So you saw Hackers at an impressionable and ignorant age, too? My neighbor friend at the time wanted to live out the hacker fantasy world, so I showed him some BS war dialers/sniffers/phone tricks that I came across. Baffled, he demanded to be taken to "cyber space of a mainframe" just like in the movie.

My introduction to that stuff was the Cyberpunk/Mondo 2000 issue of Wired that I stole from my orthodontist's office in middle school.

Hey, humans invented the concept of consciousness, we can damn well decide what has it and what doesn't. It's not like it matters to anything but us anyway.