No new ideas? The possibilities are endful...

Okay, so that title is a little inflammatory. Of course we have new ideas! What I am about to explore, though, is the realisation that we may be creating our own future inadvertently...

There is a scene, right towards the end of the film, Tomorrowland, where the protagonists learn that knowing that the world is going to end is subconsciously allowing that end to come about by affecting the actions of the population of the world. It was, at the time I viewed the movie, a deus ex machina plot device. I felt that the movie was okay but that this 'twist' came from nowhere and was resolved through some silly, emotionally manipulative contrivances. However, I've come to realise I was wrong:

Brad Bird* was right.

Who needs 4K...?

By Jedi787plus, from Wikipedia

While I have mentioned that I think it's possible that 4K resolution TVs and monitors might be prevalent in the future (say around 2026-2028) they're a long way from mainstream use in the average person's home at this point in 2017. Worse still, content providers still haven't really settled on a good way to get content to consumers at 4K resolution - Blu Ray discs are too small and streaming 4K content is made difficult by the greedy policies of ISPs worldwide who want to charge both the consumer and provider for passing information over their networks. The UHD disc format is now available but I've never seen a system or disc for sale - the systems themselves are incredibly expensive (think €300+) when you could buy a game console for the same price - none of which support UHD discs. The Xbox Scorpio will have a UHD disc player when it's released but there's no word on the cost of the device as yet and I don't expect it to be cheap* given the specs...

While video content has been filmed at a quality which would allow for recording in 4K resolution before digital cameras were commonly used, the high quality copies were discarded - probably in favour of storage space, though the article linked claims that people they have heard from "didn't realise the format was coming to the public space".

The heart of the issue is "do we need it?" and if so "why do we need it?"