The website georgewbush.com has been blocked to visitors from outside the US, according to BBC News:

bq. The international exclusion zone around georgewbush.com was spotted by net monitoring firm Netcraft which keeps an eye on traffic patterns across many
different sites. …

bq. Readers of the Boingboing [sic] weblog also found that viewers could get at the site by using alternative forms of the George W Bush domain name.

I spent part of yesterday with a friend who’s in the process of voting by post, having received the papers fairly late, and I imagine she can’t see it either. However, I suspect she already knows how she’s going to vote.

Boing Boing goes into details as to how it’s done (the entry is updated with readers’ comments integrated). I’m always curious about Internet exclusion zones or sites that treat me as a German even when I’m researching something English or international.

Boing boing also reports a special Dremel tool for pumpkin carving.

Sometimes I think the sorting of rubbish has gone too far in this country.

Urheberrechtsverletzung bei Online-Wörterbüchern? Open-Source-Wörterbuch mit vielen Beitragenden wurde anscheinend ohne Quellenangabe übernommen.

There are a number of bilingual online dictionaries. I don’t use them often, but they can be useful. They are as good as the contributors, but I don’t take a suggested translation unless I know it’s OK anyway.

The most famous is LEO (DE>EN>DE here – it mow has over 400,000 terms). Sometimes when I search for a German word on Google, I am directed to a Leo page where contributors are discussing a term. For instance, they’re discussing Rechtspersönlichkeit at the moment.

The Kudoz glossaries at ProZ are also useful. As with everything, you have to be discriminating, but people give reasons for their suggestions and that helps decide who to trust.

Almost as famous as Leo is dict.cc. I had a look at the page on Urteil. There are several solutions, starting with adjudgement, a word I don’t think I’ve ever used in my life. There’s no information to distinguish the use of judgment, decision, decree and verdict, nor any comment on the two spellings of judg(e)ment.

While browsing the dictionary I came across this page (German) describing an apparent theft of the dictionary as a whole.

Meanwhile, Frenetica fannullona reports a new online dictionary, woerterbuch.info, with translation and synonym search. That too gives adjudgement, among other terms. Here’s a German article from Austria announcing the dictionary.

The New York Daily News reports that Monica Lewinsky was thinking of becoming a lawyer, but instead wants to study forensic psychology.

bq. Monica Lewinsky is exploring the insanity defense.

bq. The former White House intern and handbag designer had been thinking about applying to law school. But she now wants to study forensic psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. …

bq. “Forensic psychology combines my interest in psychology with my interest in law,” Lewinsky, who hopes to start the grad program in January, told Webster Hall’s Baird Jones.

(Via Notes from the (Legal) Underground, who had it from Wonkette)

I’ve borrowed the following graphic (click to enlarge) of weblog hierarchy from Tom Reynolds of Random Acts of Reality.

It’s very impressive. I suppose one can exist on a certain level of each column. There should be something between Dreamweaver and Movable Type, though, because nowadays I look down on myself for using MT, but whether it should be WordPress I can’t decide.

I feel, however, that I should add a little cat content at this point. This is Tom.

In seinem deutschen Weblog bespricht Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz IPKAT’s Überlegung, ob der Neubau von Teilen der Mauer eine Urheberrechtsverletzung darstellt.

Some time ago IPKAT speculated on the intellectual property law aspect of rebuilding a section of the Berlin Wall.

bq. The IPKat wonders whether there is an issue in Germany of copyright infringement, as there may well be in the UK. Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 4, the Berlin Wall would be a “building or a model for a building” which would attract death-plus-70 years copyright protection as an artistic work. The only issue would be whether the rebuilding of a mere 200 yard section of the 96-mile wall would count as the copying of a “substantial part” of the original wall for infringement purposes.

Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz, who has blogs in English, German and Japanese, has researched the matter in German law. His English entry is brief. German sources differ as to the copyright position of unlawful works.