What seems to be increasingly obvious, as the interview also states, is that one can find virtually all Ebooks and texts one needs via p2p networks and other file sharing community’s (the true Darknet in a way) – more and more people are offering (and asking for!) selections of texts and books (including the ones by Adorno) on openly available websites and blogs, or they are scanning them and offering them for (educational) use on their domains. Although the Internet is mostly known for the pirating and dissemination of pirated movies and music, copyright protected textual content has (of course) always been spread too. But with the rise of ‘born digital’ text content, and with the help of massive digitization efforts like Google Books (and accompanying Google Books download tools) accompanied by the appearance of better (and cheaper) scanning equipment, the movement of ‘openly’ spreading (pirated) texts (whether or not focusing on education and ‘fair use’) seems to be growing fast.

Features a discussion of Ubuweb and many others.

I think the sex robot will happen fairly soon because the bottom is dropping out of the adult entertainment market, because there's so much sex available for nothing on the internet," says Levy. "I think the market was worth something like $12bn a year, and they aren't going to want to lose all their income, and this seems to me an obvious direction to go. The market must be vast, if you think of the number of vibrators that sell to women. I'm sure a male sex doll with a vibrating penis will sell better than sex dolls today. I'll be surprised if it's more than another three years or so before we see more advanced sex dolls with more electronics and electromechanics.

Stein lives in a world," Salmon wrote in March 2009, "where flying commercial is always a chore; where few hotels are as well-appointed as his own homes; where every day he spends in a vaguely public place is a day he risks being accosted and held to account for the uncountable gallons of extremely harmful drivel that he has inflicted on his readers and viewers for years.

The winner of Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards and author of the bestselling Mars trilogy, Robinson attacked the Booker for rewarding "what usually turn out to be historical novels". Five are shortlisted for this year's prize, from Hilary Mantel's retelling of the life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall, to AS Byatt's The Children's Book, set at the turn of the 20th century.

"[Historical novelists] tend to do the same things the modernists did in smaller ways," Robinson said in an article for the New Scientist, published today. "A good new novel about the first world war, for instance, is still not going to tell us more than Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford. More importantly, these novels are not about now in the way science fiction is."