How did this get marked insightful!? I'm pretty sure the Mormon Police aren't real and if they are, I have no special insight into them. It was a Simpsons joke. I guess season 9 was before the moderator's time. Instead of making me feel insightful, your moderation has made me feel old.

You just need to know who to talk to. I'm sure that for their biggest and best customers, the bank will be happy to provide names.

No, they won't. That would be breaking the law and the whole point of this approach is to avoid breaking the law.

But the bank didn't sell you the list of names.

Trivial. The Mormon Police just have the bank send all of those people a bogus prize certificate for a free motor boat and then when they show up to get their boat, the Mormon Police arrest them and beat them to the full extent of the law.

Yes, you should absolutely get a mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort cable/adapter. Here's one at random: Accell UtraAV DisplayPort Adapter.

If you can return the other, do so, otherwise figure out some other use for it / put it up on E-Bay. If nothing else, the drop in lag should be noticeable.

Plain vanilla DVI (DVI-D) just requires a simple $5-$30 adapter on Macs. You're talking about dual link DVI (DVI-DL). Apple's mini DisplayPort is really a Dual-mode DisplayPort (DP++), which allows backwards compatability with DVI/HDMI. Basically, the port is able to use the same pins it uses to send DisplayPort to instead send DVI/HDMI, which then just requires a passive adapter to rearrange the pins in the correct order. Apple's Thunderbolt port maintains that backwards compatibility. However, due to the limitations of using a DisplayPort socket to do this, it is limited to single link DVI-D, which maxes out at a resolution of 1920x1200 @ 60hz.

To use higher resolutions, you need an active converter that takes the actual DisplayPort signal and converts it into DVI/HDMI. That is why it costs ~$100 (whether from Apple or someone else) and why it requires power; it is actual processing the signal and translating it into the other protocol, not simply switching wires around. You would also need it for simple single link DVI is your DisplayPort where not a DP++ port. Hope that makes things clearer.

No, I'm not forgetting, I just didn't pay taxes or vote then.

Really? Because I don't anticipate having to spend hundreds of billions of dollars of our money to bail out Google and Facebook in order to prevent a global catastrophe. And yet, not only have I had to do that once already in my lifetime for the banking industry, I expect to have to do that again because little has changed since the last time we did it. So, fuck the banks. We're lucky that this bubble is in an industry that is not "too big to fail."

I think you meant to say "Hulu Plus" rather than "Hulu".

Sure, you could have an "open standard," but someone is controlling that, too.

No, that is why it is an open standard. Once it is out there, anyone can implement it and conform to the standard. Maybe someone maintains it and maybe someone is working on the next version, but no one controls it. To illustrate the difference, what platforms does DirectX run on? Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Xbox, and Microsoft Windows Mobile. Notice the pattern? And what platforms does OpenGL run on? All of those plus dozens or even hundreds more. If you want to port your app to the iPhone or the Palm Pre or an Android phone, who is going to have to do more work, the person with the app programmed in DirectX or the person with the app programmed in OpenGL? That is the advantage of an open standard.

[A union] can just beat you when you leave work for the day
Have you ever worked for a union? I have and I don't recall getting beaten for disagreeing with the representative we elected. Did you have a different experience?

Perhaps "open sourcing" was an imprecise choice of words. Obviously part of that would be royalty-free licensing of the patents on VP8. Presumably Google now owns most or all of those; any they don't they can either acquire or get a license that allows anyone to use it. The point is that Google doesn't care about making money off of licensing the codec; what they want is something open that has virtually no barrier to entry, everyone can use, and is widely available on clients. Just like with browsers and OSes, they view this as the platform for their advertising and they want as many users as possible.

That's a bonus. They want the IP. YouTube lives or dies by Adobe Flash. They want a codec that is as efficient as H.264 that they can open source and get into HTML5. Google says Theora isn't; apparently they think VP8 is. Then they can start pushing people towards HTML5 browsers. I bet they could get a lot of YouTube visitors to upgrade if it meant they could watch clips in HD versus the quality you see now with Flash.

I don't think that word means what you think it means.