They had hi-def CRTs for a long time before LCDs took over. My dad had a 300lb 720p monster he gave to me after I graduated in the early 2000s. It was fairly old then.
>>After about the 2nd time the Joker escaped and killed again, any superhero in his right mind would have written off the Gotham penal system as completely inadequate and just killed him
Yeah, the last Batman movie drove me crazy when he saved the Joker's life. Heath Ledger laughed, "I guess we'll get to do this again in a while."
Really? All those thousands of people murdered / blown up? Batman wants to allow all that to happen again, so that he can avoid getting blood on his hands? His pacifism is evil.
>>No one in ANYTHING even RESEMBLING real-life would walk around throwing Bat-a-Rangs at vicious gang members and psychopaths with machine guns.
That just begs the question of why people are eating too much.
The human body has lots of feedback mechanisms to stop eating and maintain weight balance. Lustig's point is that fructose throws these systems out of whack, resulting in people eating too much.
>>We haven't discovered that gravity is proportional to 1/r, or that gravity isn't attractive but repulsive.
Err, gravity *can* be repulsive.
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
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Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 1
It's very much like calling carbon dioxide "pollution" when the atmosphere is already awash in more of it than humankind ever put out. It's not quite entirely wrong, but it misses an important sense of something being acutely dangerous. Being next to a factory outputting carbon dioxide isn't actually going to do you much harm; being next to one spewing soot and lead and ozone and sulfuric acid is a different story.
(I live near San Francisco, and I'm occasionally subjected to hilarious comparisons between pollution in China and America which seem to somehow miss this difference.)
Well, recall that the EPA was forced into declaring CO2 pollution by a lawsuit. IIRC, the Supreme Court told them that CO2 qualified as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, because it could vaguely/indirectly/in a hundred years/with large amounts affect human health. Really, anything can affect human health under their guidelines, so the Supreme Court gave the EPA power to regulate everything in the air. Terrible decision.
The difference between CO2 and the sugar (technically fructose) issue is that while fructose is not an acute toxin, Lustig pretty convincingly argues that it's a chronic toxin at reasonable levels (that Americans are already eating) across a reasonable time period. But the FDA doesn't regulate chronic toxins, he claims, only acute toxins. Which is hilarious if you think about it, since they've banned so many food additives that are only toxic at a million times normal concentration.
I used to live in San Francisco, and the air quality there *is* pretty bad, and kind of similar to Beijing - they both smell pretty strongly of urine. =)
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 3, Informative
>>He also made it very clear in his lecture that fructose is a chronic toxin. Did ANYONE criticizing this theory actually listen to the entire lecture??
Seriously. He even talks about this, explicitly, in his lecture. That the FDA has flat-out refused to regulate chronic toxins.
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 1
Calling sugar "toxic" is probably a plot to demean the word "toxic" and make tobacco less regulated.
Either that, or he's fallen for a more subtle form of the Dihydrogen Monoxide troll, perpetrated by the chemistry of sugar itself.
I've watched his video, and he's very specific about the biochemistry behind him calling it toxic. In particular, he lays all the symptoms of Metabolic Syndrome, including inflammation and high blood pressure, on fructose. His talk, which was based on papers and biochem, was a refreshing change from that absolute cesspit that is modern day science reporting.
TFA is really just repeating everything in the Lustig talk. It's well worth watching on youtube.
Heh, Batman murdering the guards would have been better than letting the inmates torture, then murder, the guards. But killing the inmates would have been best.
You missed the part about it "Reminding Me". I've long felt a sort of contempt toward pacifists, who, like you, can't differentiate between murder and self-defense, and would endlessly wring their hands while watching evil men haul their loved ones off to a mass grave.
I also, unlike you, do believe that evil men do exist. Not just "misunderstood" people, but actual evil.
By contrast Arkham Asylum never justifies the main character's pacifism. Batman walks around KOing homocidal maniacs while telling the asylum guards to "stay put". When you walk back through all these areas later, you find the inmates have woken up and then brutally tortured and murdered the guards you just saved an hour before.
It's a damming condemnation of Batman's pacifism, but it never gets a critical treatment in the game. Batman himself always carries on as if he's doing the ethical thing. I'm sure it's cold comfort to the families of the guards that Batman would rather have their husbands tortured than Batman get his hands dirty.
Homefront, by contrast, shows the evils of pacifism from the other side. Who will protect your family when bad men are trying to do them harm?
Yes, but only in Reverso-land. North Korea invaded the South to begin with. Period. End of story. McArthur's invasion of the North was entirely the result of their invading first.
While I don't apologize for the US when it deserves it, the idiot Chomskyite groupthink on here, that blames the US for everything, is just sickening.
I've been playing Homefront, and it reminds me why pacifism is an morally corrupt philosophy. If you won't pick up arms to defend you and your family from evil - or worse, pretend only America is capable of evil - then you're a shithead parasite who will benefit from the sacrifices of our armed forces, while spitting on their faces.
Well, certainly the redactor at the Ministry of Defense is stupid. Nuclear Engineers are not stupid at all. The US Navy (I don't know how the Red Shirts do things) are very selective about the people they put in charge of the reactors, they overengineer everything, have an impressive safety record, and generally have a very rigorous approach to everything nuclear.
This is why, after Chernobyl and TMI and all the nuclear fearmongering in the press, when Congress called them on the carpet to explain why exactly we had these "nuclear bombs" powering our fleets, the Navy was allowed to keep running them as-is.
>>Most important thing I found in the article. I'm wondering if it will work the other way around too. I would love if I could eventually play all my steam games on both the PS3 and PC if they are available for both!
The question I have is: if I buy the PS3 version and I already have the PC version, do I get a gift copy of the PC version?
My wife is only a console gamer, whereas I'd go crazy trying to play Portal (which requires precision aiming) on a controller. But it would be pretty darn cool to be able to play co-op with her cross platform.
>>Also, there's too much problem of link obfuscation - the problem of the user having absolutely no idea where a link will take them,
This is also a problem with URL shorteners. Bitly, Goo.gl, all those kinds of horrible hacks to fit within the limits of Twitter. While there's web sites that can expand them for you, it's usually way too much effort to look it up. So any time a person posts a short URL on/., I just ignore it... it's a 50/50 chance of being Tub Girl or Goatse.
I'd really like a Firefox addon to do URL expansion, but I'm not aware of one.
>>We're spending too much money on education because we're paying union teachers too much. Well, we're not.
Hmm, my friend started at $60,000 per year as a math teacher at a high school, while my other friend started at $35k as an electrical engineer. Draw your own conclusions about who is getting "too much".
>>We pay teachers less than a lot of the countries that are beating us in education.
Our per-pupil spending is 41% higher than other similar countries. (http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2010/section4/table-ifn-1.asp) In fact, only Norway, Luxembourg, and Switzerland are higher than us, and 27 countries are below us.
Most of the education budget (~80%) goes to teachers.
So, again, the numbers show that you're full of shit.
>>First, they had to educate all the Negroes
With compelling arguments like that, it's hard to see why your liberal viewpoints haven't come to dominate the airwaves. Also, your narrative fails to account for the fact that per-pupil education spending has been monotonically rising for the last 80 years. About $1200 per pupil per decade. There's a blip between 1960 and 1970 (+$1500) that might account for your "negros", but the numbers simply fail to bear out your hypothesis. Also, it doesn't explain similar rises in per-pupil expenditures in states with low numbers of black kids.
>>You find one study that you don't understand, and then you tell *other* people to shut the fuck up. Typical ignorant right-winger.
My favorite part about your post? You didn't post one single statistic or number. That's one of the clear signs that you're trying to run some bullshit here. Beyond the fact that, you know, you're wrong.
>>This is the second year of double digit budget decreases to my school district.
And, so what? If they decreased by 50%, which is highly doubtful given the strength of teachers' unions, it would still be on par with the 1970s.
The sad fact is, per-pupil spending doesn't appear to affect student performance in the slightest. It's a false causality caused by rich schools tending to have better performance than poor schools, when the actual reason (generalizing here) is the difference in parents, not the schools.
>>State funding to higher education has dropped
The person I was responding to was talking about public education, which generally means K-12, plus public universities and community colleges to a certain extent. College funding has dropped significantly due to the fact that states have realized that students will simply take out larger student loans to finance their education. The UC System used to have something like a 90% subsidy rate for in-state students. Now it's down to 50%. (IIRC)
>>Unless of course, you honestly contend that the cost of education is a static quantity
Who said anything about costs? The myth that people love to repeat is that long-term spending on public education has been on a downward spiral, whereas the reality of the situation is the complete opposite. I was also noting with amusement the GP complaining about fact-blindness in others, while failing to see the log in his own eye.
>>Yes, and the Dollar is worth 7 times less since a few years ago. Let alone to the 30s! (But other currencies too, so it's hard to notice.)
Idiot. I said, twice, that those were inflation-adjusted dollars. Our per-pupil spending has gone up 10 times *in constant dollars* since the 1930s.
>>Of course, since you hand-picked the year ranges, and left above all infos about value loss, you could further your argument... in imaginary land.
Since you obviously didn't look at the data (it is very nearly monotomically increasing over the last 90 years), I'm imagining you just used your imagination to try to further your argument about me being in imagination land.
Learning mandarin for business is generally a waste.
A) The mandarin dialects can be so different, people from different areas can't talk B) China is learning English.
I mean, learn new languages, it's a healthy thing to do. But don't learn it because you think Mandarin will become the business language.
As I said, I learned Mandarin for fun. But some of my fellow classmates were diplomats and engineers working directly with factories over there, and so for them it was a lot more applicable. I've actually done work that needed Mandarin, and made about $100k off the experience, so I'd say my time invested in it was worthwhile...
As far as A) goes, yes China is full of dialects. But they all (to a greater or lesser extent), learn standard Mandarin in addition to their local dialect. When I was in China, I found occasional people that couldn't speak Mandarin, which was annoying (one taxi driver, especially, who I couldn't communicate with), but over 90% of the people I met there could speak Mandarin. Less than 10% could speak English to any degree of understanding, so there goes B.
Even in Japan, which teaches many years of English to all of its citizens, you'll have a horrible time getting by if you expect people to know English. They'll just stare at you with a look of fear in their eyes (attack of the AP English teachers!) and use hand gestures to try to communicate. In China, where English levels are much lower, you'll have a hell of a time trying to get by if you don't know Mandarin.
Hell, I got stuck at an elementary school in the middle of nowhere, 60 miles outside of Zhengzhou (taxi driver dropped me off at the wrong destination with the right name). Even though they taught English to all of the kids there, and I had a rudimentary level of Mandarin, we couldn't communicate. Finally, one of the women there pulled out a cell phone and called her English-fluent friend, so that they could figure out what was going on. Without that, it's unclear what I would have done. (Well, I probably would have dug around through my dictionary to put together the sentences I needed.)
Innovation and discovery comes from people with inquisitive minds - minds that have been nurtured by a well rounded education system; one that encourages critical thinking, experimentation, and a good understanding of what scientific knowledge we have already. Now look at what is happening in the US - a drastic cutback in public education, "teaching to the test", and in many areas, official dismissal of science and scientific discoveries. Quite a few school districts are actively pushing creationism against evolution, dismissing global climate change, and many "non-essential" curriculum activities.
Per-pupil spending has *doubled* (in constant dollars) since the 1970s, and funding is *ten times as high* as during the 1930s (still, in constant dollars), and we haven't shown the slightest gain in test scores since then. So... shut the fuck up about "drastic cutbacks in public education". Seriously.
If you want to bash on people for their anti-scientific behaviors, you should start by looking in the mirror.
Is it just me or is the America-is-over sentiment growing by leaps and bounds lately? Not that I'm judging it, I feel the same way much of the time. But it seems more and more that this attitude is coming to the forefront of our national consciousness and yet none of our leaders have done anything to address it.
Indeed. I wonder how much of it stems from people *wanting* America's glory days to be over. I certainly don't. China may be the workshop for the world, but they aren't the innovators of the world we still are.
We have Intel, Google, Microsoft, (cough) Facebook, Blizzard, and so forth, all of which are pre-eminent in their respective fields. When was the last time you heard about some French MMORPG being released, or new Word Processing software from Germany? While I'm sure they exist - it's all America in first place.
Sad times. Guess I should go check out Mandarin for Dummies from the library.
I learned Mandarin just for the fun of it. But it's not a bad thing to know, from a future business perspective.
>>Seems more like they have had a run of bad "historical" dramas using a cliched and awkward plot device.
Hmm? TVB's Step Into the Past series was pretty good, and even though it was a Hong Kong production, received a lot of support from the Beijing government in producing it in mainland China.
The plot of it is about a police officer that discovers a terra-cotta warrior that looks like him (hey, foreshadowing), and then time travels to the past to make sure the Qin win like they're supposed to. It's not a bad series, though I've only watched about the first half of it.
But anyway, my point is that Beijing obviously doesn't hate time travel dramas in general. Though there is a huge gaping hole of sci-fi in Chinese pop culture.
Slashdot Mirror
It's one of the theories of inflationary cosmology. You can read more about it here:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/guth02/guth02_print.html
or a paper here: http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0001011
It doesn't have anything to do with the size of the TV (over 30"), and everything to do with SD looking best on a SD TV, and HD on a HD TV.
Normal, non-upscaled DVDs look absolutely terrible on most LCDs. Upscaled DVDs are better, but still look terrible compared with bluray.
My wife recorded the Game of Thrones premiere and it was nearly unwatchable because she DVRed it off the SD HBO channel.
They had hi-def CRTs for a long time before LCDs took over. My dad had a 300lb 720p monster he gave to me after I graduated in the early 2000s. It was fairly old then.
I nearly killed him. It nearly killed me.
>>After about the 2nd time the Joker escaped and killed again, any superhero in his right mind would have written off the Gotham penal system as completely inadequate and just killed him
Yeah, the last Batman movie drove me crazy when he saved the Joker's life. Heath Ledger laughed, "I guess we'll get to do this again in a while."
Really? All those thousands of people murdered / blown up? Batman wants to allow all that to happen again, so that he can avoid getting blood on his hands? His pacifism is evil.
>>No one in ANYTHING even RESEMBLING real-life would walk around throwing Bat-a-Rangs at vicious gang members and psychopaths with machine guns.
Well... http://www.tampabay.com/news/bizarre/article855246.ece
>>You'd really want to fuck around with The Constitution over video game sales ?
It's not just video game sales. The Doctrine of First Sale has been under attack in a lot of different venues.
That just begs the question of why people are eating too much.
The human body has lots of feedback mechanisms to stop eating and maintain weight balance. Lustig's point is that fructose throws these systems out of whack, resulting in people eating too much.
>>The First Sale Doctrine really chaps their asses
We really need Congress to step up enforcement of the First Sale Doctrine.
Perhaps a Constitutional Amendment, even.
>>We haven't discovered that gravity is proportional to 1/r, or that gravity isn't attractive but repulsive.
Err, gravity *can* be repulsive.
Well, recall that the EPA was forced into declaring CO2 pollution by a lawsuit. IIRC, the Supreme Court told them that CO2 qualified as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, because it could vaguely/indirectly/in a hundred years/with large amounts affect human health. Really, anything can affect human health under their guidelines, so the Supreme Court gave the EPA power to regulate everything in the air. Terrible decision.
The difference between CO2 and the sugar (technically fructose) issue is that while fructose is not an acute toxin, Lustig pretty convincingly argues that it's a chronic toxin at reasonable levels (that Americans are already eating) across a reasonable time period. But the FDA doesn't regulate chronic toxins, he claims, only acute toxins. Which is hilarious if you think about it, since they've banned so many food additives that are only toxic at a million times normal concentration.
I used to live in San Francisco, and the air quality there *is* pretty bad, and kind of similar to Beijing - they both smell pretty strongly of urine. =)
>>He also made it very clear in his lecture that fructose is a chronic toxin. Did ANYONE criticizing this theory actually listen to the entire lecture??
Seriously. He even talks about this, explicitly, in his lecture. That the FDA has flat-out refused to regulate chronic toxins.
I've watched his video, and he's very specific about the biochemistry behind him calling it toxic. In particular, he lays all the symptoms of Metabolic Syndrome, including inflammation and high blood pressure, on fructose. His talk, which was based on papers and biochem, was a refreshing change from that absolute cesspit that is modern day science reporting.
TFA is really just repeating everything in the Lustig talk. It's well worth watching on youtube.
Heh, Batman murdering the guards would have been better than letting the inmates torture, then murder, the guards. But killing the inmates would have been best.
As they say in Texas, "Some people need killin'."
You missed the part about it "Reminding Me". I've long felt a sort of contempt toward pacifists, who, like you, can't differentiate between murder and self-defense, and would endlessly wring their hands while watching evil men haul their loved ones off to a mass grave.
I also, unlike you, do believe that evil men do exist. Not just "misunderstood" people, but actual evil.
By contrast Arkham Asylum never justifies the main character's pacifism. Batman walks around KOing homocidal maniacs while telling the asylum guards to "stay put". When you walk back through all these areas later, you find the inmates have woken up and then brutally tortured and murdered the guards you just saved an hour before.
It's a damming condemnation of Batman's pacifism, but it never gets a critical treatment in the game. Batman himself always carries on as if he's doing the ethical thing. I'm sure it's cold comfort to the families of the guards that Batman would rather have their husbands tortured than Batman get his hands dirty.
Homefront, by contrast, shows the evils of pacifism from the other side. Who will protect your family when bad men are trying to do them harm?
"Did the US invade Korea in the 1950s?"
Yes, but only in Reverso-land. North Korea invaded the South to begin with. Period. End of story. McArthur's invasion of the North was entirely the result of their invading first.
While I don't apologize for the US when it deserves it, the idiot Chomskyite groupthink on here, that blames the US for everything, is just sickening.
I've been playing Homefront, and it reminds me why pacifism is an morally corrupt philosophy. If you won't pick up arms to defend you and your family from evil - or worse, pretend only America is capable of evil - then you're a shithead parasite who will benefit from the sacrifices of our armed forces, while spitting on their faces.
Well, certainly the redactor at the Ministry of Defense is stupid. Nuclear Engineers are not stupid at all. The US Navy (I don't know how the Red Shirts do things) are very selective about the people they put in charge of the reactors, they overengineer everything, have an impressive safety record, and generally have a very rigorous approach to everything nuclear.
This is why, after Chernobyl and TMI and all the nuclear fearmongering in the press, when Congress called them on the carpet to explain why exactly we had these "nuclear bombs" powering our fleets, the Navy was allowed to keep running them as-is.
Most of this culture came from Adm. Hyman Rickover. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover
>>Most important thing I found in the article. I'm wondering if it will work the other way around too. I would love if I could eventually play all my steam games on both the PS3 and PC if they are available for both!
The question I have is: if I buy the PS3 version and I already have the PC version, do I get a gift copy of the PC version?
My wife is only a console gamer, whereas I'd go crazy trying to play Portal (which requires precision aiming) on a controller. But it would be pretty darn cool to be able to play co-op with her cross platform.
>>Also, there's too much problem of link obfuscation - the problem of the user having absolutely no idea where a link will take them,
This is also a problem with URL shorteners. Bitly, Goo.gl, all those kinds of horrible hacks to fit within the limits of Twitter. While there's web sites that can expand them for you, it's usually way too much effort to look it up. So any time a person posts a short URL on /., I just ignore it... it's a 50/50 chance of being Tub Girl or Goatse.
I'd really like a Firefox addon to do URL expansion, but I'm not aware of one.
>>We're spending too much money on education because we're paying union teachers too much. Well, we're not.
Hmm, my friend started at $60,000 per year as a math teacher at a high school, while my other friend started at $35k as an electrical engineer. Draw your own conclusions about who is getting "too much".
>>We pay teachers less than a lot of the countries that are beating us in education.
Our per-pupil spending is 41% higher than other similar countries. (http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2010/section4/table-ifn-1.asp) In fact, only Norway, Luxembourg, and Switzerland are higher than us, and 27 countries are below us.
Most of the education budget (~80%) goes to teachers.
So, again, the numbers show that you're full of shit.
>>First, they had to educate all the Negroes
With compelling arguments like that, it's hard to see why your liberal viewpoints haven't come to dominate the airwaves. Also, your narrative fails to account for the fact that per-pupil education spending has been monotonically rising for the last 80 years. About $1200 per pupil per decade. There's a blip between 1960 and 1970 (+$1500) that might account for your "negros", but the numbers simply fail to bear out your hypothesis. Also, it doesn't explain similar rises in per-pupil expenditures in states with low numbers of black kids.
>>You find one study that you don't understand, and then you tell *other* people to shut the fuck up. Typical ignorant right-winger.
My favorite part about your post? You didn't post one single statistic or number. That's one of the clear signs that you're trying to run some bullshit here. Beyond the fact that, you know, you're wrong.
>>This is the second year of double digit budget decreases to my school district.
And, so what? If they decreased by 50%, which is highly doubtful given the strength of teachers' unions, it would still be on par with the 1970s.
The sad fact is, per-pupil spending doesn't appear to affect student performance in the slightest. It's a false causality caused by rich schools tending to have better performance than poor schools, when the actual reason (generalizing here) is the difference in parents, not the schools.
>>State funding to higher education has dropped
The person I was responding to was talking about public education, which generally means K-12, plus public universities and community colleges to a certain extent. College funding has dropped significantly due to the fact that states have realized that students will simply take out larger student loans to finance their education. The UC System used to have something like a 90% subsidy rate for in-state students. Now it's down to 50%. (IIRC)
>>Unless of course, you honestly contend that the cost of education is a static quantity
Who said anything about costs? The myth that people love to repeat is that long-term spending on public education has been on a downward spiral, whereas the reality of the situation is the complete opposite. I was also noting with amusement the GP complaining about fact-blindness in others, while failing to see the log in his own eye.
>>Yes, and the Dollar is worth 7 times less since a few years ago. Let alone to the 30s! (But other currencies too, so it's hard to notice.)
Idiot. I said, twice, that those were inflation-adjusted dollars. Our per-pupil spending has gone up 10 times *in constant dollars* since the 1930s.
>>Of course, since you hand-picked the year ranges, and left above all infos about value loss, you could further your argument... in imaginary land.
Since you obviously didn't look at the data (it is very nearly monotomically increasing over the last 90 years), I'm imagining you just used your imagination to try to further your argument about me being in imagination land.
As I said, I learned Mandarin for fun. But some of my fellow classmates were diplomats and engineers working directly with factories over there, and so for them it was a lot more applicable. I've actually done work that needed Mandarin, and made about $100k off the experience, so I'd say my time invested in it was worthwhile...
As far as A) goes, yes China is full of dialects. But they all (to a greater or lesser extent), learn standard Mandarin in addition to their local dialect. When I was in China, I found occasional people that couldn't speak Mandarin, which was annoying (one taxi driver, especially, who I couldn't communicate with), but over 90% of the people I met there could speak Mandarin. Less than 10% could speak English to any degree of understanding, so there goes B.
Even in Japan, which teaches many years of English to all of its citizens, you'll have a horrible time getting by if you expect people to know English. They'll just stare at you with a look of fear in their eyes (attack of the AP English teachers!) and use hand gestures to try to communicate. In China, where English levels are much lower, you'll have a hell of a time trying to get by if you don't know Mandarin.
Hell, I got stuck at an elementary school in the middle of nowhere, 60 miles outside of Zhengzhou (taxi driver dropped me off at the wrong destination with the right name). Even though they taught English to all of the kids there, and I had a rudimentary level of Mandarin, we couldn't communicate. Finally, one of the women there pulled out a cell phone and called her English-fluent friend, so that they could figure out what was going on. Without that, it's unclear what I would have done. (Well, I probably would have dug around through my dictionary to put together the sentences I needed.)
Plenty of misinformation here. First of all, start by looking at this graph from NAEP (NCES, Digest of Education Statistics: 2007, Table 171.).
http://assets.podomatic.net/mymedia/thumb/1226777/460%3E_2921611.jpg?1272811726
Or this chart:
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_171.asp
Per-pupil spending has *doubled* (in constant dollars) since the 1970s, and funding is *ten times as high* as during the 1930s (still, in constant dollars), and we haven't shown the slightest gain in test scores since then. So... shut the fuck up about "drastic cutbacks in public education". Seriously.
If you want to bash on people for their anti-scientific behaviors, you should start by looking in the mirror.
Indeed. I wonder how much of it stems from people *wanting* America's glory days to be over. I certainly don't. China may be the workshop for the world, but they aren't the innovators of the world we still are.
We have Intel, Google, Microsoft, (cough) Facebook, Blizzard, and so forth, all of which are pre-eminent in their respective fields. When was the last time you heard about some French MMORPG being released, or new Word Processing software from Germany? While I'm sure they exist - it's all America in first place.
I learned Mandarin just for the fun of it. But it's not a bad thing to know, from a future business perspective.
>>Seems more like they have had a run of bad "historical" dramas using a cliched and awkward plot device.
Hmm? TVB's Step Into the Past series was pretty good, and even though it was a Hong Kong production, received a lot of support from the Beijing government in producing it in mainland China.
The plot of it is about a police officer that discovers a terra-cotta warrior that looks like him (hey, foreshadowing), and then time travels to the past to make sure the Qin win like they're supposed to. It's not a bad series, though I've only watched about the first half of it.
But anyway, my point is that Beijing obviously doesn't hate time travel dramas in general. Though there is a huge gaping hole of sci-fi in Chinese pop culture.