At a party in Silicon Valley last night, a Stanford staffer who had just come from the hospital told friends, including our source, about the "extra special care" being afforded their famous patient.

The specific procedure Jobs was checked in for wasn't relayed by the chatty Stanford employee. Bloomberg News, citing experts who had observed Jobs's condition after treatment for pancreatic cancer in 2004, reported that he might have liver cancer.

Jobs is currently on a six-month medical leave from Apple, but he remains the company's CEO. In announcing his leave, the company said Jobs would remain involved in "major strategic decisions." Apple's board of directors has consistently tested disclosure requirements concerning Jobs's health for more than five years. He first learned of his cancer in 2003, but did not disclose it publicly until July 2004, when he announced his decision to undergo surgery. Apple COO Tim Cook is running the company

Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, did not return a phone call for comment. The operator at Stanford Hospital did not have a listing for a patient under Jobs's name, but a spokesman for the hospital said that any patient can request not to be listed under federal privacy laws.

Jobs did not attend Stanford, but he has long had ties to the institution; he gave a commencement address at the university in 2005 where he openly discussed his brush with mortality.

UPDATE: Silicon Alley Insider and TechCrunch are carrying similarly-worded denials of our report sent to them by a Silicon Valley bigwig who claims Jobs was at Apple in meetings today. Gizmodo received a similar denial, apparently from the same source. We don't know who it is or how they know what they say they know but we sure wish he would drop us a line. We know what our source heard at the party and would love to get to the bottom of things.

Top Googlers, overheard at a holiday party, chattered about Mayer's departure as a matter of if, not when. And in some ways, it's surprising she's stayed as long as she has.

First of all, she's wealthy. That "19th employee" bit is code, within Silicon Valley, for "rich"; the earlier an employee joins a startup which succeeds, the more money they make. With Google, which is still worth $96 billion after its stock tumble, that translates into hundreds of millions of dollars for Mayer, who owns a penthouse apartment in San Francisco's Four Seasons, another home in outrageously pricey Palo Alto, and a large (if questionably tasteful) art collection, including original glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly. A couture hound, she once paid $60,000 for a lunch with Oscar de la Renta, and she owns part of I Dream of Cake, a "cake gallery" in North Beach, as a way of indulging her pastry fetish.

So she's already made her money. And her career? Mayer, who joined Google in 1999 straight out of Stanford's graduate computer-science department, rose quickly through the ranks. A stint dating Google cofounder Larry Page surely didn't hurt her chances, but she won promotions first to director and then to vice president mostly by dint of a schedule of robotic overwork and an obsession with keeping the search engine's homepage sparse and free of clutter. Her looks — blonde, Midwestern, unusually attractive for Silicon Valley — helped her win magazine covers. And she won fans among Google's tight-knit top management, even as underlings groaned about her scattered, arbitrary management style.

But the lack of turnover in Google's excuive ranks has hurt her chances of rising farther. Jonathan Rosenberg, a six-year veteran of Google who's close to its founders and a regular on its quarterly earnings calls with Wall Street analysts, would be hard to displace. While Mayer photographs well, she's an awkward public speaker — that awful, offputting giggle! And really, she already runs the world's most successful search engine, which continues to steal share from well-funded rivals. What else could she do at Google to match that?

It's a good time to leave: Mayer just got engaged to Zack Bogue, a property manager and lawyer who, importantly, looks good on his fiancée's arm at the San Francisco society events she favors. She'll no doubt be courted by venture capitalists, too, to run companies. But if I had to bet, I'd put my money on her returning to Stanford, where she now teaches computer-science classes in her spare time. Academia is the environment most like the comforting cocoon of Google, where she's spent her entire working life. From a professor, a nerdy laugh is almost expected.

Why do so many Stanford Law graduates end up being prostitutes?

On Larry's page, dug up through the Internet Archive, he declared "I attribute a great deal of my understanding and ability with mechanical devices to Legos and similar construction toys." Brin's page has a laughable GIF animation, but the real humor is that he apparently worked on an early copyright-infringement detection system called COPS with Stanford professor Hector Garcia-Molina. Brin even posted his resume from 1994, and a quick peek into the source code reveals a telling tidbit — hidden in a HTML comment, Brin states as his employment objective: "A large office, good pay, and very little work. Frequent expense-account trips to exotic lands would be a plus." Looks like his dream came true.

Update: Like any good court Jester, we've recontextualized Arrington's remarks to serve our own postmodern fun-poking purposes, excising much footage for brevity — and playfully misrepresenting what was left of his earnest advice for hilarity.

Louis XIV, the French king, gathered the nobles of France to Versailles, rewarding them with attention while robbing them of real power. For those outside the Web 2.0 scene, Arrington's rules must seem as baroque as the Sun King's court: Link to TechCrunch relentlessly on your blog and follow Arrington on Twitter, and he might grant you the imprimatur of a TechCrunch mention. Watch the whole speech, but replace Arrington's oft-repeated invocations of "community" with "noble court" — it makes much more sense. What's the fate of those who transgress against his sense of proper manners, or worse, refuse to kowtow entirely? No guillotine; he just blocks you on Twitter, a punishment which he believes to be the ultimate in ruthless dismissal.

Arrington's delusions of grandeur aren't so worrisome — a dash of humility and a vacation on another continent would fix that. What's scary is the collective fantasy shared by entrepreneurial true believers who honestly think they're destined to save civilization by monetizing pageviews on social networks. Decisions made in a bubble, whether it's the royal palace in Versailles, or a TechCrunch comments thread, veer toward groupthink, engender cults of personality and end in wild speculation and heavy losses. The Sun King's scheme worked for a while, but didn't it end with a monarch losing his head?

Mike arrington is speaking and swore on stage after his computer froze. Then a kid tried to help him and when his computer started up again and showed his messy desktop he got mad at him.

He said he was working on his presentation during Bezos's talk. Bezos, Paul Graham, everyone else was prepared except for him.

Arrington just said every developer should have their own blog. He says that he will talk about people that link to him. He also says everyone should use Twitter and Digg like him.

Then he started to say people should stop writting the snarky, trolly comments on his blog. He spent half the presentation talking about we should blog post, use Twitter, and comment on TechCrunch.

He is the worst speaker of the day by far. Really arrogant, kept name dropping. He had the worst reaction from the audience.

Readers voted that I should attend the hearings as a Comcast representative. In true Comcast spirit, I stayed home, just like the telcos, and watched it online at VON TV. (Besides, I don't have an appropriately ugly suit to play the role.) Only one actual network provider showed up — Lariat.net CEO Brett Glass from Laramie, Wyoming — but the anti-regulation argument was still well-represented on the panels, if not in the audience.

The main arguments against government regulation basically amounted to the typical accusation that regulation will restrain free market competition; if network operators aren't allowed to manage traffic and content, that will prevent them from policing the Internet for child pornography and copyright infringement; and that ten percent of users are using 75 percent of available bandwidth — presumably to trade child pornography and infringe on copyrights using file sharing protocols.

The man of the hour, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, gave one of his typical speeches accompanied by slides. He turned the free market arguments against the telcos, paraphrasing Adam Smith in observing that producers rarely meet but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public. But the most interesting perspective in favor of network neutrality came from the Christian Coalition's Michele Combs. She argued that the cable companies would be happy to let the porn industry pay for access to consumers, whereas "grassroots" organizations like her own would be silenced.

Of the public commenters, none came to the defense of ISPs. Most brought up free speech issues. An impassioned "Tiny" Lisa Gray Garcia from Poor Magazine brought up the issue of the digital divide and how a tilted Web playing field could potentially restrict access to Internet adoption among communities, such as immigrants, who are just starting to get online and access media. No wonder Comcast didn't show up — public opinion was stacked against them. Thankfully, they don't have to worry about the average American truly understanding the issues, and game knee-jerk politics to their advantage if necessary.

Meet the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation: "The Hertz Foundation's mission is to build America's capacity for innovation by nurturing remarkable applied scientists and engineers who show the most promise to change the world. With an invincible robot army." Emphasis, and wholly fabricated final sentence, are mine. According to Hertz's bio, he rose through the ranks from sportswriter to car salesman to taxi and bus manufacturer — and managed to score big defense contracts in the first and second world wars.

But Hertz was a man who wanted to give back to the community, and by giving back to the community, I mean turning his war profits into a fund to support military research. Edward "Father of the H-Bomb" Teller suggested that the applied sciences would be a good breeding ground for new and better killing technology, and the administration of the foundation was largely turned over to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Current board members include Wilson K. Talley, PhD, who was a member of Reagan administration's transition team "dealing with policy issues in space and national defense." Too Cold War? How about Ruth A. David, PhD, who started the Homeland Defense Strategic Thrust in 1999 "to address the growing national concern of multi-dimensional, asymmetric threats from rogue nations, sub-state terrorist groups, and domestic terrorists." Which was just about the time Condoleeza Rice was leaving her post at Stanford where, among other duties as provost, she managed the school's research funding budget.

This isn't a conspiracy theory, because it doesn't have to be. When it comes to investment in truly new technology, the real money isn't in mobile devices or social networks — it's in weapons, incredibly scary weapons, and lots of them. I point it all out to remind everyone on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War just who butters the bread around here. Now go turn those swords into plowshares. (Photo by Stanford News Service/L.A. Cicero)

Stanford's professors knew this going into the deal. We don't see why it should have stopped them. It's not like refusing to help staff the school would have led to a sudden cultural shift in Saudi Arabia's most conservative region. But maybe the absent-minded cabal could have asked for more than a measly $25 million? How about getting subsidized gas for the faculty? That seems more worth it. (Photo by Kelly Hart)

The chairman never indicated that there would or would not be additional hearings, only indicated that there may be additional hearings. No decision has yet been made.

The Harvard hearing, a rare outside-the-Beltway event, ended disastrously for all involved. The hearing had many more attendees than were expected, with the room running out of space well before the hearing began. As a result, dozens of members of the public and opposition groups were refused entry. Comcast's ruse was detected when some of its fresh hires fell asleep.

The FCC will take no official action against Comcast over the held seats, but relocating the hearing to Stanford is punishment enough. Net-neutrality crusader Larry Lessig teaches there, and the Valley's Comcast-hating engineers may actually be provoked enough by the seatwarming episode to pry themselves away from their keyboards. And best of all: Stanford would get to one-up Harvard by showing it knows how to run a meeting.

(Photo by AP/Stephan Savoia)