Things that annoy me, part n:

In a spin-off discussion from the Recent Unpleasantness, Raymond E. Feist took somebody to task from quoting from a private SFWA group without the posters' permission:

Irrespective of how many members may have access into a private area, it is still a private area. One of the tenants of SFF.net is that private member areas exist so that those members can discuss, off-the-record, matters of their own, personal and collective, concern. Violating that trust by posting anything from within that site, irrespective of motivation, is a violation of your users agreement, and an insult to the collective membership, no matter if they agree or disagree with your position, and is likely to get you tossed off the board.

Feist's position seems reasonable enough to me, except for one important detail: a 'tenant' is somebody who rents real estate. An important principle/ideal/etc is a tenet. I see this one far too often, but coming from a well-known author... gah!

Holy crap

News.com reports: Steve Irwin has died after taking a stingray barb through the chest. Not the first time his death has been reported, and I'm always sceptical of the Murdoch press, but the Courier-Mail seems to be pretty sure it really happened.

I'm not going to make any tasteless jokes about this one. I wasn't a 'Crocodile Hunter' fan, but while the man may not have had a lot of sense*, he was passionate about wildlife and willing to put his money where his mouth was.

And as bad as it was, I have fond memories of watching the Crocodile Hunter movie.

*AFAIK, most people who get stung by stingrays have accidentally stepped on them, and so get stung in the legs, which is nasty but unlikely to be fatal. This is because accidentally stepping on one is about the only way most people would annoy a stingray. Given Irwin's usual style of interaction, I can quite believe he had his torso dangerously close to one. :-(

While I'm posting depressing news

LA Times/WaPo via SMH:

As new figures show the numbers of civilian deaths in Iraq spiralling sharply upwards, the nation's most influential moderate Shiite leader has abandoned attempts to restrain his followers, admitting there is nothing he can do to prevent the country sliding towards civil war. At the same time, a coalition of 300 mainly Sunni tribal leaders has demanded the release of Saddam Hussein so that he can reclaim the presidency. They also called for armed resistance against US-led foreign forces.

( Read more... )

Meanwhile, for those who missed it, coalition deaths since the beginning of the invasion currently stand at 2877, with that number (which AFAIK doesn't include 'civilian' security contractors) increasing at about two a day, it will very shortly exceed the total number of people who died in the 9/11 attacks.

Edit: And Colin Thiele has also died. Probably won't mean a thing to the non-Aussies, but I loved his books as a kid :-(