I work at a non-profit that gets Gates money (though I am about as far down the food chain as you can be and still get paid). Love or hate Microsoft (I do a little of both) the things the Gates foundation are doing are pretty amazing... there is a combination of resources and vision that is unfortunately all too rare.
In the end I think Bill will be remembered in a way that Alfred Nobel is remembered... few people know that he invented dynamite but everyone knows about the Nobel Prize. In a similar fashion people in a hundred years will remember Gates for the good works in education, public health etc. and not for Windows. Heck, we'll all be using Linux by then anyway (the year of the Linux desktop will get here eventually).
One of the greatest achievements of Polish science was the K-202 minicomputer. The device was designed by Karpinski in the years 1970-73. K-202 surpassed nearly 100-fold contemporary computers, worked at a rate of 1 million operations per second, or faster than personal computers marketed a decade later. Minicomputer was equipped with a permanent memory, as well as operational, which could be extended. K-202 was the most advanced equipment in those days, his only match the American and New Super Modular One from England. Unfortunately, despite the formation of the Anglo-Polish company which deal with production equipment, was founded only 30 copies of K-202.
Original in Polish.
Good of you to bring up the Miller-Urey experiments. Those experiments and subsequent ones with different atmospheric conditions have demonstrated how easy it is to create complex organic molecules under fairly common conditions (common in a cosmic sense).
Uracil is not an amino acid, it is a pyrimidine. Very necessary for RNA and life, but not an amino acid.
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
