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With Polio, We've Gone Several Years With No Polio In All Of Africa, But Now With This We're Having To Go And Mop Up In That Whole Region, So It's A Bit Of A Setback For Polio. So In Parallel We Have To Go Back And Get Rid Of Those Cases.

-Bill Gates

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With Polio, We've Gone

Bill Gates

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With Polio, We've Gone Several Years With No Polio In All Of Africa, But Now With This We're Having To Go And Mop Up In That Whole Region, So It's A Bit Of A Setback For Polio. So In Parallel We Have To Go Back And Get Rid Of Those Cases.

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I Believe It’s Not Only Possible To Eradicate Malaria; I Believe It’s Necessary. Ultimately, The Cost Of Controlling It Endlessly Is Not Sustainable. The Only Way To Stop This Disease Is To End It Forever.

The Dreams Of The Past - Whether It Was Public Tv Being Rolled Into The Classroom To Teach Spanish, Or The Film Projectors Or The Videotapes Or The Computer-aided Instruction Drill Systems - The Hopes Have Been Dashed In Terms Of Technology Having Some Big Impact. The Foundation, I Think Can Play A Unique Role There. Now, Our Money Is More To The Teacher-effectiveness Thing, And Technology Is No. 2, But I'll Probably Spend More Money On The Technology Things.

It’s Useful To Compare Our Preparations For Epidemics With Our Preparations For War.

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.

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.

It's Pretty Amazing To Go From A World Where Computers Were Unheard Of And Very Complex To Where They're A Tool Of Everyday Life.

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The Internet? We Are Not Interested In It

Cutting Through Complexity To Find A Solution Runs Through Four Predictable Stages: Determine A Goal, Find The Highest-leverage Approach, Discover The Ideal Technology For That Approach, And In The Meantime, Make The Smartest Application Of The Technology That You Already Have - Whether It's Something Sophisticated, Like A Drug, Or Something Simpler, Like A Bednet.

Measles Will Always Show You If Someone Isn't Doing A Good Job On Vaccinations. Kids Will Start Dying Of Measles.

My Mom Was On The United Way Group That Decides How To Allocate The Money And Looks At All The Different Charities And Makes The Very Hard Decisions About Where That Pool Of Funds Is Going To Go.

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When I Was Young I Liked Taking Tests. I Happened To Be Good At It. Certain Subjects Came Easily, Like Math. All The Science Stuff. I Would Just Read The Textbooks In The First Few Days Of Class.

Philanthropy Is Fun And Fulfilling.

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Windows 95 Was A Nice Milestone.

We Need A Malaria Epidemic In The Blogging Community! Either That Or We Need People Who Have Seen The Malaria Epidemic To Start Blogging.

You Always Overestimate What You Can Get Done In A Year And Underestimate What You Can Get Done In 10 Years.

Started From The Chair Hop Now We Here.

Microsoft Went Into Orbit Because It Had A Booster Rocket Attached To It Called Ibm.

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

If You're Using First-class Land For Biofuels, Then You're Competing With The Growing Of Food. And So You're Actually Spiking Food Prices By Moving Energy Production Into Agriculture.

I Believe Os/2 Is Destined To Be The Most Important Operating System, And Possibly Program, Of All Time.

The Difference Between A Stranger Sending You A Message That You Might Be Interested In At A Very Low Volume Level, No Repetition, Just Sending It To Very Few People, And That Being Done As Spam - Those Things Get Close Enough That You Want To Be Careful Never To Filter Out Something That's Legitimate.

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

Learning To Write Programs Stretches Your Mind, And Helps You Think Better, Creates A Way Of Thinking About Things That I Think Is Helpful In All Domains.

There Certainly Is A Case To Be Made That Taxes Should Be More Progressive.

In Terms Of Doing Things I Take A Fairly Scientific Approach To Why Things Happen And How They Happen. I Don't Know If There's A God Or Not, But I Think Religious Principles Are Quite Valid.

I'm A Great Believer That Any Tool That Enhances Communication Has Profound Effects In Terms Of How People Can Learn From Each Other, And How They Can Achieve The Kind Of Freedoms That They're Interested In.

Exposure From A Young Age To The Realities Of The World Is A Super-big Thing.

Be Nice To Nerds, They'll Probably Be Your Boss One Day.

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There Won't Be Anything We Won't Say To People To Try And Convince Them That Our Way Is The Way To Go.

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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.

I've For Some Reason Or Other... Never Met Donald Trump.

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

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Know Your Numbers' Is A Fundamental Precept Of Business.

There Is No Doubt Pc Prices Will Be Coming Down.

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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.

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The Misconception That Aid Falls Straight Into The Hands Of Dictators Largely Stems From The Cold War Era.

Reward Worthy Failure - Experimentation.

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Today, You Always Know Whether You Are On The Internet Or On Your Pc's Hard Drive. Tomorrow, You Will Not Care And May Not Even Know.

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

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When You Develop Software, The People Who Write The Software, The Developers Are The Key Group But The Testers Also Play An Absolutely Critical Role. They're The Ones Who Ah, Write Thousands And Thousands Of Examples And Make Sure That It's Going To Work On All The Different Computers And Printers And The Different Amounts Of Memory Or Networks That The Software'11 Be Used In. That's A Very Hard Job.

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Rich Countries Can Afford To Overpay For Things.

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If You Withdraw The Incredible Focus On Polio, It Will Spread Back, And In Poor Countries You'll Get Something Like 100,000 Cases A Year. So By Being Very Intense And Getting The Cases Down To Zero, What You Do Is You Avoid All The Future Cases.

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

I Actually Thought That It Would Be A Little Confusing During The Same Period Of Your Life To Be In One Meeting When You're Trying To Make Money, And Then Go To Another Meeting Where You're Giving It Away. I Mean Is It Gonna Erode Your Ability, You Know, To Make Money? Are You Gonna Somehow Get Confused About What You're Trying To Do?

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Some People Read Off Of Their Palms And Pocket Pcs, But The Real Immersible Reading Experience Takes A Full-screen Device.

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.

According To Ethiopian Custom, Parents Wait To Name A Baby Because Children Often Die In The First Weeks Of Life.

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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.

At Some Point, That Risk-taking Private Capital Can Take Over, And Have Patents And Trade Secrets And Things That Let Them Lead The Way, Which Happened With The Steam Engine And Some Other Things, Although With Energy, The Time Of Adoption Is A Lot Longer Than It Is With, Say, It Products Or Even Medical Advances, Like Drugs And Vaccines.

It's Easier To Add Things On To A Pc Than It's Ever Been Before. It's One Click, And Boom, It Comes Down.

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.

(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.

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.

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We Have To Find A Way To Make The Aspects Of Capitalism That Serve Wealthier People Serve Poorer People As Well.

Investing For The Poor Requires Participation From The Entire Community.

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.

Is The Rich World Aware Of How Four Billion Of The Six Billion Live? If We Were Aware, We Would Want To Help Out, We'd Want To Get Involved.

Business Success

Self Improvement

Microsoft Is A Company That Manages Imagination.

Oh, I Think There Are A Lot Of People Who Would Be Buying And Selling Online Today That Go Up There And They Get The Information, But Then When It Comes Time To Type In Their Credit Card They Think Twice Because They're Not Sure About How That Might Get Out And What That Might Mean For Them.

The World Needs Banking But It Does Not Need Banks.

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.

Software Is Different Than Other Products Um, Partly Because It's, It's Not Physical And, And Partly Because Of Its Complexity. You Can Express In Software Millions Of Different Cases And Making Sure That You Handle All Of Them Correctly Is Extremely Difficult.

I Was Lucky To Be In The Right Place At The Right Time. But Many Others Were Also In The Same Place. The Difference Was That I Took Action.

The Most Important People Is To Pick People Who Like To Write Software And Who Are Good At... Good Developers Like Working With Each Other. And They... They Reinforce Each Other's Skills.

We Need To Cooperate Globally On Epidemic Preparedness And Prevention In The Same Way We Are Cooperating Globally To Stop People From Getting Nuclear Weapons.

Ridiculous Sums Of Money Can Be Confusing.

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.

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.

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.

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The World Is Progressing And Resources Are Becoming More Abundant. I'd Rather Go Into A Grocery Store Today Than A King's Banquet A Hundred Years Ago.

The Way To Be Successful In The Software World Is To Come Up With Breakthrough Software, And So Whether It's Microsoft Office Or Windows, Its Pushing That Forward. New Ideas, Surprising The Marketplace, So Good Engineering And Good Business Are One In The Same.

Aids Itself Is Subject To Incredible Stigma.

I Understand How Every Healthy Child, Every New Road, Puts A Country On A Better Path, But Instability And War Will Arise From Time To Time, And I'm Not An Expert On How You Get Out Of Those Things.

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.

If Somebody Is Working On A New Medicine, Computer Science Helps Us Model Those Things. We Have A Whole Group Here In Seattle Called The Institute For Disease Modelling That Is A Mix Of Computer Science And Math-type People, And The Progress We're Making In Polio Or Plans For Malaria Or Really Driven By Their Deep Insights.

Don't Wallow In Failure. Instead, Learn From It.

In The Us In The 1900's 60 % Of People Were Employed On The Farms. Today It's Less Than 1%. If You Told People Back Then That This Would Happen They Wouldn't Have Believed It. If You Told Them We Would Have Therapy, Massages And Spas That Played Important Parts In Our Lives They Would've Have Believed Us.

If You Give People Tools, And They Use Their Natural Abilities And Their Curiosity, They Will Develop Things In Ways That Will Surprise You Very Much Beyond What You Might Have Expected.

Leaders Need To Provide Strategy And Direction And To Give Employees Tools That Enable Them To Gather Information And Insight From Around The World. Leaders Shouldn't Try To Make Every Decision.

Software Suppliers Are Trying To Make Their Software Packages More 'user-friendly'... Their Best Approach So Far Has Been To Take All The Old Brochures And Stamp The Words 'user-friendly' On The Cover.

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.

Windows Is Probably The Most Important Product In The Entire Pc Industry. Everything We Do In Terms Of Supporting Touch, New Hardware, Accessibility Has Incredible Impact.

Life's Not Fair, Get Over It!

Common Core Is A Big Win For Education.

Government Investment Unlocks A Huge Amount Of Private Sector Activity, But The Basic Research That We Put Into It Work That Led To The Internet And Lots Of Great Companies And Jobs, The Basic Work We Put Into The Health Care Sector, Where It's Over $30 Billion A Year In R&d That Led The Biotech And Pharma Jobs. And It Creates Jobs And It Creates New Technologies That Will Be Productized. But The Government Has To Prime The Pump Here. The Basic Ideas, As In Those Other Industries, Start With Government Investment.

You’ve Got To Give Great Tools To Small Teams. Pick Good People, Use Small Teams And Give Them Great Tools So That They Are Very Productive In Terms Of What They Are Doing.

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

My Broad Sense Of This Is That Authors Like Smil Really Paint The Clear Picture, And Once You See That, It's Kind Of Oh, Of Course. That's Such A Primal Thing To All These Physical Services That We Take For Granted.

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

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

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

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.

I Think It's Fair To Say That Personal Computers Have Become The Most Empowering Tool We've Ever Created. They're Tools Of Communication, They're Tools Of Creativity, And They Can Be Shaped By Their User.

Robots Will Play An Important Role In Providing Physical Assistance And Even Companionship For The Elderly.

People Can Criticize Microsoft For Supporting This Tv Thing For The Past Eight Years, But It Is A Long-term Bet, There Is Not Any Other Software Business That Is As Dedicated To The Vision Of The Tv And The Pda [personal Digital Assistant] As We Are.

Investing In Innovation, Which Was My Broad Theme Talking To [warren Buffett ], That Included Health Vaccines, It Included Energy And Education.

Although I Don't Have A Prescription For What Others Should Do, I Know I Have Been Very Fortunate And Feel A Responsibility To Give Back To Society In A Very Significant Way.

Hey, Size Works Against Excellence.

Who Can Afford To Do Professional Work For Nothing? What Hobbyist Can Put Three Man-years Into Programming, Finding All Bugs, Documenting His Product, And Distributing It For Free?

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

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.

Nobody Believes In Completely Unadulterated Capitalism.

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.

With A Public Library Card In Your Hand, You Have Access To The Internet And A World Of Opportunities.

In The U.s., We Believe The Best Way To Improve Lives Is To Improve Public Education.

The Trick Generally Is To Break Programs Into Pieces And Have Those Pieces Be Individually Testable And So Then When You Move On To The Other Pieces You Treat It As A Black Box Knowing That It Either Works Or Doesn't Work.

I Have This Very Positive View Of The World Getting Better And Better. The List Of Things That Could Be Huge Setbacks Is Not Very Long: A Nuclear War, Climate Change And Epidemics.

Technology Must Be Implemented As Part Of A Thoughtful, Holistic Approach To Education Transformation That Includes Teacher Training, Relevant Curricula, Parental Involvement, And Programs For Children That Fill Unmet Needs For Basics Like Nutrition And Health Care.

I'd Be Happy If I Could Think That The Role Of The Library Was Sustained And Even Enhanced In The Age Of The Computer.

We [corbis] Make It So Easy To Call Up Images, Whether Art Or People Or Beaches Or Sunsets Or Nobel Prize Winners.

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.

Depending On How Quickly You Get Ocean Rise, You Have People Who Live In River Deltas [at Risk]. 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 Destructive-type Situations Like You Saw In New Orleans With Katrina. You're Increasing The Frequency Of That Stuff In Low-lying Areas Fairly Dramatically.

There's A True Schizophrenia Where If You Say To Voters, You Know, Do You Think The Federal Government Spends Too Much Money And They Should Spend Less, They Say Yeah, Absolutely. Then You Name Specific Things, Like Pell Grants For Students And They Say, No, Not That. How 'bout Nih, Medical Research Funding? Nah, You Really Shouldn't Cut That. And Pretty Soon You've Proved That What The American Public Is Against Is Arithmetic.

I Watched The Piles Of Feces Go Up The Conveyor Belt... They Made Their Way Through The Machine... A Few Minutes Later I Took A Long Taste Of The End Result: A Glass Of Delicious Drinking Water.

I'm Never Fully Satisfied With Any Microsoft Product.

I Was Lucky To Be Involved And Get To Contribute To Something That Was Important, Which Is Empowering People With Software.

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.

In Three Years, Every Product My Company Makes Will Be Obsolete. The Only Question Is Whether We Will Make Them Obsolete Or Somebody Else Will.

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

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

I Like The Idea Of Putting Your Christmas Wish List Up And Letting People Share It.

Christmas Wishes

Software Is The Magic Thing Whose Importance Only Goes Up Over Time.

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

This Social-networking Thing Takes You To Crazy Places.

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.

We're Only At The Beginning Of What We Have To Do Here.

Often You Just Have To Rely On Your Intuition.

One Of The Statistics That Always Amazes Me Is The Approval Of The Chinese Government, Not Elected, Is Over 80 Percent. The Approval Of The U.s. Government, Fully Elected, Is 19 Percent. Well, We Elected These People And They Didn't Elect Those People. Isn't It Supposed To Be Different? Aren't We Supposed To Like The People That We Elected?

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

Fortunately For India, It Has Got A Growing Economy. If It Is Doing The Right Things With Taxation And Focusing On The Right Areas For Human Development, It Is Going To Have No Problem, Over A Period Of Time, Taking Care Of Its Own Needs.

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.

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

What I Do Best Is Share My Enthusiasm.

Dos Is Ugly And Interferes With Users' Experience.

User Experience

Software Was The Key Element That Would Determine How Useable And How Broadly Applicable The Machine Was.

The Media Covers What’s New – And Millions Of People Dying Is Nothing New. So It Stays In The Background, Where It’s Easier To Ignore. But Even When We Do See It Or Read About It, It’s Difficult To Keep Our Eyes On The Problem. It’s Hard To Look At Suffering If The Situation Is So Complex That We Don’t Know How To Help. And So We Look Away.

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

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

With Polio, We've Gone Several Years With No Polio In All Of Africa, But Now With This We're Having To Go And Mop Up In That Whole Region, So It's A Bit Of A Setback For Polio. So In Parallel We Have To Go Back And Get Rid Of Those Cases.

You Have To Be Willing To See That Sometimes The Governments Of These Poor Countries Don't Come Through. You Have To Think About That As A Constraint. How Do You Help Them Be Better? How Do You Come Up With Things That Actually Work, Even In Those Tough Situations.

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.

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

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.

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Charles Bradlaugh

Robert E. Howard

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