Maybe '2D' means L-shaped; a regular barcode with an awkward horizontal one attached with all the extra information. So an ordinary scanner can grab the SKU from the 1D base, but the extra bar gives the meta-rich info part. And if you have trouble scanning, just make an 'L' symbol over your forehead to the manager so they know you're having scanning trouble and can deal with it appropriately.

I recall the 60 minute rule-- a VC won't invest in a company they can't pop down in 1 hour to the office to visit on a whim. That, and inertia: we invest [here] because they get results, and they get results because we invested. We should adopt the Ratatouille rule for investing more widely than just San Fran & NYC: "Not everyone can become a great [company]; but a great [company] *can* come from *anywhere*. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius[es] now [inventing] at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest [web4.0 company] in [Tulsa]. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more."

'This sounds like a P2P competitor for traditional libraries.' Or what bookmooch.com has been doing for decades now. 1 book = 1 book. You list your books, someone with a book credit 'orders' it and you ship it, you get 1 credit. You then spend that credit to get a book from anything listed on the site. You can even wishlist titles for when someone might offer a copy. It works well. ... Sorry, I meant to say Z-Library is creating a new Web3 paradigm for media revitalization that has herefore never been seen. Also something something blockchain.

'A week in advance' could be the algorithm, no ML needed. Let's see, we'll have more barfights on Friday night, more drunk and disorderly at Saturday's game, Sunday is public fighting at the riverside park picnic area, and of course there's the usual weekly mayhem on Taco Tuesdays. On the white collar side, there will be more suspicious transactions after 5pm on Fridays and also just before the major flights out of the country depart...

Ah, but they will ban outside VPN on Vodofone. But for an extra fee, you can use their VodoFone VPN for security! But that VPN does share data with some providers, but for an extra fee on top of that, they will not share that data with their providers. But we do keep a list of people who did that opt out, however for another fee, you can be removed from that list... (credit to the story 'The Ingenious Patriot')

Translation of elephant speech has existed since at least 2005-- Marquette U and Disney's Dolittle Research Center (attached to their park) does legit animal research and used some off-the-shelf algorithms to do this. "What Dumbo Tells Jumbo" has details (hidden markov methods, etc). Fun part is the only real hardware needed is to upshift their low frequence voices to something recorders can work up. Also, elephants can communicate over miles via sub-sonic, and it's not generic-- they can recognize if it's a friendly voice at that distance, or just a generic elephant. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/do...