Slate published its 2005 Slate 60, the leaderboard for "competitive philanthropy." As always, the list of the top charitable donations and pledges includes a good showing from the tech industry.

MSN is a swamp, and Microsoft is flushing it out. MSN director David Cole sent a company memo announcing his retirement this morning. The senior VP ran the network since 2001; since then, its search market share has slowly drifted to the bottom.

Rule 1 in snarky media coverage of Microsoft: Always symbolize money in the headline.

Our geeky sister was one of over 50 techies invited to Microsoft Search Champs V4. Attendees in the company's Redmond base heard about the new technologies in Vista. And the "Evil Empire" was quite kind to its visitors. Gina says they paid her expenses and "wined, dined and showered me with gifts," but with no quid pro quo that she had to write about it. But she did — as fairly as she could.

A big name blogger and Microsoft employee was recently overheard at an industry event defending his employer when it was called the "Evil Empire." He said, "Two kids from Stanford stole our evil, and now we want it back."

"My tax return in the United States has to be kept on a special computer because their normal computers can't deal with the numbers," said Bill Gates in Lisbon.

Now this is ridiculous. Fortune Magazine lists Yahoo and Microsoft in its list of "100 Best Companies to Work For". But no Google. Do the 18 massage therapists at the Googleplex count for nothing? Even more ludicrous: Fortune assigns weighting to work-life balance, a measure by which Google presumably scores poorly. As if anyone cares about balance in an up market. I always thought, in Silicon Valley, work-life balance was a polite term for unemployment.

Culled from Business 2.0, here are the dumbest moves made by the Silicon Valley geniuses.