Firefly honcho Tom Freston's yoga-loving wife Kathy seems to have forgotten to pack a bra. She seems over it; Tom doesn't.

As AOL's Tim Armstrong learned, IAC chief Barry Diller is entirely comfortable meeting in the bushes.

Rupert Murdoch, after being charmed by Haim Saban and News Corp. underling David DeVoe.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt explains to Microsoft's Nathan Myhrvold and Bill Gates how his new Chrome OS will reduce Windows to a "poorly-debugged set of device drivers."

Harvey Weinstein demands to speak with the insensitive hack who called him a "stress eater."

Walking alone, Twitter's Evan Williams remains aloof.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg listens as Microsoft's Myhrvold critiques his Bill Gates impression.

Eric Schmidt explains how Larry Page conned him into launching another operating system.

Former eBay honcho Meg Whitman brought her trophy husband, all the better to ask for gubernatorial campaign donations with.

It's a tough world for a flirty company on the make. In summer 2008, media honchos like Barry Diller and Jeffrey Katzenberg were making eyes at social networking companies like Slide, the well-funded maker of Facebook applications started by PayPal founder Max Levchin. Just in time for this year's conference, Slide is laying people off and scrapping its failed business model.

Levchin got cozy with Diller last year, but Twitter is playing hard to get: CEO Evan Williams "attended Wednesday's sessions, but didn't speak up when other executives expressed doubts about Twitter's revenue prospects," according to the New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin, who adds that both Diller and cable honcho John Malone (pictured together) disparaged Twitter's advertising prospects.

They doth protest too much: Any firm that can reunite those bitter ex-partners (and former courtroom nemeses) is clearly a stimulating concern.

"Another important factor that nobody talks about is teachers' salaries," Brin said. "Teachers are among the lowest-paid professionals. At Google, we've been paying our teachers 25 per cent more, but even with that, they're among the lowest-paid employees. I think it's really important to have a living wage for teachers."

Schools, of course, cost money. Google doesn't actually run a school, so Brin must be talking about the workers at his company's wildly overpriced childcare centers. On the Google model, even with teachers at the bottom rung on the payroll ladder, Brin's answer was to demand more money from parents.

Yet I haven't exactly seen Brin standing in solidarity with the teacher unions in California when they've lobbied for salary increases and smaller class sizes. Nor has Brin come out against Prop 13, the bill which froze property taxes in California, permanently hobbling education spending. But then it's been typical of Google to think they can have their gourmet, organic, locally-sourced cake and eat it, too.(Photo by AP/Douglas C. Pizac)

Digg, of course, was infamously profiled in BusinessWeek last August, which assigned the company a value of $200 million. Most of Silicon Valley found that number spurious, but the credulous executives who run big media companies actually believe what they read in magazines. With Rose launching Pownce, a new Twitter-like file- and bookmarks-sharing service, and Adelson increasingly focused on Revision3, now would be a good time to offload Digg, whose noisy community of users is just getting more and more fractious.

Then there's Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini, the chairman and CEO, respectively, of Ning. Ning, long an ill-defined Web 2.0 startup, has found its purpose in life — making Facebook apps and other social-networking tools easier to build. Along with the purpose came $44 million in funding, in a round orchestrated by Allen & Co. And hence the invite. It's a bit early for Andreessen to sell, so we'll bet he'll content himself with hawking his build-your-own-MySpace tools to everyone besides Rupert Murdoch.

Why build when you can buy, though? Facebook, the former college-kid social network which has been growing spectacularly since it opened its doors to everyone last fall, has all the buzz right now, prompting Murdoch himself to diss MySpace. Facebook, of course, has been showing every sign of wanting to go public. The IPO option gives CEO Mark Zuckerberg, rumored to be attending Sun Valley this year, more leverage in any negotiation.

Rounding out the tech corps: Bill Gates of Microsoft; Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, CFO Sue Decker, and even the gone-but-not-gone Terry Semel; and Mike Volpi, the former Cisco executive who's now running online-video startup Joost. Oh, and the usual old-media suspects.

There's one puzzling omission on the guest list, if reports are true: Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive. Smith is himself a former Allen & Co. dealmaker, which makes his absence curious indeed. Anyone know why people are saying Quincy won't show?

(Photo by briancaldwell)