Day: September 9, 2003

For those of you paying attention (is anyone paying attention?), I’m no longer getting the wrong weblog when I log in. Blogger Support writes:

We apologize that you ended up with someone else’s blog when you went to login to Blogger. This was a temporary problem that affected only a few users and has now been fixed. Please know that we are very concerned about keeping the information in your blogs secure. As such, we’ve made additional changes to ensure this type of mistake doesn’t happen again.

Good to know.

Also found at Metafilter is this discussion of White Wolf’s lawsuit against Sony Pictures over alleged copyright infringement in the new film “Underworld”. While my first (and probably even second) impulse is to dismiss the lawsuit as frivolous, my first thought upon seeing the trailer a few weeks ago was that it seemed awfully reminiscent of some of White Wolf’s roleplaying games.

That doesn’t, of course, make it a derivative work. It’s difficult to argue that White Wolf’s vampire and werewolf mythos is not itself a derivative work. As Metafilter user effugas writes: “White Wolf turned Montague and Capulet (public domain characters) into Vampire and Werewolf (public domain myths) and is peeved that others might do the same.”

But I’m curious to know what my readers more familiar with White Wolf’s product line think about this. Do you think they have a case? Have the writers of “Underworld” just cribbed from Vampire: The Masquerade, or simply created created a similar universe based on shared public domain characters and myths?

I haven’t had reason or opportunity to fly anywhere in quite awhile, and while I’ll be flying to and back from Texas in a couple of weeks, if this proposed system goes into effect, I may not want go anywhere I can’t easily drive anytime soon after that:

The new Transportation Security Administration system seeks to probe deeper into each passenger’s identity than is currently possible, comparing personal information against criminal records and intelligence information. Passengers will be assigned a color code — green, yellow or red — based in part on their city of departure, destination, traveling companions and date of ticket purchase.

Maybe I’m being paranoid, and maybe only terrorists and axe murderers have anything to fear, but this doesn’t seem like anything but the illusion of safety procured at the expense of civil liberty. The term “Owellian” really doesn’t do the Department of Homeland Security justice.

Found via Metafilter, where a number of people have done some of the math to explain just how many thousands of people 1-2% of passengers really is.