But I suspect less so in china than the US. I doubt that a major part of the Chinese diet is exotic fruit flown half way around the world out of season.
China does have oil reserves and could always 'spread democracy' to some 3rd world country if it needed more.
You can if every thing they want to buy is made in your country.
The US can't half the value of the dollar to boost exports because everything in Walmart that is made in China will double in price.
China can because everything it's people want to buy in GreatWall-Mart is already made in china. As long as the government steps in to subsidize imported fuel the people wouldn't notice as long as they didn't travel - and you don't want them to travel anyway.
That was the idea, and why MIT were surprised that most people were using it on their own.
What I meant was that there was no market for a small college selling lectures online for $100s when you could get MIT for free. It won't change the economics of people going to college
I do think this is a genuine attempt to spread knowledge.
Even being cynical there is no real downside for them.
People will still want to go to MIT 'for real' and they will still fill their lecture halls with paying students - even if MIT could expand to take everyone that wanted to go there - this would dilute the MIT brand.
Allowing everyone else to get the knowledge for free simply kills the competition, there is no market for a staet-college online course when you can have the best for free.
Local bookstores seem to be booming.
Amazon is taking out their competitors (B+N, Borders, Waterstones) while offering them a global marketplace to sell used books online.
The ones that have put any effort into a pleasant environment, local books, reading events etc are doing better than they have in years. Remember HN are not typical of the general population when it comes to book buying or ebook reading.
The cover/spine out is a marketing thing by the publisher.
Cover out sells a lot more books, so the publisher will insist on certain books being displayed like this, or prominently on 'new book' stands.
Sometimes the publishers pay for this service, but more often it's blackmail - "put our new diet book cover out or you will get the next Harry Potter book a week later than Amazon"
The compiler could do it automatically but it's only a single line preprocessor directive.