For a full list of today's Salon Technology stories, go to the Technology home page. There are a few ways to evade spammers, but most will limit your reception of other mail too.
Legitimate businesses threaten our e-mail system with their misguided marketing efforts.
As for making that information publicly available, your question actually is a classic example of the general misunderstanding I was just talking about. Just by virtue of being patented, the information is put into the public domain. And all that will be put online before the end of the year. But by putting all that data on the Internet, everybody will be able to come and use our computer power to perform their searches. So even though the information has been publicly available right along, there was a barrier in terms of computer power.