Yes, to make the credulous wannabe settler want to go there. I was not much greener when it was discovered than now.

The Peak Earth is already there. China's production and export quotas are lower and lower, the Diaoyu incident with Japan made other countries realize they do not want to depend of Chine for their rare earths supply, so everyone is trying to reopen their mines. It is however a complex process and reopen an old mine (US, Australia, South Africa) will take at least 2 or 3 years. Whole new projects (Africa, Vietnam, Korea) will probably take more, around 4 or 5 years.

This is why China is acting fast on this, they have a two or three years window where they want to maximize their advantage: it can be used to drive prices higher and make money, as a diplomatic tool with Japan, but more importantly to make manufacturers move to Chine for their high-tech products and export the high value added end product instead of the raw rare earth. Oh, and if possible, gain access to the technology ...

Actions consisting mostly of denying.

China is not using the Internet you built, everyone is using an Internet where both the US and China are present. To remove that is the shortest path to an open war as Internet is the best way for each country to understand each other and communicate with each other. There is still the problem of language, which means most Chinese netizens never go to foreign websites anyway, but most of the communications between foreigners and Chinese are on-line nowadays.

Do you really want to stop all economic trade ? All cultural exchanges ? Do you want most foreigners to leave China ?

Read again : The labels take 90%, the artist keeps 10%.

English as a second language is good enough to do business, maybe not to write articles and discuss philosophy.

See, English is not my mother tongue (bonus point if you can guess from my writing where I come from). I have a decent English, can read without any problem, but it is much more cumbersome and slow for me to write in English than in my native language. Don't think that the Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Chinese contributors to Wikipedia would contribute the same amount if they had to write in English.

It would also be terribly unfair to them. Have you ever been to a meeting with native speakers and non-native speakers ? It is obvious that they do not have the same mastery of the language and very often it translates in self-confidence and ability to convince. OK, I live in China, when the phenomenon is especially clear, but it is true to some extend for everyone.

Oh, and which language would that be ? You are not supposing that everyone has English as a mother tongue, are you ? Esperanto maybe ?

On the contrary, Wikipedia can now double as a wonderful dictionary for some specialized vocabulary (math notions, proper nouns, etc.) by looking at the interwiki links.

Two things :
* First it is the 12th 5 years plan.
* More importantly, the proposed reduction of CO2 emission is *per unit of GDP*, so the absolute value should continue to rise, as the GDP growth should be more than enough to offset the higher relative efficiency.

Just make your debt super top secret, then make Wikileaks leak it !

I will give you a hint, this is not about sending seals to kill a guy in the middle of the night. Justice implies presumption of innocence, trial and conviction, even for the Big Bad Guy.

Genetic algorithms are an optimisation algorithm, but what do you want to optimise exactly ? What are your individuals here ?

The idea of using a large collection of solved problem to check and improve the accuracy of the method looks more like neural network to me. Indeed, this seems to be a common method for OCR. For example : http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/simple_ocr.aspx

What rank is China ? Is there anyone below ?

I would love to RTFA, but I can't access the report myself. They must have some technical difficulties in Beijing these days, because freedomhouse.org seems to be unavailable.

Zhucheng is the city where it was found.

Surnames in China are usually formed with a single vowel.

It's a pretty clean sunny day in Beijing, thank you very much.

Really, I know it is fashionable to bash Beijing for pollution around here, but it is not that bad. Try Linfen next time, you will be closer to the truth ...

It is infuriating because of the difference in output quality, not because Word is proprietary or whatever other reason. Can you guess how the first poster was able to know the article was typeset using Word ? The paragraphs of text are not justified, the 'fi' ligature are not made, formulas are awful, the link for figure 1 is separated from the picture by a page break, etc.

Actually, it is not actually Word's fault here, it is just a very badly typeset paper and one can do much better with Word.

I also didn't understand your remark about TeX types using Acrobat and CutePDF. You do know that TeX will already output a PDF without conversion step necessary, right ? Why would they want to generate a PDF ?