Models, And Others By Reading.

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.

In 80% Of The World, Energy Will Be Bought Where It Is Economic. You Have To Help The Rest Of The World Get Energy At A Reasonable Price.

Thinking About Impact On Children Meant Adding To The Agenda, Both The R&d Agenda And The Delivery Agenda, But It's Amazing News, Even In The Scale Of Other Tragedies.

We’re No Longer In The Days Where Every Program Is Super Well Crafted. But At The Heart Of The Programs That Make It To The Top, You’ll Find That The Key Internal Code Was Done By A Few People Who Really Knew What They Were Doing.

Teaching Is The Human Thing, In Terms Of Building The Kids' Self-confidence, So If We Take The Broad Ways That We Want To See Society To Be Better, Science Can Only Provide Certain Pieces Of That.

Self Confidence

Taking A Look Back, One Big Reqret Is, I Left Harvard With No Real Awareness Of The Awful Inequities In The World. The Appalling Disparities Of Health And Wealth And Opportunity That Condemned Millions Of People To The Lives Of Despair. I Learned A Lot Here At Harvard About New Ideas And Economics, And Politics. I Got Great Exposure To The Advances Being Made In The Sciences. But Humanities Greatest Advances Are Not In Its Discoveries, But In How Those Discoveries Are Applied To Reduce Inequity.

In The Same Way That When The Car Got Going, People Thought It Would Be An Electric Car, People Thought It Would Be A Steam Car.

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

I Admire Leaders In Science, People Who Really Figure Things Out Like Richard Fineman Or People Who Work On Vaccines, Tons Of People Working On [the] Hiv Vaccine. There's Leaders In Business, People Like Warren Buffett, Who've Got A Certain Approach They Take That Are Pretty Amazing. There [are] Product Innovators Like Steve Jobs Was, Where He Gets Behind A Concept And Does A Fantastic Job.

The Obvious Mathematical Breakthrough Would Be Development Of An Easy Way To Factor Large Prime Numbers.

Kids Are Taking Pcs And The Internet To New Heights. They're The Ones That Are Designing The Cutting-edge Web Sites.

The Advance Of Technology Is Based On Making It Fit In So That You Don't Really Even Notice It, So It's Part Of Everyday Life.

You Can Be A Business Thinker.

Vaccination Is One Of The Easiest Things On The Way To Development. It's Much Easier Than Roads And A Great Education System. It's Very Basic. It's One Of The First Things You Want To Get Right.

I Really Do Think Cancer Will Largely Be A Solved Problem. I Think Most Of The Infectious Diseases Like Malaria - Our Foundation Is Very Involved - Once We're Finishing Polio Eradication, Then Starting Up This Malaria Eradication, And Getting That Done As Fast As We Can.

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.

Once You Embrace Unpleasant News, Not As A Negative But As Evidence Of A Need For Change, You Aren't Defeated By It. You're Learning From It.

If You’re A Person Struggling To Eat And Stay Healthy You Might Have Heard About Michael Jordan Or Muhammad Ali, But You’ll Never Have Heard Of Bill Gates.

I Think Any Statement About Stock Prices Is Always Suspect Unless It's Made By Warren Buffett.

If You Want To Build A Great Company, Get The Hell Out Of Silicon Valley.

Haiti Should Remind Us All That There Is An Immediate Need To Invest In And Promote Long-term Development Projects That Are Sustainable, Scalable, And Proven To Work.

You Know Capitalism Is This Wonderful Thing That Motivates People, It Causes Wonderful Inventions To Be Done. But In This Area Of Diseases Of The World At Large, It's Really Let Us Down.

[aids ] Is Not A Short-term Emergency But It Is Something That, Just Like Smallpox Was Many Decades Ago, We Should Aim For Complete Eradication.

During The Past Two Centuries, Innovation Has More Than Doubled Our Life Span And Given Us Cheap Energy And More Food. If We Project What The World Will Be Like 10 Years From Now Without Continuing Innovation In Health, Energy Or Food, The Picture Is Dark.

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

My Experience Of Malaria Was Just Taking Anti-malarials, Which Give You Strange Dreams, Because I Don't Want To Get Malaria.

The Outside Perception And Inside Perception Of Microsoft Are So Different. The View Of Microsoft Inside Microsoft Is Always Kind Of An Underdog Thing.

Well-spent Aid Money Is Saving Lives For A Few Thousand Dollars Per Life Saved.

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.

Skype Actually Does Get A Fair Bit Of Revenue.

When I Say "miracle" I Mean A Kind Of Thing Like A Computer On A Chip, Or The Internet, Or The Cellphone, That Are Really Quite Miraculous. Most People Would Not Have Predicted Them, And Their Effect Has Been Very, Very Dramatic.

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

Maintaining A Consistent Platform Also Helps Improve Product Support - A Significant Problem In The Software Industry.

The Information Highway Will Transform Our Culture As Dramatically As Gutenberg's Press Did The Middle Ages.

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.

Some People, Through Luck And Skill, End Up With A Lot Of Assets. If You're Good At Kicking A Ball, Writing Software, Investing In Stocks, It Pays Extremely Well.

Taxes Are An Investment In America.

I Don't Think There Is Any Philosophy That Suggests Having Polio Is A Good Thing.

To Win Big, You Sometimes Have To Take Big Risks.

Countries Which Receive Aid Do Graduate. Within A Generation, Korea Went From Being A Big Recipient To Being A Big Aid Donor. China Used To Get Quite A Bit Of Aid; Now It's Aid-neutral.

Of My Mental Cycles, I Devote Maybe 10 Percent To Business Thinking. Business Isn't That Complicated. I Wouldn't Want To Put It On My Business Card.

Apple Has Always Leveraged Technologies That The Pc Industry Has Driven To Critical Mass - The Bus Structures, The Graphics Cards, The Peripherals, The Connection Networks, Things Like That - So They're Kind Of In The Pc Ecosystem And Kind Of Not.

Ninety Percent Of The Cases Of Polio Are In Security-vulnerable Areas.

The U.s. And Canada Are Two Generous Governments And We Reach Out And Partner With Anyone Who Believes In Foreign Aid.

In The Philanthropy Game, You're Going For Different Outcomes: Saving Childhood Lives, Having Kids Grow Up - Because They Don't Have Malnutrition Or Disease - That They Achieve Their Full Potential. We Take For Warren [buffett] Things That, Because He's Very Intelligent About The World But Doesn't Get To Go Out In Africa And See What We See, We've Taken And Say To Him Where We Stand And It's Basically A Very Positive Report That His Gift Has Made A Phenomenal Difference.

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.

The Most Important Thing Was The Creation Of A... A Standard, Where Hundreds Of Companies Build Hardware That Can All Run The Same Software.

When You Have Money In Hand,only You Forget Who Are You .but When You Do Not Have Any Money In Your Hand,the Whole World Forget Who You Are.it's Life.

All Lives Have Equal Value. And So You Say, 'why Do Poor Children Die When Other Children Don't? Why Do Some People Have Enough Nutrition Or Reasonable Toilets And Other People Don't?' So Those Basic Needs That, Through Innovation, Actually It's Very Affordable To Bring Them...to Everyone.

We Paired This Announcement Of The R&d [commitment] With The So-called Breakthrough Energy Coalition, Which Is 27 [major Investors] Saying, "hey, We'll Put Significant Money Into [energy Innovations] When They're Ready To Spin Out Probably Into Startup Companies."

There Are People Who Don't Like Capitalism, And People Who Don't Like Pcs. But There's No-one Who Likes The Pc Who Doesn't Like Microsoft.

My Job Is About The Most Fun Thing I Do, But I Have A Broad Set Of Interests, Going Places, Reading Things, Doing Things.

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.

Before You Were Born, Your Parents Weren't As Boring As They Are Now. They Got That Way From Paying Your Bills, Cleaning Your Clothes And Listening To You Talk About How Cool You Thought You Were. So Before You Save The Rain Forest From The Parasites Of Your Parent's Generation, Try Delousing The Closet In Your Own Room.

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.

Strategically, A Major Function Of The Ceo Is To Look For Bad News And Encourage The Organization To Respond To It. Employees Must Be Encouraged To Share Bad News As Much As Good News.

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.

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.

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.

Innovation Is Often The Hidden Thing, Because We Can't Put Numbers To It. And Yet It's The Thing That Defines The Way We Live, The Things We'd Like To Have For Everyone Whether It's Health Or Education.

If You Have 50 Different Plug Types, Appliances Wouldn't Be Available And Would Be Very Expensive. But Once An Electric Outlet Becomes Standardized, Many Companies Can Design Appliances, And Competition Ensues, Creating Variety And Better Prices For Consumers.

When Ford Sells A Car, A Dealer Isn't Allowed To Take Out The Engine And Put A Different One In. When A Newsstand Sells The Washington Post, No One Can Go To The Newsstand And Pay Them To Rip Out The Classified Section And Put Their Own Classified Section In - If They Could, They Would Do So.

Creating A Piece Of Software Is Always Complicated Because You're Doing Something New. If You Just Wanted Something That Had Been Done Before You'd Just Use That Old Piece Of Software. So There Are No Repetitive Tasks.

If You're Taking Care Of Your Family And Society And Are Comfortable You Can Start To Think About Helping Those Most In Need Globally. That's How We Became Engaged In Those Things.

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.

The Microprocessor Is A Miracle.

Perhaps I Should Be Flattered That Somebody Imagines The Name Is Worth So Much, Especially Since My Parents Gave Me The Same Name 42 Years Ago For Free.

As We Get Robots Becoming More Sophisticated, I Think We Should Worry Sooner Rather Than Later On How Much They Could Take Over, But I Think It'll Mostly Be A Positive Thing. In Terms Of Deadlines It Won't Be Any Worse Than Nuclear Weapons.

When You Have A Product That Has Zero Sales, It Is Easy For People To Say Whatever They Want About It And Almost Fantasize About It.

The Tablet Is Not Mainstream. Reading Off The Screen Is Not Mainstream.

Looking At These Issues As A Businessman, I Believe That Investing In The World's Poorest People Is The Smartest Way That Our Government Spends Money.

So Not Only Are We Saving Lives Now, We're Creating The Incentive For The Breakthroughs That Over The Next Generation Will Mean We Can Take Aids, Malaria And Tb And Bring Those Numbers Dramatically Down.

Like Almost Everyone Who Uses E-mail, I Receive A Ton Of Spam Every Day. Much Of It Offers To Help Me Get Out Of Debt Or Get Rich Quick. It Would Be Funny If It Weren't So Irritating.

In My View, Investing In Public Libraries Is An Investment In The Nation's Future.

My Tax Return In The United States Has To Be Kept On A Special Computer Because Their Normal Computers Can't Deal With The Numbers. So I Am Constantly Getting These Notices Telling Me I Haven't Paid Something When Really It Is Just On The Wrong Computer.

When You Revolutionize Education, You're Taking The Very Mechanism Of How People Be Smarter And Do New Things, And You're Priming The Pump For So Many Incredible Things.

I Am Not In Competition With Anyone But Myself. My Goal Is To Improve Myself Continuously.

The Global Fund Is A Central Player In The Progress Being Achieved On Hiv, Tb And Malaria. It Channels Resources To Help Countries Fight These Diseases. I Believe In Its Impact Because I Have Seen It Firsthand.

I Considered Law And Math. My Dad Was A Lawyer. I Think Though I Would Have Ended Up In Physics If I Didn't End Up In Computer Science.

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.

Great Organizations Demand A High Level Of Commitment By The People Involved.

K To 12 Is Partly About Babysitting The Kids So The Parents Can Do Other Things.

Music, Even With These Dial-up Connections You Have To The Internet, Is Very Practical To Download.

Finally, Assuming That Many Of Those Are Fulfilled, Which Won't Be Easy In Tight Budget Times, We're Taking The Supply Side At The Basic Research Level, Because That's Where Government Is Absolutely Fundamental.

I Think There Will Be Pcs At Every Price Point.

Software Will Get To Be Somewhat More Mature, Ah, But It Will Never Be As Predictable As Most Areas Of Engineering.

Bangladesh Is Largely A River Delta, And The Rising Sea Level Means That When Storms Come In, The Human Sanitation Is Backing Up, The Ability To Farm.

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.

Of All The Statistics In Health, Death Is The Easiest, Because You Can Go Out And Ask People, "hey, Have You Had Any Children Who Died, Did Your Siblings Have Any Children Who Died?" People Don't Forget That.

Humanity’s Greatest Advances Are Not In Its Discoveries – But In How Those Discoveries Are Applied To Reduce Inequity.

I Have Drifted Away From Thinking About These Philanthropic Things. And It Was Only As The Wealth Got Large Enough And Melinda And I Had Talked About The View That Wealth Wasn't Something That Would Be Good To Just Pass To The Children.

In Almost Every Job Now, People Use Software And Work With Information To Enable Their Organization To Operate More Effectively.

Since When Has The World Of Computer Software Design Been About What People Want? This Is A Simple Question Of Evolution. The Day Is Quickly Coming When Every Knee Will Bow Down To A Silicon Fist, And You Will All Beg Your Binary Gods For Mercy.

Rich Countries Can Afford To Overpay For Things.

The Us In Some Ways Has Been The Best. Who Figured Out Shale Gas? Although That Wasn't A Good Thing [for Co2 Levels], It Was Very Innovative. It's Led To Low-cost Energy. Who Figured Out Nuclear Power? Largely The United States. Once You Get Past The Steam Engine, Which Is Mostly British, Then The Us Has Been At The Center Of Most Of The Energy Things That Have Happened.

Instead Of Buying Airplanes And Playing Around Like Some Of Our Competitors, We've Rolled Almost Everything Back To The Company.

The Government Is There Day In And Day Out, If You Want All Kids To Have Education, If You Want To Run Courts, If You Want To Have An Army, If You Want To Have Roads, You've Got To Have The Taxation System That Funds Everything That You Expect.

The Scientific Understanding Of Some Of These [childhood] Diseases Is Advancing Quite Rapidly. There's Some Things Like Premature Birth Or Nutrition, First Day Deaths That We Need A Lot More Insights So That We Can Build The Tools To Solve Those Problems.

Nuclear Energy, In Terms Of An Overall Safety Record, Is Better Than Other Energy.

Learn From Your Unhappy Customers.

This Antitrust Thing Will Blow Over.

We Will Never Make A 32-bit Operating System.

Operating Systems

I Was Announcing To The Public, In 2006, That I'd Be Leaving Microsoft In A Couple Of Years And Focusing Full-time On The Foundation. That Was The Time At Which We Went Back To New York And Warren [buffett] Announced These Gifts To A Number Of Foundations, With A Very High Percentage Of It Going To Us And Basically Doubling Our Capacity.

There's No Magic Line Between An Application And An Operating System That Some Bureaucrat In Washington Should Draw.

If You Are Born Poor Its Not Your Mistake, But If You Die Poor Its Your Mistake.

In The Long Run, Your Human Capital Is Your Main Base Of Competition. Your Leading Indicator Of Where You're Going To Be 20 Years From Now Is How Well You're Doing In Your Education System.

The Human Body Is The Most Complex System Ever Created. The More We Learn About It, The More Appreciation We Have About What A Rich System It Is.

If Success Corrupts, I'm Probably Pretty Corrupted By Now.

If You Say To People That There's Less Violence Today Than In The Past, They Would Be Stunned To Hear That. But It's The Truth, Even Though We Have Awful Things Happening In Syria Or Sudan.

Computers Are Great Because When You're Working With Them You Get Immediate Results That Let You Know If Your Program Works. It's Feedback You Don't Get From Many Other Things.

If Empathy Channels Our Optimism, We Will See The Empathy And The Diseases And The Poor School. We Will Answer With Our Innovations And We Will Surprise The Pessimists.

If You Rely Too Much On The People In Other Countries And Other Companies, In A Sense That's Your Brain And You Are Outsourcing Your Brain.

I Am Surprised That In Various Countries, Whether It's The U.k. Or The U.s., You See Isolationist Tendencies That Would Tend To Work Against The Co-operation, Whether It's Climate Change, Immigration, Innovation, Helping The Very Poorest. Those Are Things Where You Want To Think Across Country Boundaries And See A Win-win-type Solution.

People Don't Want Lots And Lots Of Single Purpose Devices. They Do Not Want To Have To Learn How To Set Up Something For Photos, Another Thing For Music, Another Thing For Video.

In Programming When You're Making A Change You Have To Know All The Affected Places, And You Have To Be Able To Model In Your Head What The Performance Impact Will Be.

There Is A Difference Between What Technology Enables And What Historical Business Practices Enable.

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.

For All These Infectious Diseases, The Goal Is To Eventually Get Rid Of Them. And To Do That We Need To Invent New Tools, But Nobody Was Doing That Because There Was No Money To Buy On Behalf Of The Poorest, Even The Existing Tools.

'i Don't Know' Has Become 'i Don't Know Yet'.

Windows 2000 Already Contains Features Such As The Human Discipline Component, Where The Pc Can Send An Electric Shock Through The Keyboard If The Human Does Something That Does Not Please Windows.

The Computer Was Born To Solve Problems That Did Not Exist Before.

In Order To Deal With All The Medical Cost Demands And Other Challenges In The U.s., As We Look To Raise That Revenue, The Rich Will Have To Pay Slightly More. That's Quite Clear.

If Gm Had Kept Up With Technology Like The Computer Industry Has, We Would All Be Driving $25 Cars That Got 1,000 Mpg.

If You Believe That Every Life Has Equal Value, It’s Revolting To Learn That Some Lives Are Seen As Worth Saving And Others Are Not. We Said To Ourselves: “this Can’t Be True. But If It Is True, It Deserves To Be The Priority Of Our Giving.”

Good Developers Like Seeing Their Products Sell In Large Quantities. They Enjoy The Competition Of Doing A Better Job Than The Other Company, Especially If The Other Company Has More People On The Project And They're Entrenched And People Are Saying That We Don't Have A Chance Of Getting In There And... And Doing Well.

People Who Feel The World Is Tilted Against Them Will Spawn The Kind Of Hatred That Is Very Dangerous For All Of Us. I Think It's A Healthy Sign That There Are Demonstrators In The Streets. They Are Raising The Question Of 'is The Rich World Giving Back Enough?'

Success Is A Lousy Teacher.

If I Was Down To The Last Dollar Of My Marketing Budget I'd Spend It On Pr!

The Information Society Should Serve All Of Its Citizens, Not Only The Technically Sophisticated And Economically Privileged.

A Lot Of People Assume That Creating Software Is Purely A Solitary Activity Where You Sit In An Office With The Door Closed All Day And Write Lots Of Code.

Now, If You're Rich, You Can Spend A Lot Of Money, Netherlands-style, And Reduce That. But Bangladesh Or Parts Of India, Like Calcutta, They Just Simply Won't Be Able To Afford That Kind Of Protection.

The Vision Is Really About Empowering Workers, Giving Them All The

In A System Of Capitalism, As People's Wealth Rises, The Financial Incentive To Serve Them Rises. As Their Wealth Falls, The Financial Incentive To Serve Them Falls, Until It Becomes Zero. We Have To Find A Way To Make The Aspects Of Capitalism That Serve Wealthier People Serve Poorer People As Well.

We Believe Unbelievable Progress Can Be Made, In Both Inventing New Vaccines And Making Sure They Get Out To All The Children Who Need Them.

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.

The Trouble With Energy Farming Is That The Energy Isn't Always Where You Want To Use It, And It Isn't Always When You Want To Use It.

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.

You Have The Refugee Crisis Triggered By Syria. That's Got A Lot Of Costs Associated With It. Domestically, Budgets Are Incredibly Tight Because The Economy's Not Generating The Growth That Makes For Easy Trade-offs.

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

U.k. Companies Are In Very International And Very Competitive Markets. If You Look At Pc Penetration In The U.k., It Is Very Similar To The United States Market.

So On The Demand Side [for Energy], There Have Been A Variety Of Policies That Globally Have Been Way Over $50 Billion A Year Of Tax Credits, Raising The Price Of Electricity Through Things Like Renewable Portfolio Standards, So The Total Amount Of Money That's Gone Into Sending A Price Signal To Push Up Demand Versus What Would Happen Without It Has Been Gigantic.

I Want To Make Clear That We Respect The Role Of Government In Our Legal Andeconomic System.

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.

Playing Bridge Is A Pretty Old Fashioned Thing In A Way That I Really Like. I Was Watching My Daughter Ride Horses This Weekend And That Is Also A Bit Old Fashioned But Fun. I Do The Dishes Every Night - Other People Volunteer But I Like The Way I Do It.

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.

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

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.

I'm Certainly Well Taken Care Of In Terms Of Food And Clothes.

I Don't Believe In Creating Dynastic Wealth. I Don't Really Believe That In A Society That Aspires To Be Meritocratic And That Believes In Equality Of Opportunity - My Kids Have Had Advantage Over 99 Percent Of The Kids In The Country.

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

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

Setting Clear Goals And Finding Measures That Will Mark Progress Toward Them Can Improve The Human Condition.

Now You Have To Be A Collaborator And You Have To Bring On Governments And Convince People.

[smart] Is An Elusive Concept. There's A Certain Sharpness, An Ability To Absorb New Facts. To Ask An Insightful Question. To Relate To Domains That May Not Seem Connected At First. A Certain Creativity That Allows People To Be Effective.

A Lot Of The Things That Will Really Improve The World Fortunately Aren't Dependent On Washington Doing Something Different.

Everything On The Internet Is Real God Damn It!

At The End Of The Day, Natural-gas Peakers Sit Back There And Get Financed So That The Midwest Corridor Can Have A Huge [period] Of Four To Five Days Of No Wind. The Peakers Are Running Big Time To Make That Up, Because That Is The Swing Piece That Can Always Be Turned On.

Hopefully, Whether It's Energy Or Child Vaccines, The Case Of The Many Benefits Helping Countries So That They Are Stable, So These Refugee Problems That Have Been Troubling For Europe - A Little Less So For The U.s. But, Even So, A Lot Of Controversy There - These Things Are Why The Future's Going To Be Better Than The Past. People Really Do Look To The United States, So We'll Be There Making The Case.

Money Has Always Been In Politics. And I'm Not Sure You'd Want Money To Be Completely Out Of Politics.

I'm Quite Worried About The Fiscal Imbalances That We've Got And What That Might Mean In Terms Of Financial Crisis Ahead.

Does The E-mail Say It's About 'enlargement' - That Might Be Spam.

If You're A Guest [at My $113 Million House], You'll Be Able To Call Up On Screens Throughout The House Almost Any Image You Like - Presidential Portraits, Reproductions Of High Renaissance Paintings, Pictures Of Sunsets, Airplanes, Skiers In The Andes, A Rare French Stamp, The Beatles In 1965.

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.

50 Years From Now We Won't Need As Much Human Labour To Do What Manual Workers Do, So We Should Be Able To Take That Extra Productivity And Put It To Better Use.

It's An Experiment, And It's Probably Good To Have A Couple States Try It Out To See Before You Make That National Policy.

If You're Smart, You Often Want A Feedback Loop So You Know If What You've Done Is... Is Right.

Don’t Tax My Income, Tax My Consumption.

When Paul Allen And I Started Microsoft Over 30 Years Ago, We Had Big Dreams About Software. We Had Dreams About The Impact It Could Have.

On My Desk I Have Three Screens, Synchronized To Form A Single Desktop. I Can Drag Items From One Screen To The Next. Once You Have That Large Display Area, You'll Never Go Back, Because It Has A Direct Impact On Productivity.

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

Microsoft Has Long Hired Based On Iq And "intellectual Bandwidth."

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

Unfortunately, In Rich-world Health, Innovation Is Both Your Friend And Your Enemy. Innovation Is Inventing Organ Replacement, Joint Replacement. We're Inventing Ways Of Doing New Things That Cost $300,000 And Take People In Their 70s And, On Average, Give Them An Extra, Say, Two Or Three Years Of Life. And Then You Have To Say, Given Finite Resources, Should We Fire Two Or Three Teachers To Do This Operation?

Windows 95 Was A Nice Milestone.

Humanity’s Greatest Advances Are Not In Its Discoveries – But In How Those Discoveries Are Applied To Reduce Inequity. Whether Through Democracy, Strong Public Education, Quality Health Care, Or Broad Economic Opportunity – Reducing Inequity Is The Highest Human Achievement.

It Is Hard To Sell Congress And The American People On Foreign Aid. Is It Harder To Do That Than It Is To Sell Billionaires On The Idea That They Should Give All Their Money Away.

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.

Does The Universe Exist Only For Me? It's Possible. If So, It's Sure Going Well For Me, I Must Admit.

Optimistic Life

That's The Part Where The Governments Have A Unique Role, And Then When It Progresses Well Enough, Then Existing Companies Or New Startup Companies Should Take It. In The $3 Trillion A Year Energy Market, The Rewards Will Be Quite Fantastic.

Money Has No Utility To Me Beyond A Certain Point.

We Need To Look At Less Obvious Paths, Things Like The Wind In The Jet Stream, Which Is Very High Up. The Material Science Of What Type Of Kite String You Would Need To Connect Up To That. That's Still At The Basic Research Level.

By Almost Any Measure, The World Is Better Than It Has Ever Been. People Are Living Longer, Healthier Lives. Many Nations That Were Aid Recipients Are Now Self-sufficient. You Might Think That Such Striking Progress Would Be Widely Celebrated, But In Fact, Melinda And I Are Struck By How Many People Think The World Is Getting Worse. The Belief That The World Can’t Solve Extreme Poverty And Disease Isn’t Just Mistaken. It Is Harmful. That’s Why In This Year’s Letter We Take Apart Some Of The Myths That Slow Down The Work. The Next Time You Hear These Myths, We Hope You Will Do The Same.

Microsoft's Philosophy Is To 'do Things Better.' And Vista Has Given Us Lots Of Opportunity To Do That.

In Software You Can't Really Add People And Expect To Get More Done, Because Their Ability To Understand The Program And What's Going On It Would Require So Much Investment And All Their Work Would Require So Much Review That You'd Be More Likely To Slow Things Down.

There Are Ecosystems Like Coral Reefs [at Risk] Through Ocean Acidification. Those Are Valuable Things That We Should Protect.

Your School May Have Done Away With Winners And Losers, But Life Has Not. In Some Schools They Have Abolished Failing Grades And They'll Give You As Many Times As You Want To Get The Right Answer. This Doesn't Bear The Slightest Resemblance To Anything In Real Life.

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.

A Company's Ability To Respond To An Unplanned Event, Good Or Bad Is A Prime Indicator Of Its Ability To Compete.

The People Who Resist Change Will Be Confronted By The Growing Number Of People Who See That Better Ways Are Available; Thanks To Technology.

Analytical Software Enables You To Shift Human Resources From Rote Data Collection To Value-added Customer Service And Support Where The Human Touch Makes A Profound Difference.

Data Collection

Sometimes We Do Get Taken By Surprise. For Example, When The Internet Came Along, We Had It As A Fifth Or Sixth Priority.

I Have A Company That Is Not Microsoft, Called Corbis. Corbis Is The Operation That Merged With Bettman Archives. It Has Nothing To Do With Microsoft. It Was Intentionally Done Outside Of Microsoft Because Microsoft Isn't Interested.

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.

Most Of Our Competitors Were One-product Wonders... They Would Do Their One Product, But Never Get Their Engineering Sorted Out.

The Flatter The Corporate Hierarchy, The More Likely It Is That Employees Will Communicate Bad News And Act Upon It.

Considering Their Impact, You Might Expect Mosquitoes To Get More Attention Than They Do. Sharks Kill Fewer Than A Dozen People Every Year, And In The U.s. They Get A Week Dedicated To Them On Tv Every Year.

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