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Tequila girls are people too, you know!

The Cold fusion conference will after all have no Tequila Slammer Girls. And the organiser seems to be preparing a book. It will be a sequel to Toby Young's "How to lose friends and alienate people" it seems.

The reader with the long memory will recall that the organiser was approached by software developers who felt that they didn't want "a chance to chat up a Tequila Slammer Girl" as advertised for the developer convention - only to be told that if they were gay, they could stay away.

The story broke on NewsWireless. The organiser seems to have immediately lost his cool, and sent a fairly unusual email to the developers, saying:

The content you have posted on your site about me I want it removed. These were private emails and no permission was given to post it online.  

Having you emailing me abuse was bad enough, and I will tollerate you slandering me on your website as well.

I suggest you lot grow up, posting this sexist rubbish online just because you do not like tequila girls is incredibly childish. I wonder how the poor tequila girls would feel if they knew about the sexist slurs you were making about them, but quite clearly you have no respect for other people.

If I find that the content is still on your site tomorrow, I will be contacting your hosting company to get it removed.

A barrack-room lawyer writes

Technically, an email is a form of publishing. If you want to send information that is private or confidential, you have to get the agreement of the recipient in advance that it will be so.

Writing: "This letter is confidential" in the text doesn't cut it. Uttering threats, while satisfying to the author, is usually unproductive. And finally, nobody can self-slander. If someone prints things you yourself have said, the only person worth suing would be: you.

Final comment (added Oct 19)

Supposedly, Russ Michaels is now suffering from Internet-based revenge - spam attacks and other harrassment. If this is the case, your Hunky Mouse would like to make it utterly clear that this activity is not something anybody at NewsWireless can approve of. Michaels may have acted like a bit of a prat, but we would consider that hacking his site is a lot worse than merely being a bit of a prat, and lowers the perpetrators to below his level.