In the less politically correct age which was my childhood, a series of stocking-filler paperbacks sold in their millions. The first was called The Official Irish Joke Book — Book Three (Book Two to follow). The only joke I remember concerned the Irish Nobel Prize for Medicine, ‘awarded to a man who had discovered a cure for which there was no known disease’.
This practice, of seeking solutions for non-problems (or ex-problems), seems to be the curse of the consumer electronics industry. It is the civilian equivalent of the military-industrial complex, with a standing army of engineers forever looking for battles to fight, even when a technological ceasefire might make more sense.
Currently it is TV technology that seems to be headed for a bridge too far. 3D may well have one wonderful application, in allowing groups of people to go to digital cinemas to watch live spectacles on large screens — indeed for major sporting fixtures, Formula 1, Wagner, coronations or anything staged by Kim Jong Il its possibilities seem genuinely exciting.
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