A New York Times op-ed points out that while India's touting itself as the new Silicon Valley, at best it's a cheap knockoff. For example, half of India's children are malnourished, and the economy wouldn't reach first-world standards at its current rate of growth until 2106.

Oh joy, two Microsoft gotchas in one day!

Spend too much time in the world of superlinked social site users, and they start to look like the seedy pickup artists in last year's book The Game. There's the same sense of social norms being twisted into Machiavellian tools. Like pickup artists, superlinkers have their own language, tactics, and a dubious micro-industry.

For those of you who just tuned in, Philip "Pud" Kaplan of anti-evil-dot-com-blog Fucked Company fame gave up his job as AdBrite CEO. But did he ever commit the evils for which he trashed so many dot-coms in the 90s? From the last line of CNET's article:

Microsoft made the mistake this March of offering free USB drives loaded with Windows Desktop Licensing info (best use: battling MS salespeople). In a desperate bid at getting something tangible from Microsoft, hordes of freebie chasers signed up for the drives.

A reader gives some juicy background on security company Symantec's tax debt — mostly carried over from Veritas, which it bought last year. A few years back, Veritas's CFO wasn't doing his job, but he was doing a low-level employee.