People spend thousands of dollars cloning animals instead of choosing from the thousands of pets available at an animal shelter for the same reason people spend tens of thousands of dollars for fertility treatments instead of adopting one of the multitude of unwanted children in the world.

Nature always wins out over nuture for people of means.

If publishers can't show harm, I say let Google do what they want. The publishers lose some control, but the world gains an instantly searchable database of a huge chunk of the world's knowledge. In fact, add in some decent translation software, start scanning books from all around the world, and we'll be well on our way to realizing the ultimate potential of the internet.

Google naturally wants information to be free since it's the gatekeeper to that information. However, it's hard to see Google as the bad guy. They stand to profit enormously from this, but so does the populace. Isn't that the dream of capitalism?

First off: Thomas Garman, you need to get a subscription. I see you posting on most of the Salon articles, it's time to put your money where your mouth is.

As your letter in the Maureen Dowd column suggests, you have a lot of alone time. Thusly, you do not need a shed with pornography and booze. Those of us who spend every waking moment in the company of others do ocassionally need to go somewhere to regroup.

Of course, pornography and booze are perhaps not the best ways to regroup, but somehow I don't think Mr. Keillor was 100% serious when he suggested it. His article was not intended to be a treatise on man's responsibilities in the modern world. Get a sense of humor.

Thomas Garman, yet again I must disagree with you.

Your arguments don't address the issues at hand, and are more suited to an argument about whether the internet or computers in general have a place in academia.

More easily accessible knowledge will not lead to the dumbing down of society. Online card catalogs haven't dumbed down our students, despite the fact that they no longer need to manually thumb through tens of thousands of index cards to find a book.

No one's suggesting that all research should be replaced by algorithmic searches. Scientific journals are not going to be replaced by blog-style listings of people's Google Print searches. Sources will still be checked and context will still be important.

Google Print will be a remarkable tool, but it will not fundamentally change society in any way that the Internet hasn't already.

Lost in the debate on this article is the fact that Google is not allowing full access to these books, but is only offering excerpts. You'll never be able to see more than a few pages of the book without purchasing it from one of the links.

Google Print is more like listening to a 30 second clip of a song on iTunes than downloading a full album on Kazaa.

John Horgan says in his article "Today, many people who cannot believe in God have faith instead in the myth of scientific progress. Faith in science is vitally important; without it, scientists would not have come so far so fast. But when this faith can be sustained only by shunning contradictory evidence and arguments, it violates the scientific spirit."

This argument rings false for several reasons. Firstly, faith in science is not what's sustaining it. Repeatable experiments with predicatble results are what keep it going.

As previous letters have stated, cancer rates have been dropping in this country in many areas. Breast cancers are being detected and treated earlier, lung cancers are being prevented through education. Actual science rather than faith in science is causing these declines. When faith healers can join antibiotics in being effective at curing bacterial infections, you can start talking about faith sustaining science.

Whether science is making the world a better place can be debated. Are people happier today than they were a thousand years ago? Probably not. But you can't argue against the fact that we have a greater understanding of our bodies and our environment than at any other time in history.

If you're going to make a case against false science, go ahead. But to make a case against science in general is to ignore thousands of years of actual results.

I really enjoyed this serialization...

The mental image of an army of dancing Elmo dolls teaming up to drive a car will stick with me for awhile :)

I always thought it was strange that Salon picked up Heather Havrilesky as a TV writer. The insights that she offered as Polly Esther on Suck.com (r.i.p.) rarely strayed into TV-land.

Reading the other letters posted here, it's obvious that I'm not the only person that reads ILTW for reasons other than wanting to keep up with Triple-Threat Tyra Banks' latest career moves.

Salon seemingly gives her free reign as far as the content of her weekly TV column goes, but I'd still love to see what she'd write for Salon if she were given a monthly column in a different department.

This article reminds me why Cory Doctorow's sci-fi is so compelling. He takes a scientific advance that everyone acknowledges is right around the corner (3D printing in Themepunks, the mind-machine interface in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and others) and shows how fully developing it could affect our society.

We will create remote-controlled toilets from our PCs and we will do it in our lifetime!

Ms. Havrilesky,

CrazyChicken is right. Your weekly science article on Salon was woefully misinformed on the plight of chickens and insensitive to the struggle for biodiversity in general.

Oh wait, it's a TV article in the entertainment section? Perhaps CrazyChicken could cut down on some "feces-to-mouth contact" by taking his/her head out of his/her ass, and enjoy ILTW for what it is.

Swaggerin' with Free-Range-Chicken sandwich in hand,

ajohn505