Do they make marble dinner plates? Would be cool

Since you mention the d-pad. It was patented, so all the big companies had their own legally distinct spins on it. Nintendo has their cross; sega had a circle thing; Sony had discrete buttons, Microsoft had a different circle thing.

The Nintendo patent actually expired a number of years ago now, so nowadays the cross is showing up more places.

But super energy inefficient in comparison to what we have today.

I know Heinlein had his problems, but in highschool I loved his books.

Oh, but they have, and they still are.

As of 2024, Mr Hara and the Denso team are reportedly developing a new rectangular micro QR Code that can hold more data in a smaller physical footprint.

Did you know that you can halftone dither two different but same size QR codes on top of each other?

I wish I had a link to the article handy, but yeah I've tried that myself and it totally works! You basically get a 50/50 chance of one or the other code scanning. It's literally two QR codes in one!

And no, that's not some new special QR code format either, it's basically taking advantage of the nature of the scanners plus the built in error correction.