obituaries

- Rounding up Google I/O Day One: Hands on with the Nexus 7, seeing the world through Google Glasses, a closer look at the Nexus Q, and all the goodies from Google Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean."

- How major media outlets confirm celebrity deaths.

- Food porn pictures are making you fat.

- Pictures of Asians taking pictures of food.

- Back to the Future hoax separates the fans from the posers.

Video voicemail: St. Paul from Kevin brings hackers into Google's self-driving cars.… Read more

Micron's chief executive officer and chairman of the board, Steve Appleton, died earlier today in a plane crash in Boise, Idaho.

Appleton, who was 51, was flying an experimental fixed-wing plane at the time of the accident.

"Steve's passion and energy left an indelible mark on Micron, the Idaho community and the technology industry at large," the company said in a statement.

Micron's board of directors plans on meeting over the weekend to discuss Appleton's successor, the company said. In the interim, Micron President and Chief Operating Officer Mark Durcan will take on the … Read more

John McCarthy, the creator of the Lisp programming language and a pioneer in artificial intelligence, has died. He was 84.

McCarthy died yesterday, Stanford University's School of Engineering announced in a tweet today. McCarthy invented Lisp, a program that became the language of choice for AI, in 1958 while at MIT and published its design in the 1960 paper Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I. One of the oldest high-level programming languages (second only to Fortran), Lisp is still in use today.

McCarthy said he felt there were aspects of human intelligence that … Read more

Steve Jobs, from his early days of tinkering with electronics to today's groundbreaking designs of the iPhone and iPad, never wavered from his vision. An iconoclast who changed the way we do everything, from how we listen to music and watch movies to how we teach our children, Jobs died today. He was 56.

"Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives," Apple said in a statement. "The world is immeasurably better because of Steve."

Jobs, an Apple co-founder and most recently chairman … Read more

Michael Hart, who laid the foundation for today's e-book industry by launching Project Gutenberg 40 years ago, died Tuesday at age 64, the project announced.

Hart began the digitization project on July 4, 1971, by typing the text of the U.S. Declaration of Independence into a Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois. Next came the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution, the Bible, and Shakespeare.

It grew from there. As of March, the project released its 40,000th digitized book and combined another 60,000 from other sources, Hart … Read more

Happy 21st birthday, Natali. We hope you're having a great time out there on the best, err...West Coast! Even though Jeff is mad at me for not getting Morgan Spurlock on the show, we squash the beef and get going on a great show. Today we talk about magic noodles, the Facebook movie, and Steve Jobs' impending death. We also debut the best set of voicemails ever played on The 404. No hype!

I can't stop reiterating this sentence in my head: Morgan Spurlock served me ice cream cake on a boat in New York city last … Read more

Rodney Smith, the former chairman and chief executive officer of chipmaker Altera, died Friday after a bicycle accident. He was 67.

Smith died about 25 minutes after a car struck him while he rode his bicycle in Menlo Park, Calif., according to the Associated Press. Smith, of Portola Valley, Calif., was riding eastbound along Sand Hill Road when he was struck by an automobile, the California Highway Patrol said.

Smith served as CEO from 1983 to 2000 and spent 20 years as the company's chairman before retiring in 2003. The San Jose, Calif.-based company makes chips that can … Read more

Jack Valenti, the longtime Washington lobbyist for the motion picture industry has died, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.

Valenti suffered a stroke in March and was treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for weeks before returning home to Washington on Tuesday, the newspaper reported.

As chief of the Motion Picture of Assn. of America for nearly 40 years, Valenti became famous for creating the movie-rating system (G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17).

In Silicon valley, many technologists considered Valenti an antagonist and enemy of innovation.

Twenty-five years ago this month, Valenti testified before a congressional committee reviewing whether … Read more