In the rare event a borrower went under, his land collateral was as good as gold anyway since legions of land-use restrictions acted as virtual government price supports.
Investors view this sector as inherently low risk because of the virtual assurance of government bailout or government mediate restructuring in which shareholders gain disproportionate advantage.
Competing with the giants will be tough all around, as Ranbaxy emerges from its twin cocoon of government protection and virtual anonymity on the world stage.
The Chinese government has repeatedly curbed virtual currencies.
The government is also strengthening its virtual borders with plans to create a cyber-threat monitoring center.
At the other extreme, Canada, Germany, most of Scandinavia and many developing countries argue that the court should be free to examine conflicts referred to it by any concerned government, thus giving it virtual independence.
Big business, increasingly dependent on government contracts and regulation, became a virtual adjunct of the contracting agents and regulators.
Lashing together multiple processors to create a virtual supercomputer is a popular parlor trick in academia and government research.
Developers will be able to leverage the reference designs to rapidly develop their own virtual assistant capabilities for travel, insurance, retail, government and more.
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After a decade of virtual legislative standstill, for example, Kuwait's government is promoting educational reform, a redrawing of electoral districts to make voting fairer, and a removal of barriers to foreign investment.
Of course, the federal government is hardly the only major organization discovering the value of virtual conferences.
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And this week along a stretch of border in Arizona, the government is bringing online a test of a high-tech virtual fence.
In the 1990s, at the insistence of Massimo D'Alema, leader of the biggest left-wing party, the centre-left government held off passing laws to break Mr Berlusconi's virtual monopoly on private television.
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Called AVATAR (Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessments in Real-Time) and developed by the US government and the University of Arizona, an official figure (a man nicknamed Elvis) projected onto a screen conducts the interviews and can detect small changes in movement and behaviour to see if a traveller is telling the truth.
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