A bit of moving and shaking went on yesterday, though most of it was on the depressing side — James I was right when he said "No news is good news," or something vaguely like it. Still, it's best to know what's going on, so here we go.

One of the bigger surprises of the day was the news that Dell is no longer offering machines with AMD processors via dell.com. Still more interesting is that the announcement came not from Dell or AMD, but via alert shoppers who noticed the machines had gone missing. With the back and forth nature of things at AMD, this can't be a good sign.

On the subject of bad signs, the European Commission was waving another one at Big Evil yesterday — what is this now, the third? This time it's the Empire's ballot stuffing efforts during the OOXML vote that has attracted the Commission's attention. One can only hope there's a persistent offender clause in the Maastricht Treaty...

Speaking of evil, the RIAA was in the news yesterday, with reports on its hopes for universal spyware to end file sharing. Apparently, Chief Goon Cary Sherman spent his time at last week's State of the Net conference advocating for content filtering everywhere from individual applications all the way up to the ISPs themselves. If you've been sharing your files, watch out, because — if he gets his way — Cary will be watching you.

While we have conferences on the mind, it's time to get ready for a different conference this week, as the SCALE gets off to a start today — that's the Sixth Annual Southern California Linux Expo — with everything Linux and quite a bit more. If you were planning to go but haven't gotten on the ball, there's still time to pick up your passes at the SCALE website.

In other news, all the big names were scrambling over each other yesterday to sign up for the Board of OpenID — IBM, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others have all hopped on board the sign-in train. This was good news to be sure — meaning that many of the most popular websites should soon have interchangeable log-in — and will likely mean that the coming weeks will see even more sites coming on board. However, with that group sharing the wheel, we want to be a fly on the wall at the next Board meeting.

To wrap it all up — in keeping with the theme of boarding — we have some interesting news from the Transport Security Administration's new passenger-feedback blog. It seems somebody up there really is listening, as comments on the blog about excessive electronics screening have led to the TSA bringing "rouge screeners" into line. What a triumph for truth, justice, and the American way, though we have to agree with the people asking "How the heck did they not know this was happening?"

With that, we're buckled up and have our tray tables in the full upright, locked position, and are ready for takeoff.