This is actually quite interesting. With China putting a lot of prestige in being "better than the west", they may actually be able to pull of something good with this one (and hopefully, later missions). There is nothing like a bit of competition to get the party started. Their Changâ(TM)e 1 probe was a sucess, so why not this one ? they have at least proved themselves capable of space exploration, and the more space exploration, the better!

They could consider following the same model the Norwegian government used when oil was discovered in the sea outside Norway; create a lithium fund managed by the government, paid by taxes and exploration fees from the companies wanting to mine the lithium. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Oil_Fund. It worked for Norway, it might work for Bolivia too.

tried with IE now, it installs some kind of activex download manager. That was probably the reason Firefox couldn't handle it.

strange. This is on an almost clean windows XP install. Pushing the "Download now" button produces some loading and activity on the status bar, then stops and nothing happens.

It would be ironic if it was because of load problems on the servers, but i doubt it on a saturday night (and everything else is snappy on the site)

"Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 support the Windows 7 Beta download experience. "

It's even an experience just to download it, one that my Firefox seems not to enjoy.

I really hope this is better than vista. With XP gone from retail, this will probably be the OS installed and upgraded to on the few windows computers I manage.