Spam just doesn’t die. Every major mail provider has really good spam filters in place, as do the common mail clients. Nontheless, there seem to be enough people reading – and acting on – spam mail to make it a profitable business. No matter how much we hate it, we need to deal with spam. Better than having a good spam filter is not to be spammed in the first place.
The story of Monastral is not about a character in the Magic flute, but is a classic of chemical serendipity, collaboration between industry and university, theoretical influence, and of much else.
One of the many clever things that clever people can do with the Web is harvest it, aggregate it, classify it etc. Its not just Google that does this sort of thing! Egon Willighagen is one of those clever people. He runs the Chemical blogspace which does all sorts of amazing things with blogs.
Das Urheberrecht schützt bekanntlich Sprachwerke wie Romane, Gedichte, Computerprogramme und … die Verwendung von Schlüsselwörtern zur Suchmaschinenoptimierung. Zu dieser Auffassung sind jedenfalls die Richter des 2. Zivilsenats des Oberlandesgerichts Rostock am 27. Juni 2007 (!) gekommen (Az 2 W 12/07, via Telemedicus). Die entscheidenden Passagen des Urteils lauten: Das Verfahren war von der Ongate GmbH angestrengt worden.
As has been noted in a few places, Neil Withers, one of the editors of soon to be newest Nature journal, Nature Chemistry put out a request last week for input on a range of issues to do with how people use journals, formats, and technical widgets. Egon Willighagen, Rich Apodaca, and Oscar the Journal Munching Robot (masquerading as Peter Murray-Rust, or is that the other way around?) have already posted responses.