The Zetas—a Mexican drug cartel believed to be responsible for numerous beheadings, murders, and acts of mayhem—got on the wrong side of the hacker collective Anonymous after allegedly kidnapping one of their members in Veracruz. Now Anonymous has issued an ultimatum: Release our man by November 5, or we'll expose your identities, addresses, and allies. More »

One of the most frequently asked (and smartest) questions about the supposedly forthcoming Apple television is: Why does it need to be an actual TV set? Why can’t it just be an accessory like today’s $99 Apple TV thing?
That line of thinking generally goes like this: If the Apple TV remains an inexpensive add-on device, more people could buy it for less money, and Apple could get more users. Then, in theory, it could potentially disrupt the TV industry — the content and distribution side, that is — more effectively.
Plus, who wants to buy another new TV already? Many people just bought one within a few years to upgrade to HD. And isn’t the TV itself just a giant monitor, which Apple’s software can easily take over via an external box? (You can listen to Instapaper’s Marco Arment articulate something along these lines in his most recent podcast episode.)
That’s a fine argument, and it has been a decent way for Apple to practice its living room “hobby” so far. But here’s why I think Apple will eventually make an actual television set:
Apple sells complete experiences, not just devices.
That’s everything from the box it comes in to the status and emotion that owning and using one of its products provides.
There’s not much special about plugging an Apple TV box or Blu-ray player or game console into your HDTV, turning the TV on with one (obnoxiously complex) remote control, toggling over to the right HDMI input, and then resuming with the Apple remote.
Watching Apple TV on an off-brand display is the equivalent of running Mac OS on a Dell laptop. It works, but it’s not as magical. Apple sort-of tried this with the Mac mini — hook up your old PC monitor, keyboard, and mouse to this tiny new Mac — but I don’t think it converted as many people to the Apple brand as, say, the cool all-in-one MacBook.
Apple wants to be your primary interface.
Right now, the Apple TV box is aiming for “input 2″ on your TV — most people still reserve “input 1″ for their cable or satellite box. (Believe it or not, the average American still watches more than 5 hours of TV per day.) If you have a game console, maybe Apple TV is even input 3 or 4 — if your TV even has that many hi-def inputs. This was smart on Apple’s part, because for most TV watchers, today’s Apple TV box is still only a part-time solution.
But long-term, Apple probably wants its TV platform to be “input zero.” That is, the first thing you see when you turn your TV on. The only thing you need to watch video, make FaceTime calls, download apps, play games, and maybe even use Siri to order a pizza. The only remote control you need. The heart and soul and brain of your living room.
Importantly, the opportunity is growing for Apple — and Google, Microsoft, and others — to become the primary TV interface, as more cable companies test and deploy IP-based TV service. (Meanwhile, the first Google TV device already aimed for “input 1″ and flopped. But it had a bunch of problems, not just being too early to market.)
Apple sells tightly integrated software, hardware, and services.
Let’s say Apple wants to enable FaceTime calls and Siri voice controls in the living room. Is it going to sell you an iSight camera/mic add-on to stick on top of your Vizio and run another cord into your Apple TV box? Is it going to rely on your having another camera and mic — say, on an iPhone or iPad — handy at all times?
Or is it going to make the most gorgeous HDTV imaginable with a built-in HD camera and amazing speakers? Over the long run, my bet is on the latter. It’s not like the 27-inch iMac is even very far away from that!
Selling TVs could be the better business.
Recall that Apple makes its profits by selling hardware, not by selling apps or iTunes rentals.
It may be harder and take longer for Apple to sell 10 million television sets at $1,000+ than 10 million set-top boxes for $100. But the opportunity for Apple to generate several hundred dollars in gross profit per device is greater than it is on the existing Apple TV, where profits are probably in the tens of dollars per device. (And competitors like Roku are driving market prices down.)
So far, the Apple TV set-top box is not enough of a business for Apple to even break it out as its own category. But selling high-end televisions could potentially become a multi-billion-dollar business for Apple.
Don’t expect anything crazy.
Expectations seem to be insanely high for this device, and they shouldn’t be. Apple rarely leapfrogs — it usually just makes great products using the Apple formula.
The iPod wasn’t actually that different of a concept than existing hard drive-based MP3 players — it just had a novel and simple user interface (the wheel), better software, a neat name, and Apple’s intangible cool-factor. The iPhone, yes, was a complete leapfrog. But the iPad mostly applied Apple’s formula to the tablet format that had existed for years.
An Apple television may not look or work that much different than today’s TVs. (Then again, it might — I have no idea.) But Apple’s combination of hardware design, software and platform depth, services like iCloud, a novel user interface like Siri, and the overall Apple experience could set it apart from today’s TVs.
And that’s what’s so attractive about the idea — and why I think Apple will eventually make an actual television, and not just more set-top boxes.
Previously: Here’s how Apple could finally put the “TV” in Apple TV

Things are unquestionably messy for Netflix right now. It is losing subscribers. It is still in clean-up mode after a PR disaster. Its stock price is getting hammered. Is is making an expensive bet to grow overseas.
But despite all of this, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ master plan — to eventually kill the DVD and push his customers and Hollywood toward streaming video — is working.

Netflix said in its earnings Q3 report today that “only 7% of new streaming subscribers also currently sign up for DVD.” (Netflix doesn’t specify what percent of new subscribers are signing up for DVD-only plans, but I assume it’s very small.)
I have also broken down Netflix’s 23.8 million, end-of-Q3, U.S. subscribers by type. While 90% are streaming subscribers of some sort, only 58% are DVD subscribers of some sort. And it’s only been a few months since the big switch.
During the current quarter, the percentages will likely change further. Netflix is predicting a much sharper drop in its DVD subscriber base during Q4 (about 3 million, or ~20%) than its streaming base (about 700,000, or 3%).
“As of today, less than half of our streaming subscribers also subscribe to our DVD service, and we expect that number to continue to fall, given that only 7% of new streaming subscribers also currently sign up for DVD,” Netflix said in its quarterly letter to shareholders (PDF).
Hastings may have moved too fast, and Netflix may have scared its loyal customers with price increases and that whole “Qwikster” thing. But the big-picture shift seems to be working. Now it’s just going to take a while to clean everything up.
Related: 10 things to remember about Netflix while scratching your head about Qwikster

This man, identified as Libyan rebel Senad el Sadık el Ureybi, claims to be the person responsible for fatally shooting viral video sensation Muammar Gaddafi the other day. "We grabbed him, I hit him in the face. Some fighters wanted to take him away and that's when I shot him twice, in the head and in the chest," reports Ynetnews. The man shows off a gold ring and a bloody shirt that he claims had belonged to Gaddafi, but that's some pisspoor lighting and camera work going on there, so who really knows. More »

Robots can do a lot. We’ve seen them compete in the Hawaii Ironman and play in an orchestra. But play video games?

The Bitbeambot does exactly that — play Angry Birds, Rovio’s far too addictive mobile game.

Scientists began innovating with robotics to help humans with necessary processes. Gaming, as fun and addictive as it may be, falls far from these initial aspirations. Playing Angry Birds is a stress reliever, an escape from real-world toils.

SEE ALSO: Meet the Newest Angry Bird [VIDEO]

Now that there’s a robot who can plan Angry Birds, what do you think is the wildest capability robots are yet to conquer? Let us know your ideas in the comments.

More About: angry birds, Robot, Video
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From Ancient Greece to quantum mechanics, or what a Chinese room and a cat have to do with infinity.

From the fine folks at the Open University comes 60-Second Adventures in Thought, a fascinating and delightfully animated series exploring six famous thought experiments.

The Paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles comes from Ancient Greece and explores motion as an illusion:

The Grandfather Paradox grapples with time travel:

Chinese Room comes from the work of John Searle, originally published in 1980, and deals with artificial intelligence:

Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel, proposed by German mathematician David Hilbert, tackles the gargantuan issue of infinity:

The Twin Paradox, first explained by Paul Langevin in 1911, examines special relativity:

Schrödinger’s Cat, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, is a quantum mechanics mind-bender:

For more such fascination and cognitive calisthenics, you won’t go wrong with Peg Tittle’s What If….Collected Thought Experiments in Philosophy .

via Open Culture

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Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and keeping it ad-free isn't easy. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.

To make your own version of the world's most expensive dessert, go to Costco and pick up a two-carat diamond, a squeezable bottle of champagne jelly (they sell an economy-sized version now), champagne caviar, bitter dark chocolate, orange, peach and whiskey-flavored Belgian chocolate, "a light biscuit joconde" (not this kind of joconde but this kind), a gold ring, some pink things, and several sheets of gold leaf. More »

Doctors are baffled at the case of Nguyen Thi Phuong, a 26-year-old Vietnamese woman who says that an allergic reaction caused her skin to sag and wrinkle, effectively aging her 50 years in just a few days. More »

Visit oldindianphotos.in for more photos.

Yeah, so, here's a counterpoint take on Steve Jobs' death, from Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong, screamed to thousands of fans at a concert in Lima one year ago. I won't repeat what he said here, but it's pretty horrible and shocking. It happens at 2:10 in the video above. More »

Boycott, Maverick, Guillotine, Shrapnel, Cardigan, Sandwich, Silhouette, Zeppelin, Leotard, Lamborghini.

Finding your name in the dictionary as a noun is a sure-fire litmus test for having made a impact on culture and history. Just look at OED-approved fine folks like Charles Boycott, Samuel Maverick, Joseph-Ignace Guillotine, Henry Shrapnel, and Lord Cardigan. But there are unsuspected downsides to being reduced to a noun — just ask suffragette and women’s rights pioneer Amelia Bloomer, now equated with a baggy pair of women’s underpants.

Now, thanks to NPR‘s Robert Krulwich and Adam Cole, there’s a delightful music video about them.

Semi-relatedly, this reminded me of a lovely illustrated children’s book called If You Were a Noun.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.





Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets us know we're doing something right and helps keep the lights on.

Data is in demand on college campuses, and it’s putting a strain on shared school networks. The iPad is partly to blame, according to University of Missouri-Columbia IT director Terry Robb (via The St. Louis Post-Dispatch), but it’s mostly acting as a gateway drug for the real culprit: online video.

The report from the Dispatch describes slow or severed connections that students at the University of Missouri-Columbia experienced when coming back to classes this September. At that U.S. school, the number of wireless devices active on the network at any one time maxed out at 900 last year. Already in 2011, it’s hit 8,000 devices actively using the school’s connection at once.

The iPad is the biggest change in terms of the mobile connected-device landscape in recent years. Apple’s tablet still owns the market for that category of device, and it’s an optimal device for consuming streaming video, since it features a much larger display than smartphones, but is much simpler to turn on and hold than a cumbersome notebook computer. The iPad alone was already equal to Android’s share of online mobile video consumption back in May, and Apple’s other devices occupy a huge slice of the pie, too.

While Apple’s iPad may have multiplied the problem, iPhones and other smartphones have already significantly affected demand for Wi-Fi on college campuses. Students now expect strong on-campus Wi-Fi as one of the perks associated with going to school–it factors into their feeling of satisfaction over what they pay in tuition. Washington University’s Andrew Orstadt, who is the associated vice chancellor for information services and technology, says the demand for high capacity should be met within reason, no matter what students end up using the bandwidth for. He told the Dispatch that since students live on campus, schools should “make sure they are doing what they want to do” with their recreation time, too.

The challenge now is for schools to be able to meet the growing demand for reliable Wi-Fi with a growing population of connected devices with increasing technical specs. Next-gen devices will be able to stream higher-quality video to and from the web, and do more than one task at a time without as much of a cost on battery life or processor power. Students two years from now could likely be streaming one full HD video to their tablets while downloading another two equally high-bandwidth files in the background.

Apple’s devices may only be fuel for the fire that is demand for college Wi-Fi Internet access, but the iPad’s success and the rise in connected-device usage seen by the University of Missouri-Columbia in the wake of its introduction is a good sign that as far as fuel goes, it’s the rocket-powering kind.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continuesWeb Tablet Survey: Apple’s iPad Hits Right NotesBuilding a better paywall: strategies for monetizing news content

No doubt, that guy who sounds a hell of a lot like Freddie Mercury was pretty impressive. But Javier Diaz, who hails from Santiago, Chile, sounds exactly like Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder. As in jaw-dropping, OMG, holy shit, unreal. More »

Are you curious about how to make videos but can't tell a camcorder from a coffee maker? Do the terms 'pan' and 'tilt' conjour up thoughts of tv cooking shows instead of movie making terminology? Or maybe you're tired of always being the audience member and want to start making videos yourself? Well look no further, Video 101 is here! Join the friendly Vimeo Staff as we cover all the basics of shooting and editing videos you can be proud of. We've handcrafted these lessons for beginners of all backgrounds, check it out!

"Earlier this year, the federal government created a program to help promote international tourism to the United States. And while I'm sure the result will be a forgettable series of montage spots that are heavy on landmarks and cowboys, I'd like to offer an alternative: Find a way to use the video below, "Guy Walks Across America""

As good as any tourism ad could get in today's citizen-created videos; helps that it feels real.

"The 17-year-old was over in the U.S. to talk to developers and potential investors about how to evolve his site, which he developed over three days in his bedroom."

Collecting and watching video is one task every personal Mac is put to use for. While QuickTime or VLC can play pretty much any kind of file you throw at it, it’s a lot better to get video to reside in your iTunes library. iTunes is the the most fussy video manager, mostly because Apple wants you to buy content from their store, but it’s also your one way ticket to watching video on your iPhone, iPod, iPad, or AppleTV. So you have to learn to deal with it.
Here’s a little guide, on using some of the video converters on the Mac, that will make sure the process is as smooth as can be.

Air Video can stream videos in almost any format to your iPhone and iPod touch. You don't need to copy your videos to the device just to watch them.

It will take you more than 16 hours to watch all of these videos. So, make some popcorn, turn off the lights and enjoy.

ffmpegX is a Mac OS X graphic user interface designed to easily operate more than 20 powerful Unix open-source video and audio processing tools including ffmpeg the "hyper fast video and audio encoder" (http://ffmpeg.sf.net/), mpeg2enc the open-source mpeg-2 encoder and multiplexer (http://mjpeg.sf.net/MacOS/) and mencoder the mpeg-4 encoder with subtitles support (http://sf.net/projects/mplayerosx).

Illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects
are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal.

Here’s a trailer for the DVD release of a new documentary that details the life and times of real life Baltimore kingpin Avon Barksdale, the man on whom the infamous character from The Wire was based.

One of the best ways to prepare yourself to pitch your company is to watch other people pitch theirs. Here are a dozen of the best “start-up” pitches I could find

"The nostalgic Doordarshan clips from the olden days"

Cool description of an complex phenomenon by Mr.Wible

Charlie Brooker turns his burning gaze on Sweet 16 brats.

You’ve seen him plenty of times on sitcoms; he’s the dumb, bumbling, idiot dad, husband and boyfriend who appears useless at everything but bringing home a paycheck. The message: Guys are dumb and women have to lead them around.

A first ever look at the man behind the camera that set off Bill O'Reilly's Inside Edition tirade.

The life raft is called Hulu, a site that debuted this month. It demonstrates how TV might thrive in the Web environment of comments, ratings, and the wisdom of the crowds.

A new hub for Comedy Central's "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" headlines a slate of two-dozen targeted Web sites that Viacom's MTV Networks will launch by the first quarter.

Heh.

If only more channels offered such an option.

Launch your own 24/7 television station

Great resource listing by Mashable

Free online video converter. Convert and download videos from YouTube, Google Video or directly from .FLV file. Play it on your PC, Mobile, iPod, PSP and enjoy!

I just noticed that you needed to have videos in your account to remix them. Can't I borrow a few?