I'm not sure war exists only to burn money (though it is an effecient way of keeping an underclass busy just by sending them abroad). I'm wondering if it's a means of maintaining the value of our capital.
Increasingly, Americans are specializing in technology and management, and the production of raw goods is moving overseas. Our main resource is becoming capital; we're becoming less builders and more owners. The survival of the system depends on making other countries willing to recognize and trade for that intangible capital, and one shortcut to that is being very good at protecting our interests militarily.
Respected elites provide useful service with their capital, making possible projects and economies of scale that couldn't have worked without concentrated resources. Hated elites depend on walls and police to maintain their authority.
Man, your links couldn't be deeper into spin if you tried. I had to click 5 or 6 times on some of them to find anything that wasn't a conservative blog or column. Other people saying the same unsupported crap you said does not constitute "facts" unless that facts is that someone else is dumb enough to agree with you.
I dunno... check out the onion AV club for a review that didn't like it for good reasons.
I mean, we should be happy about this. Anime is finally getting reviewed by the same standards of story composition and directing that "real" cinema is. And I've got to agree with them -- the Bebop movie had some great scenes and animation, but it felt like one more episode, and not one of the best. The series ending captured the whole point of the show so well....
1) Overwhelming military force, because drawn out wars force moral compromise and prolonged damage to civilians and soldiers.
2) Never enter war without a clear, publicized political end-point, and never enter without exhausting other methods of reaching that end-point.
We've got #1 down, I agree I'd rather have this thing over quickly.
WTF happened to #2? Just cuz you got sick of CNN reporting on the lead-up to the war doesn't mean we ever put up a credible diplomatic effort... if the public studied diplomacy ad avidly as warfare in this country, we wouldn't have anyone getting away with saying that we had.
An unfortunate consequence of a dominant military is that it can make the people making political decisions reckless and lazy.
Maybe we could use a few years as a non-'superpower' to sharpen those skills.
Our awesome Privacy maven here at CMU, Prof. Latanya Sweeney, used a new publically available housing record database to find photos and estimates of the houses members of Pittsburgh's zoning commission (which created the database) lived in. You'd be amazed what these guys were buying on small civil servant salaries. Where does all that money come from?
Well what did they do about it? You guessed it. Passed new regulation that members of the zoning board can't be included in the database.
I agree that photos shouldn't be altered. But don't believe the correlary that unaltered photos can be trusted. The original choice of composition -- what's in the frame and what's not -- can be as much of a lie as a cut and paste job.
And, in non-journalistic circumstance, cut and paste jobs can be used to better describe the truth.
Because we needed more recycled, assinine speechifying in our monster movies.
Oh, also no one's ever tried to make monster movies better by giving them incredible special effects. Maybe he can hire an old favorite like, say, Matthew Broderick to be the woman Kong drags to the top of the State Building.
overestimating neuroscience
on
AI in Sci-Fi
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· Score: 1
Anyone who's read up on current behavioral theory and neural basis for cognition studies knows the field still has a long way to go. Benjamin Libet's experiment "proving" that action preceeds decision can be read just as easily to prove that we misunderstood which parts of the brain do what.
It's funny, because Ian Watson references Goedel earlier in the paper but doesn't understand the implications. Goedel's 2nd incompleteness theorem shows that never, by any scientific reasoning, can we demonstrably unravel the basis of our own existence and consciousness. The myth goes that several mathematicians committed suicide upon learning that no "unified mathematical theory" would ever be able to prove every true statement.
On the other hand, I think we could easily make great progress at writing AI's that synthesize fictional and scientific writing and make up BS journal articles summarizing them, without ever understanding any of it.
Eh... amen on the free speech point, but there were most certainly other ways to contain Hitler. Like, oh, say, not supporting him in the first place. (Maybe that would have worked with a certain CIA-trained dictator we're currently bombing). Perfect foresight in deplomacy isn't always possible, but maybe if we kept an eye on the long term, civilians and enlisted teenagers wouldn't end up paying with their lives for the mistakes.
None of which makes it worth banning, of course. Generals marketed itself on a morally retarded militaristic worldview that's definitely on the rise in this country. But censoring never made anything go away.
I Am Obviously Not A Lawyer, but shouldn't it be possible to avoid DMCA prosecution by describing workarounds for hypothetical schemes not yet released?
In the Future, it will probably be illegal to distribute in any centralized way (i.e. open source community =( ) anything that hurts these corporate interests. Keep lobbying now but plan for the worst.
People wanting to use their computers for non mainstream activities are going to have to hack out individual solutions and use them privately, just like the open source pioneers did. But maybe we can make it an easier (and more populist task) than it was the first time around.
There should be an organized effort to compile manuals carefully crafted to be generic and legal that allow ordinary people (and not just us code junkies) to figure out for themselves how to solve these issues.
Real code junkies who have access to good equipment are never going to be without free distribution of information. Private hacks and circles of trust will see to that. Legislation like this is only aimed at, and can only succeed at, keeping it from being a mainstream phenomenon. What we have to work hard on is to make sure we have people other than code junkies to talk freely to.
Worth noting the the NASA Impact Risk Summary lists the Palermo rating at -.06, making it actually less likely that this will happen in the next 20 years than that some unpredicted background event will cause similar damage. Way to check your numbers, BBC...
Then again, a number this close to 0 means that the chances of such an impact over the next 20 years has just about doubled with this observation...
Not being too tied to American Mainstream means that anime has a lot of themes that aren't explored well in hollywood and network TV crap. These may be old hat in Japan, but having series that focus on pacifist heroes (Kenshin, Trigun) or psychological pressures between children and society (Evangelian) were pretty new to me. Maybe they just seem really well done because I haven't seen them tried before extensively.
As for Bebop specifically: it's a pop culture send-off largely. Watch for scene for scene recreations from Bruce Lee's kung fu movies, homages to old noir films, and best of all Yoko Kanno's experimenting with American musical forms. Plus, the weightless, unattached nature of the main characters' lives plays into some subtle points in some of the episodes that i think are a lot deeper than people are expecting, at least when they watch the kid-ified cartoon network version...
love says that unlike books, the music industry wasn't always tied to distributed media. it wasn't dead then and doesn't have to be in the future. i think the glamour was always part of the performance of music, not the record contracts. i'm in a modest band and have friends in slightly more successful punk bands around pittsburgh... they hardly rake in the dough, but still get by, and with enough booze/sex/id to satisfy your American Dream.
just because people are making 300 people scream at a local club instead of 3000 or 30000 at some massively promoted venue, does that mean rock stardom is dead? and didn't we figure out yet that when people start getting more limos, cocain, and fly company than they can possibly need, they just stop having that much to say to the rest of us? god, look what happened to Bono, over the years.
Do any of you people who think you're special for knowing that sterilization != mutation know have any info about the sterilization process? I'm genuinely curious...
I doubt they pinpoint the little fly-balls and burn them off with gamma rays, so I'd like to know how one goes about ensuring that batch of flies is sterile without causing enough genetic damage to make the things die before they can mate. Obviously, dramatically increasing the mutation rate in a population is unlikely to increase the fitness of any of these guys, but I'd like to know if there's any risk of just boosting the tsetse population instead of starving them out.
The reaction to this boycott seems a bit knee-jerk. I'm as open source as the next troll but...
Centralized science publishing does accomplish a useful purpose: peer review. Articles submitted to journals are sent to experts in the field for analysis and go through a lengthy revision process with the author. Slows down publishing quite a bit, contributes to the cost of overpriced journals, but serves as a pretty damn good moderation mechanism: review by people who know wtf is being discussed. Do you want formal scientific review to take place at the level of a slashdot discussion?
Democratic, decentralized review: good for normative discussions (deciding ethics/values), good for creative discussions (incl. software development), but hazardous to scientific inquiry on existing phenomena.
the only widespread anxiety caused by falling iridiums would be in the wallets of the poor suckers who invested in it originally. and if there _were_ going to be damage outside of that group, well it's the responsibility of those same poor suckers to pay for it.
the point of the system where we set up corporations and invest in them is to encourage people with capital to take risks with it and create more stuff. a side effect is that people who take stupid risks lose their capital and it goes to someone smarter. ideally.
when the government (i didn't even know the DOD was allowed to _do_ this sort of thing outside of a contract/bidding process) steps in and bails a company out like this, they're making ours a system that rewards those with capital whether or not they use it intelligently. a system like that doesn't produce new, good things, it produces lemon sattelites and reapportions the wealth in the system before to keep the people who made them in charge.
Politicians started playing games with the data long before voters did. As long as we keep this bass-ackwards winner-takes-all electoral system, politicians are going to gear their campaigns towards garnering electoral votes rather than popular votes. A popular movement to manipulate things in the other direction is long overdue. I for one am pissed at the idea of my vote meaning _nothing_ just because more than half of the people in my state are conservative.
I'll vote for Nader because he believes in proportional representation and I'll vote swap to do it because I believe in proportional representation.
Ever since we abandoned the gold standard, "your money" has been a purely representative quantity. It represents some fraction of the overall exertions of every human who participates in the US economy. The fact that we have a common currency and a government to issue it is a recognition that our welfare is interconnected with the welfare of the people with whom we exchange goods and services. "Your money" is their work, and through a democratic government they (theoretically) have a chance to determine where it goes on a larger scale than their individual interactions.
It's a nice romantic idea to imagine yourself completely independent from anyone else. I think a lot of Republican boomers are particularly fond of the image of the cowboy, who lives on a ranch so far removed from others that he count all his interdependencies on one hand by remembering who he ran into on the trail that week. Sometimes I think a Thoreau-style self sufficience is the only way a person could get the clarity to actually be themselves.
But as long as we're using a peer-to-peer protocol to discuss this, we aren't there yet. Unless you're living in a biosphere with no atmospheric exchange, growing your own food and generating your own electricity, you're not even close. So until then we have to make compromises with the other children.
And oh yeah... let's not forget that the founding fathers were also the richest landowners in the country, with a lot to lose by preaching anything other than complete economic "freedom". Even so, some of the founding fathers were great philosophers who saw past their own immediate interests. Jefferson in particular favored compromises to freedom, not for security but morality: he was one of the few delegates to the first congress who spoke out against slavery, despite being a slave owner himself.
Bullshit. It takes motivation and capital to make more money. Where's the motivation when all the capital is with people who are as high as they can go on the social pyramid?
Read the fucking argument. Your simple equations of more liquidity meaning more economic growth only apply in an economic system like the current one, where that liquid is in the hands of people who have a lot to gain by using it wisely. Inheritence tax is only pushing that equity into the hands of those who have all the absolute and relative wealth they could ever use.
Do all these rich conservatives actually believe all the jargonized disinfo they're spewing?
Re:Free Software = Pompous Bores, discuss
on
Men of Zeal
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· Score: 1
To me, the accomplishment of "The Community" isn't any amount of software, it's the set of social values we so boorishly promote. Hell yes -- people wax painfully pompous and political about their contributions amd motives, and it's not called for. It would be a better world if people everywhere were secure enough not to need public recognition or a sense of religious piousness to keep on working.
But I'll put up with it if it's an alternative to a world controlled entirely from the top down. I'd rather choke down the egoes of thousands of individual trolls than one, mass produced conceit we're all expected to identify with (e.g. Britney Spears).
Heh and look -- im getting pompous already. But geek ego has always been that way, privately. The fact that some people are getting evangelical about it now is at least a sign that we geeks are beginning to care about the world outside our isolated academic interests. Give us some time and we may learn real class.
By letting out legislators value people with entrenched businesses and money in the bank more than those without, we're volunteering for opression. In the future, we'll have to scrutinize every word we write, every bit of science we research to make sure it's not stepping on some corporation or coalitions toes. Cuz if we don't, their hired guns will take us to jail.
for the next big stealth legislation: The Digital Millenium On Line Child Protection Mother Apple Pie Act, allowing companies to sue people who distribute any information ultimately rendering their business model ineffective.
Enjoy talking about workarounds like this while we still can... sooner or later, the respectable, deep pocketed folks in the censorware industry or just about anywhere else are going to get sick of us ne'er-do-wells poking holes in their stupid, stupid, stupid products...
For a long time now, every time I head into a into a book or video store, i've stayed as far from the mainstream stuff as possible, heading directly for the more "underground" or "special interest" selections. For a long time that made me feel guilty. I don't want to give in to that Goth urge to be different for the sake of it, to alienate yourself so that you can somehow feel superior for embracing your angst. And god knows there's a lot of stuff out there that indulges that.
But even artificial alienation is sometimes worthwhile for the new perspectives it gives you, and that's what I find attractive about anime, arthouse cinema, and a lot of other wantonly isolated media. It's also a background that the computer geek culture and sci-fi culture and the comic book culture and the adult animation culture that rose out of it have in common.
I also like what happens when this stuff hits mainstream culture. Ruoruni Kenshin is about as mainstream as it gets in Japan, airing prime time and enjoying massive funding and support from Sony. But its hero is a sincerely pacifistic badass who doesn't take himself seriously and doesn't kill -- a far cry from America's brooding killers who we watch restrain themselves for half an hour at a time just so we're not completely numb when they do get around to putting another digit on the bodycount. Kenshin builds its conflict up just as gratuitously, but somehow they're resolved without death and sometimes without even fighting. And yet somehow we're still satsified.
Stuff like that restores my faith in mass media's ability to learn new tricks and ideas. And it wouldn't happen without a dissident subculture that used its different perspective to create something instead of mope about it. So huzzah for good anime and science fiction and anything else that makes you think. And let's hope we geeks can be just as creative.
And um...watch Neon Genesis Evangelion. All of it. Including the End of Eva movie, not the wussed out TV finale. Don't stop cuz you think it's a bout big robots. It's good for you.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure war exists only to burn money (though it is an effecient way of keeping an underclass busy just by sending them abroad). I'm wondering if it's a means of maintaining the value of our capital.
Increasingly, Americans are specializing in technology and management, and the production of raw goods is moving overseas. Our main resource is becoming capital; we're becoming less builders and more owners. The survival of the system depends on making other countries willing to recognize and trade for that intangible capital, and one shortcut to that is being very good at protecting our interests militarily.
Respected elites provide useful service with their capital, making possible projects and economies of scale that couldn't have worked without concentrated resources. Hated elites depend on walls and police to maintain their authority.
Any thoughts?
Yeah, but it's just sad to think my tax dollars could get spent by the justice department enforcing the protection of some moron's DRM business model.
Man, your links couldn't be deeper into spin if you tried. I had to click 5 or 6 times on some of them to find anything that wasn't a conservative blog or column. Other people saying the same unsupported crap you said does not constitute "facts" unless that facts is that someone else is dumb enough to agree with you.
I dunno... check out the onion AV club for a review that didn't like it for good reasons.
I mean, we should be happy about this. Anime is finally getting reviewed by the same standards of story composition and directing that "real" cinema is. And I've got to agree with them -- the Bebop movie had some great scenes and animation, but it felt like one more episode, and not one of the best. The series ending captured the whole point of the show so well....
Powell Doctrine parts 1 and 2:
1) Overwhelming military force, because drawn out wars force moral compromise and prolonged damage to civilians and soldiers.
2) Never enter war without a clear, publicized political end-point, and never enter without exhausting other methods of reaching that end-point.
We've got #1 down, I agree I'd rather have this thing over quickly.
WTF happened to #2? Just cuz you got sick of CNN reporting on the lead-up to the war doesn't mean we ever put up a credible diplomatic effort... if the public studied diplomacy ad avidly as warfare in this country, we wouldn't have anyone getting away with saying that we had.
An unfortunate consequence of a dominant military is that it can make the people making political decisions reckless and lazy.
Maybe we could use a few years as a non-'superpower' to sharpen those skills.
Our awesome Privacy maven here at CMU, Prof. Latanya Sweeney, used a new publically available housing record database to find photos and estimates of the houses members of Pittsburgh's zoning commission (which created the database) lived in. You'd be amazed what these guys were buying on small civil servant salaries. Where does all that money come from?
Well what did they do about it? You guessed it. Passed new regulation that members of the zoning board can't be included in the database.
I agree that photos shouldn't be altered. But don't believe the correlary that unaltered photos can be trusted. The original choice of composition -- what's in the frame and what's not -- can be as much of a lie as a cut and paste job.
And, in non-journalistic circumstance, cut and paste jobs can be used to better describe the truth.
Because we needed more recycled, assinine speechifying in our monster movies.
Oh, also no one's ever tried to make monster movies better by giving them incredible special effects. Maybe he can hire an old favorite like, say, Matthew Broderick to be the woman Kong drags to the top of the State Building.
Anyone who's read up on current behavioral theory and neural basis for cognition studies knows the field still has a long way to go. Benjamin Libet's experiment "proving" that action preceeds decision can be read just as easily to prove that we misunderstood which parts of the brain do what.
It's funny, because Ian Watson references Goedel earlier in the paper but doesn't understand the implications. Goedel's 2nd incompleteness theorem shows that never, by any scientific reasoning, can we demonstrably unravel the basis of our own existence and consciousness. The myth goes that several mathematicians committed suicide upon learning that no "unified mathematical theory" would ever be able to prove every true statement.
On the other hand, I think we could easily make great progress at writing AI's that synthesize fictional and scientific writing and make up BS journal articles summarizing them, without ever understanding any of it.
None of which makes it worth banning, of course. Generals marketed itself on a morally retarded militaristic worldview that's definitely on the rise in this country. But censoring never made anything go away.
g
I Am Obviously Not A Lawyer, but shouldn't it be possible to avoid DMCA prosecution by describing workarounds for hypothetical schemes not yet released?
.0002 ...
In the Future, it will probably be illegal to distribute in any centralized way (i.e. open source community =( ) anything that hurts these corporate interests. Keep lobbying now but plan for the worst.
People wanting to use their computers for non mainstream activities are going to have to hack out individual solutions and use them privately, just like the open source pioneers did. But maybe we can make it an easier (and more populist task) than it was the first time around.
There should be an organized effort to compile manuals carefully crafted to be generic and legal that allow ordinary people (and not just us code junkies) to figure out for themselves how to solve these issues.
Real code junkies who have access to good equipment are never going to be without free distribution of information. Private hacks and circles of trust will see to that. Legislation like this is only aimed at, and can only succeed at, keeping it from being a mainstream phenomenon. What we have to work hard on is to make sure we have people other than code junkies to talk freely to.
Just my
Then again, a number this close to 0 means that the chances of such an impact over the next 20 years has just about doubled with this observation...
Not being too tied to American Mainstream means that anime has a lot of themes that aren't explored well in hollywood and network TV crap. These may be old hat in Japan, but having series that focus on pacifist heroes (Kenshin, Trigun) or psychological pressures between children and society (Evangelian) were pretty new to me. Maybe they just seem really well done because I haven't seen them tried before extensively.
As for Bebop specifically: it's a pop culture send-off largely. Watch for scene for scene recreations from Bruce Lee's kung fu movies, homages to old noir films, and best of all Yoko Kanno's experimenting with American musical forms. Plus, the weightless, unattached nature of the main characters' lives plays into some subtle points in some of the episodes that i think are a lot deeper than people are expecting, at least when they watch the kid-ified cartoon network version...
love says that unlike books, the music industry wasn't always tied to distributed media. it wasn't dead then and doesn't have to be in the future. i think the glamour was always part of the performance of music, not the record contracts. i'm in a modest band and have friends in slightly more successful punk bands around pittsburgh... they hardly rake in the dough, but still get by, and with enough booze/sex/id to satisfy your American Dream.
just because people are making 300 people scream at a local club instead of 3000 or 30000 at some massively promoted venue, does that mean rock stardom is dead? and didn't we figure out yet that when people start getting more limos, cocain, and fly company than they can possibly need, they just stop having that much to say to the rest of us? god, look what happened to Bono, over the years.
just my 2 cents...
Do any of you people who think you're special for knowing that sterilization != mutation know have any info about the sterilization process? I'm genuinely curious...
I doubt they pinpoint the little fly-balls and burn them off with gamma rays, so I'd like to know how one goes about ensuring that batch of flies is sterile without causing enough genetic damage to make the things die before they can mate. Obviously, dramatically increasing the mutation rate in a population is unlikely to increase the fitness of any of these guys, but I'd like to know if there's any risk of just boosting the tsetse population instead of starving them out.
heh -- and this is more like suing the steel company over the fact that people kill each other with guns...
Centralized science publishing does accomplish a useful purpose: peer review. Articles submitted to journals are sent to experts in the field for analysis and go through a lengthy revision process with the author. Slows down publishing quite a bit, contributes to the cost of overpriced journals, but serves as a pretty damn good moderation mechanism: review by people who know wtf is being discussed. Do you want formal scientific review to take place at the level of a slashdot discussion?
Democratic, decentralized review: good for normative discussions (deciding ethics/values), good for creative discussions (incl. software development), but hazardous to scientific inquiry on existing phenomena.
the only widespread anxiety caused by falling iridiums would be in the wallets of the poor suckers who invested in it originally. and if there _were_ going to be damage outside of that group, well it's the responsibility of those same poor suckers to pay for it.
the point of the system where we set up corporations and invest in them is to encourage people with capital to take risks with it and create more stuff. a side effect is that people who take stupid risks lose their capital and it goes to someone smarter. ideally.
when the government (i didn't even know the DOD was allowed to _do_ this sort of thing outside of a contract/bidding process) steps in and bails a company out like this, they're making ours a system that rewards those with capital whether or not they use it intelligently. a system like that doesn't produce new, good things, it produces lemon sattelites and reapportions the wealth in the system before to keep the people who made them in charge.
grr.
/end rant
Politicians started playing games with the data long before voters did. As long as we keep this bass-ackwards winner-takes-all electoral system, politicians are going to gear their campaigns towards garnering electoral votes rather than popular votes. A popular movement to manipulate things in the other direction is long overdue. I for one am pissed at the idea of my vote meaning _nothing_ just because more than half of the people in my state are conservative. I'll vote for Nader because he believes in proportional representation and I'll vote swap to do it because I believe in proportional representation.
It's a nice romantic idea to imagine yourself completely independent from anyone else. I think a lot of Republican boomers are particularly fond of the image of the cowboy, who lives on a ranch so far removed from others that he count all his interdependencies on one hand by remembering who he ran into on the trail that week. Sometimes I think a Thoreau-style self sufficience is the only way a person could get the clarity to actually be themselves.
But as long as we're using a peer-to-peer protocol to discuss this, we aren't there yet. Unless you're living in a biosphere with no atmospheric exchange, growing your own food and generating your own electricity, you're not even close. So until then we have to make compromises with the other children.
And oh yeah... let's not forget that the founding fathers were also the richest landowners in the country, with a lot to lose by preaching anything other than complete economic "freedom". Even so, some of the founding fathers were great philosophers who saw past their own immediate interests. Jefferson in particular favored compromises to freedom, not for security but morality: he was one of the few delegates to the first congress who spoke out against slavery, despite being a slave owner himself.
Read the fucking argument. Your simple equations of more liquidity meaning more economic growth only apply in an economic system like the current one, where that liquid is in the hands of people who have a lot to gain by using it wisely. Inheritence tax is only pushing that equity into the hands of those who have all the absolute and relative wealth they could ever use.
Do all these rich conservatives actually believe all the jargonized disinfo they're spewing?
But I'll put up with it if it's an alternative to a world controlled entirely from the top down. I'd rather choke down the egoes of thousands of individual trolls than one, mass produced conceit we're all expected to identify with (e.g. Britney Spears).
Heh and look -- im getting pompous already. But geek ego has always been that way, privately. The fact that some people are getting evangelical about it now is at least a sign that we geeks are beginning to care about the world outside our isolated academic interests. Give us some time and we may learn real class.
By letting out legislators value people with entrenched businesses and money in the bank more than those without, we're volunteering for opression. In the future, we'll have to scrutinize every word we write, every bit of science we research to make sure it's not stepping on some corporation or coalitions toes. Cuz if we don't, their hired guns will take us to jail.
Enjoy talking about workarounds like this while we still can... sooner or later, the respectable, deep pocketed folks in the censorware industry or just about anywhere else are going to get sick of us ne'er-do-wells poking holes in their stupid, stupid, stupid products...
But even artificial alienation is sometimes worthwhile for the new perspectives it gives you, and that's what I find attractive about anime, arthouse cinema, and a lot of other wantonly isolated media. It's also a background that the computer geek culture and sci-fi culture and the comic book culture and the adult animation culture that rose out of it have in common.
I also like what happens when this stuff hits mainstream culture. Ruoruni Kenshin is about as mainstream as it gets in Japan, airing prime time and enjoying massive funding and support from Sony. But its hero is a sincerely pacifistic badass who doesn't take himself seriously and doesn't kill -- a far cry from America's brooding killers who we watch restrain themselves for half an hour at a time just so we're not completely numb when they do get around to putting another digit on the bodycount. Kenshin builds its conflict up just as gratuitously, but somehow they're resolved without death and sometimes without even fighting. And yet somehow we're still satsified.
Stuff like that restores my faith in mass media's ability to learn new tricks and ideas. And it wouldn't happen without a dissident subculture that used its different perspective to create something instead of mope about it. So huzzah for good anime and science fiction and anything else that makes you think. And let's hope we geeks can be just as creative.
And um...watch Neon Genesis Evangelion. All of it. Including the End of Eva movie, not the wussed out TV finale. Don't stop cuz you think it's a bout big robots. It's good for you.