Your claim, precisely as stated, appears to be true but, per your link, that doesn't mean that the watermarking hasn't been broken in other ways. In fact, citation 16 regarding DVD-Ranger CinEx appears to do precisely that: detect the signal and then remove it.

The Amazon technique sounds like exactly the same crap that you get from a lot of machine-learning researchers doing security work: they don't think about an adaptive adversary. There's an entire field of adversarial machine learning that works by training a machine-learning system on the inputs and outputs of another: if you can train a neural network to insert and recognise these watermarks, can you train another one to recognise and remove them? If you haven't even tried that, it's likely that an attacker will be able to.

I realise you're trying to be sarcastic, but you're correct. In the per-capita GDP rankings, the UK is 25th at $43,620, China is 78th at $16,624 (2017 IMF numbers). The USA is 11th at $59,495.

It's similar in the UK. Wales and Scotland made the switch almost a decade ago, England followed a few years later. You can still buy a disposable plastic bag for 5p, but you don't get one for free. Plastic bag usage dropped 85% since that law was introduced. Here, most people take reuseable bags (not the low-quality ones that shops sell at the checkout, something a bit more sturdy). A lot of companies have realised that this is a good marketing opportunity and now hand out sturdy canvas bags at recruiting events and similar.

Since we're playing that game, I live in a country that banned free single-use bags. You can still buy them, but they're 5p each. I occasionally see someone buy one, but it's very rare and plastic bag usage has dropped 85% since this law was introduced, after decades of usage increasing year-on-year.

Oh, and while most shops do sell thicker plastic bags that you can trade in for a replacement when they wear out, most people here carry their shopping in something a bit more sturdy (fabric, canvas or higher-quality plastic bags).

The USA started phasing out incandescent lightbulbs about 10 years after I replaced all of the ones in my house with brighter (and significantly lower power) CFLs, which saved me about as much money in electricity during their first two months of operation as they cost to buy. If the ones you could buy were worse, then that says a lot more about your local supply chain and access to modern technology than it does about the regulation.

As those bulbs die, I'm replacing them with LEDs, which are a bit brighter for around a quarter to a third of the power (around 10% of an equivalent incandescent). It's much less of an electricity saving - going from 60W to 12W makes more of a difference than going from 12W to 4W - but it's still probably a cost saving over the course of 1-2 years and they're expected to last at least 5-10.

That sounds like it's only a problem if you're putting unwrapped food in them.

Off topic: I didn't get a message that you're replied to my post and can no longer find the Slashdot message settings. Have these gone away? Are the new owners intentionally trying to prevent meaningful conversation on this site? That would explain why the standard of comments has dropped a lot recently...

And, to make that worse, the stuff that's supposed to be there is quite big, but a lot of the plastic has broken down to be particles of a similar size to grains of sand. Designing a net that will catch small things but let large things pass is very hard!

It's worse than that. In a lot of jurisdictions, the payout rates are mandated by law and there can be serious legal consequences if the advertised payout rates are not the real ones.

You don't know the target in advance. You know where the target is going to start from and where it's going to end up, and you probably know when it's going to start. You don't know what the atmospheric conditions at the time are going to be and how they're going to affect speed and trajectory.

At the speeds that these things travel, there's no such thing as a near miss. If your interceptor explodes a couple of metres away, then by the time the explosion reaches the target's position at the time of the explosion, the target will be long gone. You'll sometimes hear this kind of interceptor (including air-to-air missiles) referred to as 'hitiles' (which is a horrible word and, thankfully, seems to be going out of fashion) for this reason.

Once you can actually hit a fast-moving target, you've solved one of the two difficult problems in ICBM interception. The second one, calculating the trajectory for the interceptor fast enough, boils down to available computational resources and those are relatively easy to improve.

Of course, this is assuming that the target isn't actively trying to evade the interceptor, and that's why they call it an arms race...

This may not help with the other bits of Teams, but SharePoint shares (including the files tab in Teams) can also be used as a OneDrive for Business share. If you hit the 'Sync' button in the SharePoint share, it will sync the entire share in the same way that OneDrive does (things are loaded lazily, but then they're local and they're sync'd in the background). This also works directly from Office, so files open as fast as if they were local, but you get all of the collaborative editing stuff via the desktop version of Office.

At least on Windows, a Miracast display looks just like a wired display to the rest of the system. PowerPoint automatically puts you into the mode where Windows 10 notifications are silenced, but a lot of other applications have their own ad-hoc notification mechanisms (Thunderbird, I'm looking at you!) and don't respect the silence command.

At work, you can often see a few meeting rooms' Miracast targets from one room. This isn't a problem except in one room that you would expect to support Miracast, but doesn't, and is right next to the lab director's office - it's very easy to accidentally project onto his wall display and wonder why nothing is showing up in the room that you're in...

Does it go into general revenue? In the UK, shops are required to charge 5p for plastic bags (with a few exceptions) but that money isn't levied as taxation, instead shops are required to donate it to a registered charity of their choice. This removes any profit incentive from both the shops and the government. It took a little while to get used to, but now I carry a reusable bag, which is a lot more robust than a plastic carrier and still going strong after hundreds of uses.

Not Oracle, but Sun has a lot of history in closely related spaces. The original Java platform (back when Java was called Green) was the 7*, a handheld computer that ran a modified Solaris that supported execute in place and ran happily with a 32-bit SPARC and 1MB of RAM. The vast majority of pre-iPhone smartphones and featurephones included J2ME, which (unlike J2SE) required a license fee from each phone maker.

This is the main reason that Sun was unhappy with Android. They'd been receiving royalties from pretty much every phone to be able to use Java and then suddenly Google came along with a Java implementation that didn't require anyone to pay Sun. Worse, as with Microsoft's J++, it wasn't a fully conformant implementation of Java - it did both subsetting and supersetting, so arbitrary Java code doesn't work on Android and arbitrary Android Java code doesn't work on other JVMs.

x86-64 with SSE2 is just about coming out of patent. That's quite an interesting baseline, because that's still the target for a lot of binaries, but anything that depends on SSE4, AVX, or any of the other CPU features that Intel has introduced in the last 20 years likely have patents attached. If you're interested, Intel has a public graph that you can probably find of the number of patents on each CPU feature.

Most plastic is not truly recycled (i.e. turned into the same material that it was), it is downcycled (i.e. turned into lower-grade plastic). Downcycled plastic extends the life of the plastic and is a lot better than just sticking it in landfill / oceans, but it still eventually ends up there. Truly recycling plastic requires a lot of energy (more than creating new plastic from oil, even from plant oil) and so is difficult to make an economic case for.