I watched this awesome anime 2 days ago and it's brilliant. apart from the stunning graphics, which makes the move more like that Final Fantasy movie than a regular anime, it picks up various themes of virtual reality, artificial intelligence and future society. some of the dialogues were hard to follow because the subtitles were too fast with my version but anyways i can only recommend it to all blame fans and everyone thta already liked ghost in the shell. i'm currently thinking of buying the first movie, i only had the chance once to watch it on tv with a (pretty good) german syncro, and i love the visual style of it. also the music is awesome... not just some random jpop here and there.. it's more like neon genesis evangelion, which's soundtrack i also love.

Heh... i am huge fan of GitS...
My favorite anime IS GitS: Stand Alone Complex/2nd GIG that showed how was Section 9 before and in some episodes, you can see history of characters... Story is superb, smart, intriguing, stunning political thriller without any stupid or no-logical parts...
After that goes story from first GitS movie, where in the and Motoko melts with Puppetmaster and become new entity. And then brilliant Innocence, that from my point has biggest missing only it term of main character aldo Batou is brilliant, his charisma and whole character cant match superiority of Majors character...
Anyway, unfortunatly SAC is completed, 2nd GIG is still in translation becouse of troubles within translator group LMF, but on tv airing, entire anime series is completed, so i would advise anyone with interest in cyberpunk and stuff to check this out...

is 2nd GIG some kind of abbreviation?

2nd GIG is just actualy 2nd season of Stand Alone Complex series... it is same series, same timeline, same characters, just different story...
In SAC main story was going trough 7 or 8 episodes out of 26, and others where side storys... So main story of SAC was Laughin Man case, conserning one perticular super-hacker and one incident that happened... but as story goes, mosaic showes much bigger story behind...
SAC: 2nd GIG continues where SAC ended, so its actualy episodes 27-52, and follows happenings behind Perticular Eleven case.
LMF fansubs is the only translationgroup, becouse SAC is licenced, but they dont give a shit. Except that, one of main thing about SAC is high level conversation in EVERY episode, so translating it is 10x more difficult than translating any other anime episode. So releases are really slow but going. Now 2nd GIG is on ep 19/26...