I switched to the British practice (punctuation outside quotes) years ago, and no one has ever complained. I have vague hopes that in another couple of hundred years we'll have solved that problem.
I don't know how much rice you eat, but my experience has been that 1 rice cup cooks enough rice for a modest serving for 2 adults - in our household at least.
The general idea is that a cup of rice is the main portion of the meal, and the rest of the meal is add ons (mostly veggies with a bit of meat). If the rice is just a side to the entree, then yeah, you're going to be eating less of it.
That's the idea but as someone who have been in Asia all my life rarely do people eat the entire cup per meal. 0.5-0.7 cup per person is more common this days for standard meal.
In that case I would suggest that Olive Garden Canada didn't "go out of business" (i.e. naturally through business dying off), but was killed intentionally.
It didn't die as a result of failure on its own part.
There is also a difference between a restaurant and a chain of restaurants - in any case the US component survived, so I would say that the (overall) business didn't "die off".
"The mining of rare-earth minerals was at one time dominated by the United States. The People's Republic of China has since come to dominate the market."
If it'd be pure economics, then yes. But Japan and China are not necessary the best friends, so there is a strong geopolitical factor at play. China has the (quasi) monopoly and China with strategic embargo/tariffs/creative strings attached could easily grind the tech manufacturing in Japan to halt, impacting it's economy severely. This is not theoretical, they already impacted Japanese economics this way.
So now Japanese politics has a strong incentive to change the situation, creating a second source. It might be more expensive as long as the supply lines are still open, but it's a strong hedge against politically motivated supply line disruptions.
Simply said, exploiting these deposits even if they are more expensive than the market price can be seen as an insurance. It also strengthens Japan's negotiating position when their industry can't be held hostage so easily.
ps.: Also keep in mind, that it takes considerable time (years) to develop a mining and refining operation, so they can't just wait until a disruption occurs before starting with the mining.
Rather than the abstract, the legality of a patent is based primarily on the claims. That's what you should be looking at to see if there's prior art. Here's claim 1:
1. A virtual currency transaction system, comprising: a non-transitory memory; and one or more hardware processors coupled to the non-transitory memory and configured to read instructions from the non-transitory memory to cause the system to perform operations comprising: identifying a first user primary wallet that is associated with a virtual currency and that includes a first user primary wallet private key; creating a plurality of first user secondary wallets that each include a respective first user secondary wallet private key; performing a respective virtual currency transaction using the first user primary wallet private key to transfer an association of predefined amounts of the virtual currency from the first user primary wallet to each of the plurality of first user secondary wallets such that at least two of the plurality of first user secondary wallets are associated with different predefined amounts of the virtual currency; receiving, subsequent to associating the predefined amounts of the virtual currency with each of the plurality of first user secondary wallets, an instruction to transfer a payment amount to a second user; and allocating a subset of the first user secondary wallet private keys to the second user, wherein the subset of the first user secondary wallet private keys are included in respective first user secondary wallets that are associated with predefined amounts of the virtual currency that equal the payment amount.
You're on the money, but just a bit out of date. We have a (very) new far-right party called the Australian Conservatives now. The creation of a former Liberal party senator.
> The Liberal party is the conservative party. No Conservative party in Australia AFAIK.
You a little behind the times. That was true many years ago, in the Fraser years. Now it's "The The Liberal party is the conservative party. There is currently no 'John Stuart Mill' liberal party in Australia".
1. Please enter the text “foo bar.”
and
2. Please enter the text “foo bar”.
The first is normal American practice, but suggests incorrectly that the period (.) should be input.
Technical writing should be accurate - meaning all quotes should be a true representation that is not subject to style whimsy.