The percentage of electronics at the end of their lives which were recycled.
The EPA found that the percentage remained consistent from 1999-2005. Even as recycling rates went up, the amount of electronics reaching end of life outpaced the increase, leaving the figure static. (source: EPA, July 2008)
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I wonder whether the BDA will care as long as region free mods are relatively low-key.
This'll end up being more of an arms race than it was for DVD. With DVD there was really only one workaround for region encoding, checking the region number in the menu VM.
For Blu-ray, there's BD+, which will allow pretty much every disc to include code to say "Is this one of the BD players that has a region-free hack for it, and if so has this player been altered? Oh yes it has, shut it down". And, joy of joys, this'll mean BD+ will be on even more discs, which will increase the amount of content where you have a random chance of seeing it play on your player.
They - the technology side of the BD group - should have done what the HD DVD people did: realize region encoding is yet another inane scheme that causes more harm than good, and kept it out of Blu-ray. Unfortunately the Blu-ray people were too keen to "win" against HD DVD and ended up giving Hollywood pretty much everything they wanted, knowing full well it'd damage the experience for end-users. So we have BD+, and we still have region encoding.
This is one major reason why I don't like Sony.
So if Hollywood was so keen on region coding why did any of them ever support HD DVD?
Does Blu-ray require content providers to put a region code on a disc? If I wanted to release a movie on Blu-ray would I be forced to release 3 versions if I didn't want to?
Mojo - because of the terrible dark secret of HD DVD. It worked. It was, capacity aside, the technically superior format, having at the time a whole bunch of features that Blu-ray didn't and, even today, the vast majority of Blu-ray players (by model - naturally, because everyone buys the PS3, in terms of installed base the majority can) don't. And not everyone at Hollywood is an utter imbecile which meant many realized that BD's touted advantages in the hacker-proof field were not as positive as they were made out to be.
The two formats really ended up trying to appeal by going in radically different directions. HD DVD tried to be as versatile as possible, both to create a platform that allowed publishers to add a lot of value to each disk and make it a genuine step-up from DVD in every area, not just quality, and also creating a platform that would neatly scale well when the inevitable transfer from hard media to downloads would come about.
Blu-ray focussed on copy-control issues, listening to Hollywood's concerns that HD meant the death of cinema and, thus, that piracy would invade every area of revenue, not just DVD sales which are little more than sugar in terms of how you build revenue to fund a movie. The problem, for me, is that Blu-ray went too far. Things that should have been mandatory - such as managed copy - were made optional. Things that should be optional - such as AACS - were made mandatory. Options were given to publishers that can and will cause hardship for customers. Essentially, the only way Blu-ray - in its present form - can work is if everyone buys the PS3 and no other model of Blu-ray player, because it's safe to say Hollywood will always make BD+ work with the most popular player.
So, in practical terms, until the online systems are settled and standardized, there's no reliable HD media format available right now that everyone supports. And that's a crying shame.
Region-free players? Prepare for everything to get worse before it gets better. About the best we can hope for now is for things to get so bad, they'll be forced to announce "Blu-ray lite", with the excesses of the access controls removed, at some point in the near future.