The Register and Cnet are reporting that the URL hell.com is scheduled to go up for auction today. They go on to estimate that the domain will go for around $8 million dollars. Personally, I'm going to miss the old hell.com.

Ubuntu 6.10, or Edgy Eft has been released. It sports GNOME 2.16, Firefox 2.0 and a ton of other new features including some new eye candy. As of 10 a.m. EST the download servers are a bit slow, but that's what torrents are for. One item of note, the standard Shipit process has changed. At least for now, you can only get free copies of 6.06 LTS. If you want 6.10 you will have to pony up some cash.

As if the normal /.-induced paranoia was not at the orange alert level, I just read in an interesting article in the Lansing State Journal about Caller ID scammers. Have I not been keeping up on my paranoia or is this something relatively new?

Ligers look out. Scientists have unearthed fossils suggesting the presence of "Killer Kangaroos" in the Australia. The article goes on to mention that evidence was also found of a "carnivorous, giant 10-foot-tall, 881-pound duck-like bird." The real question is what wins in a fight, a killer kangaroo, a giant duck, or a liger?

It seems to me that everyone who has a clue hates the current state of patent, copyright, DRM and every other restrictive thing being done to technology today. So why does it fly? Why do people buy and put up with this garbage? Is this just the /. effect happening to me? By that I mean: read something on /.; get really pissed; tell the other geeks in my office about it; get pissed together; install another linux distro on my windows machine using VMware; feel better knowing they can't take linux away from me; completely forget about the article and never experience its results; go back to using windows because i have to; check the /. rss on firefox; repeat.

Has it always been like this? Back in the 80's were people talking about how all of your 5 ¼ disks are being replaced by some overpriced hard-floppy disk that was wasting so much plastic that the earth would be covered in it from the millions of copies of leisure suit larry? I don't even know if I should hope that was the case or not. All this spinning seems to have separated me from my sensibility. I better go and install Vista while I still can.

The self-titled "Last Angry Young Man" has made it six days on his diet consisting entirely of monkey chow. In his quest to avoid cooking, dishes, and waiting in checkout lines, the author of "The Monkey Chow Diaries" has decided to go a week eating nothing but, "pelletized, nutritionally complete food like puppies and monkeys do." His odyssey has even prompted the monkey chow manufactures, ZuPreem, to publish a product description that specifies "non-human" primates. His blog details the dietary odyssey, poo and all.

Every time I get frustrated with another /. article on DRM, another piece of software that does not work the way it use to before big business bought innovation, or another piece of hardware that stops working because the outsourced capacitors are melting again, I just swivel in my desk chair and take a look at my bookshelf. This is usually followed by a sigh of relief because regardless of what they do to everything I find enjoyable unlocked by a keyboard and mouse, they can't take my books away. They can't DRM them up so I have to pay each time I want to delve a little deeper into P.K. Dick's madness, walk the surface of Mars with Bradbury, or experience a post-apocalyptic Earth with Walter Miller.

At this point, a future where they charge every time we flip a page in a book is a long ways away. As long as paper is easier to read than some display technology, books will be safe. Even if this technology is more expensive than paper, we've all seen what publishers will do just to suck a few more bucks out of the consumer. The marketing will be great, it always is. Apple will have shadow people dancing around a library, downloading and reading books on their iFlip at the speed of light. But don't be fooled. This library is run by blockbuster and even though the downloads are free, each flip after 10 will cost you.

So maybe someday soon I'll have to give up on the newest graphics and quad core processors when I finally unplug my billboard/coin-slot pc, but at least I'll have something to fill up the nights and early mornings, something different than the same old familiar, something I only have to pay for once.