Snail Spam

The office complains about the postgrads not collecting their mail. So today a bunch of us just went and sort out things. There are all sort of wonderfull goodness, like people's payslip, and magazine catalog, and most of us (namely those who bothered with writing a paper) got an invite to submit their details to the World Wide Who's Who.

Everyone: ooooowww...

Anyway, I got curious about all this, thinking: are they actually scamming people to submit their details and say "for just $14.95 you can be listed too", or, well, just exactly how are they getting money (if they get deperate enough to get MY details from a paper... heck they even got people's name from like their 4th year project and the paper that their supervisor submitted...). But no, there's no money required.

Maybe they sell the details out you know... much like spamming. That got me wondering whether they got my address because I got "sold out" by the conference I entered.

Honestly, why would people pay for that book? Chances are the really important people won't be bothered to read and submit their detials anyway... they won't even reply to emails asking about their research (very VERY annoyed...) Something's fishy about all this. But exactly HOW they get the money, I'm still not too sure.

Ah well, I think I'll just grab some lunch and go back to making silly little GUI to help me meditate on the data...