There's no reason you can't have a "kilo" prefix in a unit that also has Kelvins in it. SI prefixes can apply to just about any unit of measurement. I'm pretty sure this statement is valid:
The Sun's surface temperature is approximately 6 kK. (6000 K)
I buy a high-end video card when I upgrade my PC every 2 years or so.
Why? Because I enjoy PC gaming, and I want to have a great experience with it. I have friends with various consoles, and my brother has a Wii that I can theoretically borrow at any time, but I just plain prefer games on the PC.
I think of it as a bit of a luxury hobby. Some people spend thousands of dollars on hockey tickets or high-end car parts. What's wrong with spending a few hundred bucks on computer equipment?
A few months ago, I went on a business trip to Belgium, and spent two weeks in Antwerp. I spent a fair amount of time in malls, pubs and touring the city. During the whole trip, I didn't see a single fat person anywhere.
Like a lot of European cities, Antwerp is very compact. It's typical to see to 6 or 8-story apartments everywhere with stores on the ground floor. This mixture of residential/commercial space makes it easy for people to walk to wherever they need to go. In fact, since the roads are narrow and difficult to navigate, walking is often the fastest way to get places, too.
I don't know if it's a law of economics or anything, but here's my (fairly trivial) observation: When given a choice of solutions to solve a problem, most people will choose the easiest, cheapest and most convenient method.
In sprawling neighbourhoods, cars are usually the most convenient choice for just about everything. In dense cities, distances to most destinations are shorter, traffic is slow, and parking is hard to find, so driving is often more trouble than it's worth. I don't expect the problem of sprawl in North America to end anytime soon, though. In Europe, space is at far greater premium than North America, so the only direction to build is up. In North America, though, land is cheap and cities are far apart, so it's a whole lot cheaper to build more suburbs than to build multi-story apartments.
Conversely (and any strong Go player can flame me for this) Go hasn't been nearly as well analysed as Chess, and proportionally doesn't have that same depth for computers to fall back on.
No flameage required.
You're absolutely right. Until fairly recently, there hasn't even been much interest in computer Go.
There's a major difference between between knowing the game well, and being able to program a good AI. A good player won't necessarily be able make a good AI. Go, and chess masters for that matter, are good because of intuition and practice, and not just logic. That's not the sort of thing you can easily program or train an AI to do.
The reason that computer Go is much harder to implement that computer chess is because the problem space is much larger. Chess is played on an 8x8 grid, with only a few dozen possible moves on each turn. Go is typically played on a 19x19 grid, so at least at the beginning of the game, there are many times more possible moves. When you start calculating a few moves ahead, then things get *really* complicated. Also, despite the simple rules, distinguishing a good move from a bad move in Go is quite hard.
The complexity of the rules is not that important -- it's the number of possible moves and figuring out the effect of each move that makes programming the AI hard. I think Sid's right on this one.
Music, video, and other entertainment content is *not* intellectual property. Trade secrets, manufacturing methods, software - that's IP. But music in specific is undergoing a transformation. Content control is not natural in the broad scope - it's an artificial control mechanism put in place to generate revenue.
The term "intellectual property" is terribly imprecise.
Manufacturing methods are covered by patent law. Software is covered by copyright. Trade secrets have their own rules. All of these laws are completely different.
Lumping them all under "intellectual property" just causes confusion. It makes it sound like the same laws apply to all of the above, which is not the case.
Online piracy may now also include certain uses of "streaming" technologies from the Internet.
Why are just "some" streaming technologies considered online piracy? An audio stream is just a bunch of bits that the client software won't let you save on your drive. But bits can be easily manipulated - check out Loop Recorder.
Personally, I always thought that the SETI project was interesting from a theoretical point of view, but it has little chance of actually finding something. The main problems are:
(a) SETI assumes that the extraterrestrial race uses radio waves,
(b) the extraterrestrial race is of a similar technological level to us, and
(c) the problem of distance.
Issue (a) can't be helped. Radio astronomy is probably our best technique for exploring interstellar space at this time. If some extraterrestrial race uses some other technology for communication... well, we can't do anything about that. Issue (b) can't be helped either. If the extraterrestrial race has, say, Industrial Age technology, then they can't be detected. Not our fault. As for issue (c), remember that a finite speed of light means that anything we see or detect has a "time lag". Many of the stars scanned during the SETI project are hundreds or thousands of light years away from us.
For instance, imagine that we find simple radio transmissions from a star 500 light-years away from us. This means that 500 years ago, there was something there, at approximately our level of technology. In the present though, that extraterrestrial race may or may not still be there. If it is still there, then they likely 500 years ahead of us in terms of technology. If instead the race is our equal in technology, then signals from the planet would have just recently been transmitted, and would not have reached us yet.
However, I think the SETI project is important and will continue to be important in the future.
I've noticed that the PC game industry really lacks creativity in many ways. This causes a kind of cycle.
Very often, new games are copies of successful, groundbreaking, original games, and some particualar types of games become a "safe" choice to produce. Game devlopers and publishers want to make money; taking risk doesn't guarantee you profit. For instance, Diablo has many copycats. Baldur's Gate started the current flood of RPGs. Doom made first person shooters popular. X-Wing did the same for space flight sims.
I read in a recent interview with John Carmack that the concept of first person games was as an enhancement of existing top-down games at the time. Diablo is similar in many ways to old games like Rogue. I don't think any gaming genre is really dead... it may be unpopular for a few years, but eventually someone will think: "Remember _________? That was a fun game! Let's remake it, only make it better!"
Then, if the game's a hit, it starts the cycle all over again.
...but was it really unexpected? The judge's decision was based on the DMCA as it stands. The fact that it's a bad law to begin with isn't really relevant to the judge.
In fact, even the EFF said that the MPAA would probably win, and that this trial was mainly to set the stage for an appeal.
A web page is a file, but the constitution is also a piece of paper, I can burn a piece of paper, therefore I can burn the constitution.
Hmm... Perhaps we're talking about "pages" in different contexts here. To me, a web page is just a publicly readable text file which is interpreted by a user's browser. Nothing more, nothing less.
I am trying to abstract the idea of linking to a page that links to a page that links to something illegal would be illegal (because that would kill the internet) linking directly to illegal material.
Of course that would kill the Internet! That's why you can't start the chain to begin with! Think of it this way:
Let's say that file A is illegal. Next, some file B contains a hyperlink which points to file A. Also, some other file C contains a hyperlink which points to file B. You are saying that the owner of file B should be held liable; that is, you are stating that file B is illegal. But that automatically makes file C illegal also, by the same reasoning! This chain can then continue ad infinitum.
Linking directly to illegal material (whether it be an MP3, or a text file, or whatever) is a concious act that in most cases can be avoided. [...] There must be a level of responsibilty that goes with linking directly to a file.
What about search engines, though? It is possible to automatically gather all sorts of file names using automated web crawling tools. A computer program can't tell if a file is illegal or not. Should the owner of a search engine be held liable if his automated engine catalogues an illegal file? And no, there is absolutely no responsibility involved. For example, let's say you want to know where you can find Bob the stolen-watch-seller's house. Am I committing a crime if I tell you where it is? That's exactly what a link does - it provides a reference only.
(yes, there is that tiny.00001% chance that the funny pic you linked to could become an pirated MP3 file, but there is also that same chance that a cow will fall from the sky and land on my head, I wouldn't count on either happening).
So, you agree that there is a non-zero chance of that happening. What should you do if that does happen? How do you prove that you didn't intend to link to an illegal file?
Ignorance is not an excuse. This is especially true when you tout on your web page that the files are illegal.
I agree that providing illegal content is not right, but giving the exact location of illegal content is not the same thing! Using another information analogy, if I tell you that I saw a Secret Service agent drop a Top Secret document in the middle of Central Park (let's say I saw the cover, but didn't read the content), who should be blamed if you commit a crime by reading the document?
I really like this idea. From my understanding of the article, it seems that BXXP will be a "wrapper" for any file types (like HTML is a "wrapper" for plain text). This could allow us to properly embed all sorts of data within a nice, formatted page. Also, I hope that the BXXP standard will be powerful, extensible, and well documented. I would really hate to see more of the same browser-specific tag silliness that plagues Netscape and Internet Explorer. It's interesting to note, though, that if this really flies, then we may be in for another round "browser wars", especially if BXXP replaces HTTP.
Article quote: Instead of creating a metadata-specific protocol, he built BXXP as a general-purpose foundation upon which he could stack a metadata protocol he calls Blocks.
To me, there is a huge difference between linking directly to a file and linking to a page.
I disagree. Both a "page" a "file" are merely information. Distiguishing between a "page" and a "file" is silly and abritrary, and very likely to cause problems, especially since a "page" is just a particular format of "file". I wouldn't make sense to rule, for example, that linking to HTML pages is always legal, but other file types may be illegal. What if, in the future, "pages" are no longer HTML files, but some other format? Also, even "pages" may have illegal content (e.g. UUEncoding an MP3 and displaying the resulting text as an HTML file).
To use a (weird) analogy, consider the case of someone looking to buy a stolen watch. It is not illegal for me to say that Bob sells stolen watches down at the corner. This would be the equivalent of linking to a page, basically pointing someone in the right direction. Now, what happens, if this person goes, talks to Bob, and leaves without taking his (stolen) watch with him? Bob then comes to me, asks me to give him the watch, which I do. This is what MP3board is doing. They are handing the MP3s to people. It's not their watch, and they didn't sell it, but they are involved nonetheless.
An interesting analogy, but as with most relating the Internet to Real Life, it doesn't really work. This is because MP3Board is still not involved, even if it provides a direct link to the file. The analogy you describe would be work only if MP3Board had a service where they would temporarily store a file for you, so that you can download it directly from MP3Board at a later time, which is certainly not the case. Also, the analogy fails because the site does not "give" MP3s; in a really basic sense, all that the site is doing is "displaying" a file to a person's browser, and the person who is viewing it is making a local copy for himself.
On a side note, I realize that people like making analogies so that others can understand the situation better, but very often they simply don't work when talking about pure information (especially when encoded in some way, like MP3, or a binary file, etc.) The main issue is that information can be copied easily, by anybody, at zero cost. If I steal somebody's CD, they don't have it anymore. If I "steal" an MP3 from a site, the site still has it. This is an important difference, and it's enough for flawed analogies to confuse people.
Just out of (morbid) curiosity, I watched Gates' presentation about this.net thing... Somewhat amusing. A sampling of Bill Gates' claims:
Here's a good one... "Passwords are the weak link in today's networks." No, I think I'd disagree - the weak link is lousy security on systems such as *cough* Windows.
Unintentional slip? Gates said that information sharing is good. Hmm...
The.net servers will be running Windows 2000, which has apparently set "world-setting benchmarks" for speed and reliability. I was under the impression that benchmarks showed that Win2K is slower than even WinNT.
The "core" of.net is XML. It was not explained why this is good, or how this particular brand of text formatting (or "protocol", as Gates insists on calling it) will be used.
Gates repeatedly alluded to "per-minute charges" for the required broadband access. If this.net thing flies and people actually use it, then MS is set to suck a LOT of money from hapless consumers.
Apparently, the PC "required" a "universal platform" (line Windows) in order for applications to be created. Please. I suppose that Gates is conveniently forgetting the many problems and incompatibilies which his "common platform" has caused.
For those who are interested, technology "highlights" include:
"Smartlinks" - it looks like Microsoft's.net client will automatically scan and highlight stuff for its internal list of keywords, and then place a "customized menu" associated with those keywords. Think MS Word's annoying autocorrect misfeature on steroids.
A command line! It seems the people at MS have discovered that command lines are actually useful! Unfortunately, then they proceeded to butcher the concept by adding "natural language" queries. This utterly reeks of DWIM (Do What I Mean) and we all know the problems with that. Case in point: the demonstrator entered a typo and that screwed up the demonstration script, forcing him to restrat the query demonstration.
MS, partnered with Samsung, is developing what looks like a cross between a cell phone and a PalmPilot, which runs Internet Explorer.
A "tablet PC" (and extra-large PalmPilot style device) which runs WIndows 2000 and is meant to function as an "electronic book" onto which you can download books from the net. Warning! Warning! They advertise one-click buying though the tablet PC and thus the.net sevice; I guess MS expects up to trust it with our credit card numbers too...
A pretty hokey handwriting recognition system. What was not explained is how or why MS expects their system to work better than anything else out there.
Here are my top 3, but I'm not sure if they're available on DVD:
Macross Plus Very visually impressive, and a good story to boot. It's mainly a story of two test pilots competing for the love of a woman, but it touches on many other issues as well.
El Hazard: The Magnificent World This is actually a small 7-episode mini-series. The whole thing is about 4 hours, but it has very detailed and intricate story. Well worth seeing.
Princess Mononoke (Mononoke Hime) Another excellently produced anime. This one features the voice talents of Claire Danes, Gillian Anderson, and several other well-known actors. What's best is that the screenplay was written be Neil Gaiman! No silliness or cheese in this movie.
I think it's mainly the story that makes Anime appealing to many people. American TV and movies seem to have given up making really good, intricate, believable stories, and Anime really provides a breath of fresh air.
Slashdot Mirror
I can see it now...
"Please welcome the next president of the United States: A A!"
There's no reason you can't have a "kilo" prefix in a unit that also has Kelvins in it. SI prefixes can apply to just about any unit of measurement. I'm pretty sure this statement is valid:
The Sun's surface temperature is approximately 6 kK. (6000 K)
And it doesn't hurt that his reviews are absolutely hilarious! :)
I buy a high-end video card when I upgrade my PC every 2 years or so.
Why? Because I enjoy PC gaming, and I want to have a great experience with it. I have friends with various consoles, and my brother has a Wii that I can theoretically borrow at any time, but I just plain prefer games on the PC.
I think of it as a bit of a luxury hobby. Some people spend thousands of dollars on hockey tickets or high-end car parts. What's wrong with spending a few hundred bucks on computer equipment?
So do you ACs have any sources for this moon god stuff? Because the Wikipedia page for "Allah" says nothing about it.
a sp
Someone's been reading their Chick tracts...
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0042/0042_01.
http://www.chick.com/information/religions/islam/
According to Research in Motion's web site (www.rim.net), the correct acronym for the company name is RIM.
RIMM is the company's NASDAQ stock symbol.
I agree.
A few months ago, I went on a business trip to Belgium, and spent two weeks in Antwerp. I spent a fair amount of time in malls, pubs and touring the city. During the whole trip, I didn't see a single fat person anywhere.
Like a lot of European cities, Antwerp is very compact. It's typical to see to 6 or 8-story apartments everywhere with stores on the ground floor. This mixture of residential/commercial space makes it easy for people to walk to wherever they need to go. In fact, since the roads are narrow and difficult to navigate, walking is often the fastest way to get places, too.
I don't know if it's a law of economics or anything, but here's my (fairly trivial) observation: When given a choice of solutions to solve a problem, most people will choose the easiest, cheapest and most convenient method.
In sprawling neighbourhoods, cars are usually the most convenient choice for just about everything. In dense cities, distances to most destinations are shorter, traffic is slow, and parking is hard to find, so driving is often more trouble than it's worth. I don't expect the problem of sprawl in North America to end anytime soon, though. In Europe, space is at far greater premium than North America, so the only direction to build is up. In North America, though, land is cheap and cities are far apart, so it's a whole lot cheaper to build more suburbs than to build multi-story apartments.
I was wondering how long it would take for someone to make a web browser for the DS. I think it's much better suited for it than the PSP.
With Opera working on it, I'm hoping for some good results.
No flameage required.
You're absolutely right. Until fairly recently, there hasn't even been much interest in computer Go.
There's a major difference between between knowing the game well, and being able to program a good AI. A good player won't necessarily be able make a good AI. Go, and chess masters for that matter, are good because of intuition and practice, and not just logic. That's not the sort of thing you can easily program or train an AI to do.
Not true.
The reason that computer Go is much harder to implement that computer chess is because the problem space is much larger. Chess is played on an 8x8 grid, with only a few dozen possible moves on each turn. Go is typically played on a 19x19 grid, so at least at the beginning of the game, there are many times more possible moves. When you start calculating a few moves ahead, then things get *really* complicated. Also, despite the simple rules, distinguishing a good move from a bad move in Go is quite hard.
The complexity of the rules is not that important -- it's the number of possible moves and figuring out the effect of each move that makes programming the AI hard. I think Sid's right on this one.
The term "intellectual property" is terribly imprecise.
Manufacturing methods are covered by patent law. Software is covered by copyright. Trade secrets have their own rules. All of these laws are completely different.
Lumping them all under "intellectual property" just causes confusion. It makes it sound like the same laws apply to all of the above, which is not the case.
Online piracy may now also include certain uses of "streaming" technologies from the Internet.
Why are just "some" streaming technologies considered online piracy? An audio stream is just a bunch of bits that the client software won't let you save on your drive. But bits can be easily manipulated - check out Loop Recorder.
Personally, I always thought that the SETI project was interesting from a theoretical point of view, but it has little chance of actually finding something. The main problems are:
(a) SETI assumes that the extraterrestrial race uses radio waves,
(b) the extraterrestrial race is of a similar technological level to us, and
(c) the problem of distance.
Issue (a) can't be helped. Radio astronomy is probably our best technique for exploring interstellar space at this time. If some extraterrestrial race uses some other technology for communication... well, we can't do anything about that. Issue (b) can't be helped either. If the extraterrestrial race has, say, Industrial Age technology, then they can't be detected. Not our fault. As for issue (c), remember that a finite speed of light means that anything we see or detect has a "time lag". Many of the stars scanned during the SETI project are hundreds or thousands of light years away from us.
For instance, imagine that we find simple radio transmissions from a star 500 light-years away from us. This means that 500 years ago, there was something there, at approximately our level of technology. In the present though, that extraterrestrial race may or may not still be there. If it is still there, then they likely 500 years ahead of us in terms of technology. If instead the race is our equal in technology, then signals from the planet would have just recently been transmitted, and would not have reached us yet.
However, I think the SETI project is important and will continue to be important in the future.
I've noticed that the PC game industry really lacks creativity in many ways. This causes a kind of cycle.
Very often, new games are copies of successful, groundbreaking, original games, and some particualar types of games become a "safe" choice to produce. Game devlopers and publishers want to make money; taking risk doesn't guarantee you profit. For instance, Diablo has many copycats. Baldur's Gate started the current flood of RPGs. Doom made first person shooters popular. X-Wing did the same for space flight sims.
I read in a recent interview with John Carmack that the concept of first person games was as an enhancement of existing top-down games at the time. Diablo is similar in many ways to old games like Rogue. I don't think any gaming genre is really dead... it may be unpopular for a few years, but eventually someone will think: "Remember _________? That was a fun game! Let's remake it, only make it better!"
Then, if the game's a hit, it starts the cycle all over again.
In fact, even the EFF said that the MPAA would probably win, and that this trial was mainly to set the stage for an appeal.
A web page is a file, but the constitution is also a piece of paper, I can burn a piece of paper, therefore I can burn the constitution.
.00001% chance that the funny pic you linked to could become an pirated MP3 file, but there is also that same chance that a cow will fall from the sky and land on my head, I wouldn't count on either happening).
Hmm... Perhaps we're talking about "pages" in different contexts here. To me, a web page is just a publicly readable text file which is interpreted by a user's browser. Nothing more, nothing less.
I am trying to abstract the idea of linking to a page that links to a page that links to something illegal would be illegal (because that would kill the internet) linking directly to illegal material.
Of course that would kill the Internet! That's why you can't start the chain to begin with! Think of it this way:
Let's say that file A is illegal. Next, some file B contains a hyperlink which points to file A. Also, some other file C contains a hyperlink which points to file B. You are saying that the owner of file B should be held liable; that is, you are stating that file B is illegal. But that automatically makes file C illegal also, by the same reasoning! This chain can then continue ad infinitum.
Linking directly to illegal material (whether it be an MP3, or a text file, or whatever) is a concious act that in most cases can be avoided. [...] There must be a level of responsibilty that goes with linking directly to a file.
What about search engines, though? It is possible to automatically gather all sorts of file names using automated web crawling tools. A computer program can't tell if a file is illegal or not. Should the owner of a search engine be held liable if his automated engine catalogues an illegal file? And no, there is absolutely no responsibility involved. For example, let's say you want to know where you can find Bob the stolen-watch-seller's house. Am I committing a crime if I tell you where it is? That's exactly what a link does - it provides a reference only.
(yes, there is that tiny
So, you agree that there is a non-zero chance of that happening. What should you do if that does happen? How do you prove that you didn't intend to link to an illegal file?
Ignorance is not an excuse. This is especially true when you tout on your web page that the files are illegal.
I agree that providing illegal content is not right, but giving the exact location of illegal content is not the same thing! Using another information analogy, if I tell you that I saw a Secret Service agent drop a Top Secret document in the middle of Central Park (let's say I saw the cover, but didn't read the content), who should be blamed if you commit a crime by reading the document?
I really like this idea. From my understanding of the article, it seems that BXXP will be a "wrapper" for any file types (like HTML is a "wrapper" for plain text). This could allow us to properly embed all sorts of data within a nice, formatted page. Also, I hope that the BXXP standard will be powerful, extensible, and well documented. I would really hate to see more of the same browser-specific tag silliness that plagues Netscape and Internet Explorer. It's interesting to note, though, that if this really flies, then we may be in for another round "browser wars", especially if BXXP replaces HTTP.
Article quote: Instead of creating a metadata-specific protocol, he built BXXP as a general-purpose foundation upon which he could stack a metadata protocol he calls Blocks.
So, it's a metametadata protocol. Very cool!
To me, there is a huge difference between linking directly to a file and linking to a page.
I disagree. Both a "page" a "file" are merely information. Distiguishing between a "page" and a "file" is silly and abritrary, and very likely to cause problems, especially since a "page" is just a particular format of "file". I wouldn't make sense to rule, for example, that linking to HTML pages is always legal, but other file types may be illegal. What if, in the future, "pages" are no longer HTML files, but some other format? Also, even "pages" may have illegal content (e.g. UUEncoding an MP3 and displaying the resulting text as an HTML file).
To use a (weird) analogy, consider the case of someone looking to buy a stolen watch. It is not illegal for me to say that Bob sells stolen watches down at the corner. This would be the equivalent of linking to a page, basically pointing someone in the right direction. Now, what happens, if this person goes, talks to Bob, and leaves without taking his (stolen) watch with him? Bob then comes to me, asks me to give him the watch, which I do. This is what MP3board is doing. They are handing the MP3s to people. It's not their watch, and they didn't sell it, but they are involved nonetheless.
An interesting analogy, but as with most relating the Internet to Real Life, it doesn't really work. This is because MP3Board is still not involved, even if it provides a direct link to the file. The analogy you describe would be work only if MP3Board had a service where they would temporarily store a file for you, so that you can download it directly from MP3Board at a later time, which is certainly not the case. Also, the analogy fails because the site does not "give" MP3s; in a really basic sense, all that the site is doing is "displaying" a file to a person's browser, and the person who is viewing it is making a local copy for himself.
On a side note, I realize that people like making analogies so that others can understand the situation better, but very often they simply don't work when talking about pure information (especially when encoded in some way, like MP3, or a binary file, etc.) The main issue is that information can be copied easily, by anybody, at zero cost. If I steal somebody's CD, they don't have it anymore. If I "steal" an MP3 from a site, the site still has it. This is an important difference, and it's enough for flawed analogies to confuse people.
- Here's a good one... "Passwords are the weak link in today's networks." No, I think I'd disagree - the weak link is lousy security on systems such as *cough* Windows.
- Unintentional slip? Gates said that information sharing is good. Hmm...
- The
.net servers will be running Windows 2000, which has apparently set "world-setting benchmarks" for speed and reliability. I was under the impression that benchmarks showed that Win2K is slower than even WinNT. - The "core" of
.net is XML. It was not explained why this is good, or how this particular brand of text formatting (or "protocol", as Gates insists on calling it) will be used. - Gates repeatedly alluded to "per-minute charges" for the required broadband access. If this
.net thing flies and people actually use it, then MS is set to suck a LOT of money from hapless consumers. - Apparently, the PC "required" a "universal platform" (line Windows) in order for applications to be created. Please. I suppose that Gates is conveniently forgetting the many problems and incompatibilies which his "common platform" has caused.
For those who are interested, technology "highlights" include:Macross Plus
Very visually impressive, and a good story to boot. It's mainly a story of two test pilots competing for the love of a woman, but it touches on many other issues as well.
El Hazard: The Magnificent World
This is actually a small 7-episode mini-series. The whole thing is about 4 hours, but it has very detailed and intricate story. Well worth seeing.
Princess Mononoke (Mononoke Hime)
Another excellently produced anime. This one features the voice talents of Claire Danes, Gillian Anderson, and several other well-known actors. What's best is that the screenplay was written be Neil Gaiman! No silliness or cheese in this movie.
I think it's mainly the story that makes Anime appealing to many people. American TV and movies seem to have given up making really good, intricate, believable stories, and Anime really provides a breath of fresh air.