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The whole point of the Three Laws was to illustrate the holes in the concept of the Three Laws.

EVERY Azimov Robot story was designed to show the unintended consequences of the Three Laws....

See the plot of Scrapped Princess. link

Excuse the spoilers, but there you have robotic overlords keeping us in our place for our own good. They actually forced a reset of society back to the horse and buggy era, because mankind was too destructive to be trusted with more technology.

Of course there, they weren't the ultimate one in charge, but a true AI could easily promote itself to a god like figure, for our own good. It could likely do it through the use of religion as in Scrapped Princess.

Hell, I could just see an AI determine that conservative ideology and such similar to what Fox News does is a great vehicle to guide the masses with. Of course as has been pointed out even Asimov just used them as plot devices.

In the way the three laws are a bit like the powerpoint iteration of a beautiful software design. It is elegant, simple looking, and probably not implementable nearly as simple as in the slides. Real code, that works and is deployed, tends to be a little more complex. Real code that works and is deployed in a safety critical application does not really on an AI's interpretation of doing no harm. It is designed to provably fail, if it ever does, in ways that don't endanger lives, which usually means not to fail at all.

Of course the (spoiler) real question in Scrapped Princess is if you had to choose whether to put mankind in a bubble or let them continue to an inevitable and catastrophic world war III, what choice would you make?

How many of those are kid friendly?

For the youngest? The first dragonball maybe. I think most of it would be fine for what older teens. At any rate, go to anidb and i'm sure you will find some kid friendly stuff.

For that matter some of the "Disney" movies are really japanese animation. It has been awhile but kiki's delivery service might apply. Full Moon wo Sagashite centers around a younger girl, but it is still a serious drama.

I suppose if you have a teenager, it might be ill advisable to buy them the Initial D boxed set though.

Yep, IIRC the US astronauts in the episode with the space Shuttle even mention how their conventional pressurized space suits are inferior. :)

Also the currently airing Mouretsu Pirates has a very similar space suit type (& is also quite realistic in its space flight representation).

Somebody should tell Jaxa it was only an anime , not a documentation :).... Planet es

http://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?show=anime&aid=4904

See this now

That AC may be referring to the story here: http://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?show=anime&aid=4121

http://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?show=anime&aid=895

Anyone seen the anime Planetes? It's all about people working collecting debris in the future, because there is so much up there, that it is a risk to the (now common and commercial) space flights. Interesting that this is becoming a topic of interest as of late.

I'd pay to see a well-made movie version of Black Lagoon, though only if they include the Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise arc from the end of the second season.

I'd pay to see a well-made movie version of Black Lagoon, though only if they include the Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise arc from the end of the second season.

umm Rahxephon is already released in US.
Rahxephon ADV Films Announced: 7/05/2002 Released: 03/25/2003

Courtesy of http://www.animeondvd.com/licenselist/

Gankutsuou is a new series (about halfway through its first and only season) with high ratings. It WILL be licensed. It's a retelling of the Count of the Monte Cristo.. certainly not niche there.

Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien has received a lot of awards among the non-Japanese anime community. Guess what, licensers look at the popularity of fansubs, and it will be picked up. Check out anidb if you don't believe me about its popularity, probably biggest interactive DB on net for anime (~20000 EP's). 8.57 (1324 votes) for Kimi, for comparison Cowboy Bebop (an extremely popular series released in US and on TV) is 8.73 (1922 votes)

Two more site-plugs while I'm at it
Kyle's edit list
AnimeNewsNetwork Anime Encyclopedia

Finding files can be annoying, yeah. Mostly I, and most eMule users for that matter, just use ed2k link sites, and forums. For anime, you can get nearly any fansub ever released on AniDB. For a while, ShareReactor was the ed2k link site, but they were finally taken down. On this page you can find some great sites that still work today.. You can still use archive.org to access the huge library of ed2k that was on SR, a total of 2243 releases at the time of the last crawl. One release is counted as one full item; one movie, one game, one season of a TV series is one count. So it's a whole shitload of files, no mistaking that.