They really should have taken a page from Apple. When the music labels tried to strong-arm iTunes pricing in the early days, Apple just laughed at them and said "No. You'll take what we give you, and you'll like it." They could do this, because the iPod, and thus iTunes, was by far the most wildly popular digital music platform in the world, and they knew they had all the bargaining leverage against the labels that they needed

Netflix is in the same boat. They are far and away the biggest streaming platform around, wildly popular, and almost ubiquitous at this point. At least in North America. Who can compete with them? Blockbuster? Their platform is a joke. Hulu? Nextflix is (was) not much more per month, and Hulu still forces ads on you and has asinine and frustrating device playback restrictions on certain content, mainly because they're run by the media companies. Netflix should have all the muscle needed to force their way around the studios.

What they lack, is a strong personality like Steve Jobs in their leadership, who had no issues playing hardball with anyone, anytime.

A similar story made the rounds last April. CBS claimed copyright infringement on the "DiagnosticPADD" app for the iPad. Specifically, CBS claimed

What's confusing to me is they seem to flip back and forth between copyright and trademark infringement. I'm not sure how either would apply here anyway.

Starbuck's is closed, Almondine is open: https://twitter.com/#!/ApronAnxiety/status/107444218556981248 No word on Brooklyn Roasting Company. I may need a almond croissant this morning.

I'm writing this from the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, right near the edge of the evacuation zone 'C'. A good portion of the people here in the neighborhood of Dumbo near the water have either followed mandatory evacuation or have opted to leave on their own . Nearby low-lying Fulton Ferry and the much better situated Brooklyn Heights are ready to ride the storm out.

I also happen to have the weekend on-call network emergency duty for a group of offices here in the neighborhood (trade into it weeks ago. Oops). We ran through a checklist today, including testing backup generators and going over contingency plans for flooding. In front of me is a cell phone, radio and keys to everything. Meanwhile, the city is doing a massive amount of prep work on its own. Talked to a number of friends and neighbors today and everyone who will be here is hunkered down.

This is my first hurricane. Not sure how this is going to turn out, but everyone here is ready.

Bring it Irene.

Only if you wear it in an ironic, hipster fashion.

Does this mean my MP3.com t-shirt from 1998 is back in style again?

The City of Portland, Oregon will be extremely disappointed when they find out that holding down the shift key and typing "fund" doesn't work like it did in SimCity Classic.

That last sentence is what's known as a "Slashdot Cred Enhancer". It's +1 credibility point for proclaiming that you run Linux as your only OS, and +2 credibility points for actually calling it GNU/Linux.

Back in 2001, a virus stole all my TreeLoot dollars. 2 years of punching the monkey, all down the drain in an instant.

use Open::Innovation;

What I learned from this list, is all anyone cares about is Project Managers. So, who's actually going to do all the real work?

I really don't understand why a small web startup would go with Microsoft. The licensing costs when you (hopefully) start to scale up are going to kill you. There's a reason that all the big-hit startups over the past decade weren't standardizing on Windows as their web platform.

I don't think quite you get the point. Mid-size businesses generally have progressed beyond the limitations of the free ESXi and vSphere Essentials level (which is a good fit for smaller businesses), but don't have needs that require vSphere Enterprise (which, realistically, Microsoft has nothing that can compare to). At that mid-level point, Hyper-V's pricing is very attractive compared to VMware, which is still fairly expensive, even with the Standard package. And when you're already an all-Windows shop, it's an easy jump to make.

It's still a bad decision, because if you grow, you're going to be stuck with the fairly limited Hyper-V and have a more difficult migration path into VMware when you're ready to join the big-boy world. But it's still a tempting deal.