Fortune magazine–which never met a list it did not like to make–had a solid group of women tech types on its “50 Most Powerful Women 2009” roster, the annual survey it posted yesterday.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz made the Top Ten this year, clocking in at No. 8.

Other women geek types–many from Silicon Valley–on the list include:

Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox (XRX) at No. 9; IBM (IBM) Global Sales and Distribution SVP Ginni Rometty at No. 11; Oracle (ORCL) President Safra Catz at No. 12; Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) Technology Solutions Group EVP Ann Livermore at No. 13; Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at No. 22; Charlene Begley, president and CEO, GE (GE) Enterprise Solutions at No. 27; Lorrie Norrington, president of eBay (EBAY) Marketplaces at No. 40; HP CFO Cathie Lesjack at No. 42; and, finally, Google (GOOG) Search Products and User Experience VP Marissa Mayer at No. 44.

The conference associated with the Fortune issue, spearheaded by Pattie Sellers, will take place next week, starting Monday, in Carlsbad, Calif.

Fortune is part of Time Inc., which is owned by Time Warner (TWX).

Bartz, Sandberg and others will be interviewed onstage, along with Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) chairman and CEO Warren Buffett.

Will BoomTown be in attendance, with my trusty Flip digital video at the ready? Yes, indeedy, so the lady geeks should beware–and I am talking to you, Sandberg!

Until then, here’s a cable television interview Bartz did today on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” Clocking in at almost 12 minutes, it’s classic Carol, with sassy catchphrases and jokes about being a really tough lady, but with little new news–except for her saying she would have sold to Microsoft (MSFT) when it was offering $33 a share way back when, because she is not “stupid.”

Indeed not.

Here’s the video:

It turns out that the person who spent $1,680,300 for lunch with the investment guru wasn’t a person at all: it was Canadian wealth-management firm Salida Capital. It went public about its purchase Wednesday.

Courtenay Wolfe, Salida’s CEO, said that she and a handful of other employees will all share the lunch, which the firm’s partners paid for.

“We think we will be able to gain invaluable insights from his years of experience and current insights and perspectives,” she said. “We think lunch with Warren is going to be a once in a lifetime experience.”

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The investment guru and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway has an annual ritual of auctioning a steak lunch with himself on eBay (EBAY) to raise money for San Francisco’s Glide Foundation. Last year’s winning auction tally of $2.1 million broke all previous records.

Despite many predictions that a lunch with Buffett isn’t worth nearly as much during a recession, the folks at Glide say the pace of this year’s auction is way ahead of last year.

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“If I have any serious illness, or something coming up of an important nature, an operation or anything like that, I think the thing to do is just tell the…the Berkshire shareholders about it. I work for ‘em. Some people might think I’m important to the company. Certainly Steve Jobs is important to Apple. So it’s a material fact. Whether he is facing serious surgery or not is a material fact. Whether I’m facing serious surgery is a material fact. Whether (General Electric CEO) Jeff Immelt is, I mean, so I think that’s important to get out. They’re going to find out about it anyway so I don’t see a big privacy issue or anything of the sort.”

– Warren Buffett says Apple has been too secretive about CEO Steve Jobs’s health issues

Among those who’ve suffered grotesque losses: Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates, who ranks first on the Forbes list with an estimated net worth of $40 billion despite seeing his fortune decline by some $18 billion. Just behind him, in second place: Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett, who saw his net worth fall $25 billion to $37 billion. Finally, telecom magnate Carlos Slim Helu placed third, with $35 billion, down from $60 billion. Combined losses for the three: $68 billion.

“The world has become a wealth wasteland,” Forbes says in its report. “Like the rest of us, the richest people in the world have endured a financial disaster over the past year.”

If seeing your personal fortune slip to $40 billion from $58 billion is disaster, it’s one I think most of us would happily endure.

The same can apparently be said for the PC market. Research outfit Gartner on Monday warned that PC sales will suffer the “sharpest unit decline in history” this year. Gartner (IT) expects the PC industry to ship just 257 million units this year. That’s an 11.9 percent decline from 2008, one that easily eclipses the previous worst decline in 2001, when shipments fell 3.2 percent.

“The PC industry is facing extraordinary conditions as the global economy continues to weaken, users stretch PC lifetimes and PC suppliers grow increasingly cautious,” said Gartner research director George Shiffler. “Slower GDP growth will generally weaken demand and slow new penetration, lengthening PC lifetimes will reduce replacements, and supplier caution will keep inventories at historic lows.”

I’ll say. Gartner believes desktop shipments will decline a staggering 31.9 percent from 2008. Even an expected 80 percent spike in netbook sales, the lone bright spot in the market, won’t do much to temper that. Bad news for PC manufacturers like Dell (DELL) and HP (HPQ), and for suppliers like Microsoft (MSFT), Intel (INTC) and AMD (AMD) as well.

So this is kind of like that: Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim may invest “hundreds of millions” in the paper via what amounts to a high-interest loan. Slim, a telecom magnate whom Forbes pegged as the second richest man in the world last year, is looking at buying a slug of preferred stock in the New York Times (NYT), The Wall Street Journal reports.

If the deal goes through, it will give the Times some breathing room to deal with its cash crunch–it has $46 million in cash and more than $1 billion in debt, with a $400 million revolver that winds down in May. But it won’t solve its core problem– print ad dollars are disappearing and it hasn’t figured out how to replace them on the Web.

The breathing room will be expensive, too. But the paper doesn’t have many options at this point. WSJ:

For the Sulzberger family, which controls the Times through super-voting shares, the advantage of such a move would be that it would give the company capital without forcing them to relinquish control or dilute other shareholders. The downside is that the cost of such capital is generally very high.

When Goldman Sachs Group Inc needed $5 billion in September, for example, it found a willing investor in Warren Buffett but only after agreeing to pay a 10% dividend on perpetual preferred shares. Yet with credit tight, especially for companies like the Times that have poor credit ratings, many lenders have few options but to accept onerous terms.

Mr. Slim, who is said to be worth $60 billion, already had a 6.4% stake as of the end of September. The value of the investment has dropped by more than half…since then and is now worth about $60 million. At the time of the investment, a spokesman for Mr. Slim said the 68-year-old billionaire simply saw an opportunity for a piece of a ‘great’ company at an ‘attractive’ price and had no plans to take a role in its management or board.”

The Times declined to comment on the report to me, but Reuters has followed up with a story of its own confirming the basics of the WSJ account.

FBN is describing the chat as an “exclusive,” which is true in the sense that it is the only one running an interview with Buffett at 4 p.m. Eastern today–he tends to be fairly visible these days. Still, there’s some good stuff here, and not all of it is depressing. Excerpts follow:

On Unemployment:

“There are going to be more people unemployed…but I’m not worried about how we come out in the end. I mean, I’m not worried about five years from now. Five months from now, can be very painful…it will be considerably higher…. It will happen eventually [surpassing 8%], and we will go on to new heights, but it will not turn around by mid-year next year.”

On Berkshire Hathaway’s Stock Plummeting:

“No, it doesn’t make any difference. I mean, if you don’t own it on margin, you own a business…. I look to the business to determine my results. I’ll say it’s happened to me three other times in my life, too. It happened when it went from 90 to 40 back in 1974, and it happened in 1987. It went down 50 percent in 1998 to 2000. I mean, I hope I live long enough so it happens a couple more times to me.”

On the Auto Bailouts:

“I would drive a deal like I would drive myself if I were buying a business. And I think, I would say there’s plan A or plan B.  And if you don’t want to do it this way, you know, then…take bankruptcy.

“I would make the CEOs buy in. I would say, you know, the United States government is willing to put in X dollars, but we’re going to have you put in a certain percentage of your net worth right along with us.  We’ll give you more upside, but you’re going to lose if we lose.”

On the Future of Goldman Sachs:

“Their businesses are all tough now, but they’re going to get around it…. This time, the institutions got very, very leveraged, and when the whole world tries to be leveraged at one time, I mean, there is a lot of pain that goes around. But you know, the Goldman’s of the world, they’re going to be around. Some of them needed, I mean, not Goldman specifically, but some of them needed the help of the TARP.”

On the President’s Role in the Bailouts:

“I think really only the president can do that effectively. I think it’s very difficult for the Congress, where you’ve got 535 people where each–you know, one guy has a plan for Chrysler and somebody else has another–and I think that–and you have to have somebody who can deliver, who can say, if you do these things, we will come up with a solution. But if you don’t have a business solution, they’ll just be putting money in every year for the–you know, as long as the federal government’s around.”

On Being the Next Treasury Secretary:

“Well, I haven’t been asked. And I won’t be asked. But the answer is I wouldn’t give up my job. I’m glad to help in any way I can, but I would not do it.

“So I think, you know, we’ll know in a few days, perhaps, who the Treasury secretary will be. And we’ll go from there.”

On President-Elect Barack Obama:

“I think that Barack–I think that Hillary would have made a good president too, and I think Barack will make a terrific president. I think he’s the right person for this time…you need a strong, decisive, smart leader, who can communicate very well with the American people at a time like this. They need somebody they believe in, and I think that he has the qualities that are right for this time.”

On Selling Investments:

“…I do sell stocks. Not very often…if we’re going to put the money in the Goldman Sachs preferred or the General Electric preferred, the Mars-Wrigley deal, to some extent, if we have the money around we’ll use the money that is in cash. But I like to keep a lot of money around, so I will sell some things if I need to sell them in order to buy something else…. We don’t sell businesses, though. Businesses we own we keep.”

On His Next Investment Pick:

Not right now.  But that could change tomorrow. Both GE and Goldman Sachs happened on a phone call I got in the morning and I said yes.  It was–that’s that, something like that.

On Henry Paulson:

“I think it’s a very, very tough situation. There are no silver bullets here. It’s not like some one idea or three ideas that’s all of a sudden going to turn around the economy and the markets. We are in a negative feedback cycle. It’s going to last for a while. I don’t know how long it’s going to last…. And I don’t think I could have done a better job, and I don’t think most of the congressmen could do a better job…. I think that putting the capital in the various financial institutions, probably you’ll get more mileage out of that dollar spent than in the mortgage repurchase program.”

The new economy is the Internet Economy. The Internet Economy is reshaping the fortunes of business, countries and people, leveling the playing field for everyone, and driving the most significant economic shift since the Industrial Revolution.”

– Cisco CEO John Chambers, Sept. 24, 1998

When he appeared at our D5 conference in May 2007, Sen. John McCain said that, given the chance, he’d hire Cisco CEO John Chambers for his cabinet. Now, in the run-up to the November presidential election, it looks like Chambers has some competition for that spot. In an interview with Reuters today, McCain said that Chambers–who’s contributed quite a bit to the McCain campaign–is still on his short list of potential Treasury secretaries, but the Cisco (CSCO) CEO has some company. “I think it would be someone that Americans would recognize that would inspire trust and confidence,” McCain said. “There’s people like John Chambers, there’s people like [former eBay (EBAY) CEO] Meg Whitman, there’s people like Warren Buffett.”

Apparently, current Secretary Henry Paulson doesn’t quite cut it anymore. Anyway … it’s curious that McCain would include Buffett among his choices for Treasury secretary since his appointment would almost certainly outrage tax-cutting fiscal conservatives to near-aneurysm. Indeed, it already has. Said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, “Warren Buffett is a goddamned Democrat and he doesn’t understand that a 28 percent capital gains tax would be a bad thing. He might be a good bridge partner, but he’s awful on policy.”

Incidentally, Barack Obama’s list of potential Treasury secretaries includes no Silicon Valley CEOs, current or otherwise. According to people close to his campaign, it includes New York Federal Reserve Bank President Tim Geithner, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and former deputy Treasury secretary Roger Altman.

So, I have been standing by, trying to make sense of the debate that has swirled around Apple CEO, Co-Founder and font-of-all, Steve Jobs, with regard to his health or, more specifically, the lack thereof.

And after listening to all of the debate about it–mostly indignant declarations by the media, making their case mostly by wheedling milder indignant declarations from stock analysts and corporate tsk-tsk outfits–I have concluded that what is ailing Jobs is exactly no one’s business.

Even if his every breath is critical to the ongoing operations of Apple, the reason most use as their main argument for Jobs to tell all, it goes double.

Why?

Well, any Apple (AAPL) investor has to know by now that Jobs suffered from a rather serious bout with a curable version of pancreatic cancer some years ago and that recovery includes inevitable complications.

That was on display when he took to the stage of Apple’s most recent Worldwide Developers Conference in mid-June and looked really gaunt and unhealthy. It was obviously hard to look away.

People immediately reacted like it was the end of the world–which is no surprise given Apple’s rabid following–and began to suddenly acquire instant medical degrees and diagnose Jobs on the spot.

In its typically secretive style, Apple did not help matters by throwing out a thin gruel of information and noting it was only a common bug.

Of course, that felt like a bigger whopper than usual–even if he did, in fact, also have a cold, it kind of begged the question of what accounted for the rest of his haggard appearance.

In any case, the chatter went on and on, right up until the most recent quarterly earnings call when Apple’s CFO said, when asked that Jobs’s health, that it was a “private matter.”

Immediately, that sent the debate into a frenzy, as armchair word detectives went into overdrive about exactly what that meant. (Personally, I think it meant that Apple was saying Jobs’s health was a private matter.)

This weekend, the noise level reached a quantum level after Jobs made a can’t-make-this-up statement to New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, who was inquiring as to Jobs’s well-being:

“This is Steve Jobs. You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.”

Now that just cracked me up, given all that had gone on before, although some were once again indignant over the gall of a major company CEO making such a statement.

Obviously, they have never met or heard Jobs, who is well known for doing such things pretty much all the time.

And that’s the problem here and my main argument for leaving him be:

1) As I said, Apple investors who have not figured Jobs’s precarious health–after a round with any kind of cancer–into their investment strategies about Apple going forward need some serious reality medication themselves.

Guess what? Jobs has been really sick and it means he is going to have a harder time with any kind of infection or complication for the rest of his life, and he will likely be more delicate than someone who has not had cancer.

By the way, the take-away from the Nocera article and an earlier one last week in the New York Times was that Jobs had been quite ill, but not life-threateningly ill. Which was Jobs’s way of getting out the news.

2) Jobs is one of the most important CEOs, in relation to his company, around. (Warren Buffett, who did choose to reveal all when he was sick, is the other.) And that’s another thing investors should be figuring into their calculations on the worth of the stock.

As Jobs himself said in a famous commencement speech to Stanford University: “No one wants to die. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.”

You don’t have to get as dramatic as all that to know that when you are talking about such a charismatic and critical CEO as Jobs, any lack of involvement by him–like say going on a year-long yoga retreat–is going to be a problem that investors are buying when they buy the stock.

Of course, there are other Apple employees making things work at the company, although it sometimes feels as if Jobs is crafting every iPhone that goes out.

But it’s obviously the Steve Jobs Show, and investors risk that when they buy such a ticket–kind of like anyone who bought a ticket to Celine Dion’s recent show in Las Vegas and hoped she would not get, like, a common cold!

3) And, of course, we get to the secretive Apple culture story line in every single story, which is trotted out like it is a surprise and we should all be so angry about it and demand change.

Again, have we not been paying attention all these many years? When has Apple not been secretive, except when it suits itself?

Here are a few more shockers for those still stewing about Apple’s secretiveness: Sen. Barack Obama is African-American and Sen. John McCain is old and some people in the country are racist and ageist and may hold those things against them in the upcoming Presidential election!

All kidding aside, it’s the same media that wait in eager anticipation when Jobs doles out the often-disingenuous tidbits about various Apple products coming and then hype them to the high heavens for him when he deigns to unveil them.

In other words, the Steve Jobs you are getting right now is the Steve Jobs you have always gotten–on his terms, what he wants to say and when and how.

So don’t be surprised when he does just that.

Meanwhile, Jobs has come to our D: All Things Digital conference many times and chatted up a storm. Here he is in a highlights reel of the historic joint interview with Microsoft CEO and Founder Bill Gates in 2007.

In it, Jobs is quite voluble about their longtime rivalry and also reveals their secret relationship that dares not speak its name (he is kidding):

While Microsoft’s (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo’s (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang hemmed and hawed about what had happened in their disastrous takeover battle that ended not with a bang, but a whimper, everyone else who appeared onstage at the sixth D: All Things Digital conference last week was a bit more definitive about what should occur now:

Get it done.

From Thomson Reuters’ (TRI) Tom Glocer to IAC’s (IACI) Barry Diller to TiVo’s (TIVO) Tom Rogers to Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. (NWS) (who simply said: “I’d get on with it.”), it seemed obvious to one and all that the only way either had a prayer of catching up with online search leader Google (GOOG) was to join forces.

It seems, according to many sources, that the pair are now in serious talks again, which–if they are smart–will come to some resolution, yes or no, within the next week. (You’ll get first wind of what’s what, as soon as much-frustrated bankers begin their leaking to major news outlets.)

Whatever the case, I dearly hope these discussions are not bogged down as they have been before.

Not in the bits and pieces niggling of some complex partial deal to buy search and spin of this and that here and there in a configuration sure to confuse everyone.

And not continuing with the endless roundelay of price negotiations that seems to have needlessly taken focus off the ball–which is to create a competitive alternative to the incessant brainiacs of Google (and if you want any more proof of that, see this New York Times piece today about the search giant’s data-crunching abilities).

It seems $33 to $34 a share will still wrap the whole thing up and, if Microsoft was serious about its intentions to buy Yahoo when it first made its foray in February, that seems doable.

Because, if Ballmer is serious about his contention, which he made fervently onstage at D6, that the software giant keeps “coming and coming and coming,” it simply cannot make that attack from a piddling 9% market share in the online search business.

One of the most interesting takeaways I had from last week’s interview Walt Mossberg and I did with him and Chairman Bill Gates (who seemed about as underwhelmed by a Yahoo deal as possible without slumping over asleep) was the early focus at the company on fiscal conservatism.

Baked into its DNA, as it turns out, is a fear of bankruptcy even.

While that was funny to hear about–complete with worried financial calculations on sheets of yellow paper stuffed in couches early on–it seems to continue to this day, despite Microsoft’s huge treasure chest of cash.

But Ballmer should slough off that tendency, as Microsoft can afford all of Yahoo and it should if it wants to make the boldest case possible that it will compete with Google.

As for Yahoo, both Yang and President Sue Decker are to be lauded for showing up to answer Walt’s questions (and one by me via remote video about leadership, which neither actually did answer) about the company and its future.

Their sincerity and love of Yahoo and its products and people was clear and even touching, making it clear that companies are a true reflection of its leaders.

But, while making good points about the he-said-she-said nature of the past Microsoft talks, the pair still could not adequately and passionately explain what Yahoo is exactly, which everyone I spoke to in the halls was surprised and even disappointed by.

Moreover, their weariness for the next phase of tumult that will come if Yahoo remains independent was apparent in both their body language and low energy levels, especially when compared to others onstage like Murdoch, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and, of course, the frenetic Ballmer.

Yang and Decker need big-time help and they need it now, help that cannot come from their own dwindling energies and that of their much-beleaguered troops.

Still, they also deserve credit for this very funny spoof video of advice they have been getting.

I especially like the turn by famed investor Warren Buffett best, with his “buy low, sell high” tip.

But I would fiddle with that to change it a little bit for Yahoo today: Just sell high enough.

Here’s the Yahoo spoof video: