If you’re a Web designer (or even just a hack like me) and you haven’t tried EditCSS for Firefox yet, you’re missing out.

John Battelle’s Searchblog has been the one site to read about Google’s impending IPO and just about everything else search related since it launched, so it’s no surprise that his coverage of Google’s S1 filing is notable.

Bruce Rolston writes about Fallujah:

Comic Book Guy jokes aside, this could well be a brilliant move on the Marines’ part, but only if you ascribe to one key assumption … that the resistance in Fallujah is largely non-political, tribal, and localist, as we’ve argued here all along. Then it’s brilliant. It gives the tribesmen still fighting the Marines an exit strategy and enough of a victory to go home with, while isolating any remaining foreign/diehard nationalist elements, whose numbers are, I’ve been arguing, probably pretty minimal, from their covering population. Now, if you believe there’s an actual coordinated nationalist, reactionary, Sunni-based resistance in Fallujah, one sponsored and aided by foreigners to boot, it’s insane.

The argument that the resistance in Fallujah was as Rolston argues that it is always made the most sense to me. It’s worth remembering that we got off to a bad start in Fallujah as soon as the occupation began, when a bunch of civilians were killed by US troops after a demonstration got out of hand.

LawGeek points out that Apple has changed the licensing terms for tracks purchased from the iTunes Music Store, reducing the number of times the same playlist can be be burned to CD, and has added code to detect trivially different playlists and include them in the count as well. This doesn’t really affect me, but it underscores a larger point, which is that when you purchase copyrighted material protected by DRM, you submit to the whims of the DRM provider, and usually the terms can be changed without your having any say in it at all. That’s why I hate DRM — it changes what the term “ownership” means fundamentally.

So it looks like we’re turning Fallujah over to a former Iraqi general who was governor of Anbar province (where Fallujah is located) and was former military adviser to Chemical Ali. When we said we were letting former Baath party members start working with the new government, I thought we meant school teachers, postmen, and other such people. I didn’t know we meant Baath party insiders like General Salah. It sounds to me like we’re turning security in Fallujah over to the insurgents for all intents and purposes. Maybe it will work out better than what we’ve tried out up til now. It bears close watching in any case.

One risk that Christopher Albritton doesn’t point out is that the new force may very well keep Fallujah secure and quiet, but at the same time let it remain a haven for insurgents, terrorists, and other anti-occupation types, basically letting them do what they wish as long as they don’t make trouble in Fallujah proper.

The retro eyeglass frames I’ve long dreamed of possessing, which I now know are called Clubman Art-Rims, have been discontinued. That’s a bummer.

I was a bit shocked to read the following at Cafe au Lait today:

On the other hand I’ve yet to figure out why Apple expects me to pay $0.99 for songs that can be downloaded for free from many other places. Perhaps Steve Jobs took too many engineering classes and too few classes in economics.

The odd thing was that this wasn’t written by a high schooler who has no money outside his allowance but rather by a computer book author who makes what one would assume is a decent sized chunk of his income by selling copyrighted works. When it comes to other people’s creative work, it seems like Eliotte Rusty Harold’s basic ethical code consists of, “Why should I pay for something I can steal?”

The White House, ignoring the scientific consensus, and indeed, basic common sense, is classifying hatchery bred salmon as wildlife for the purposes of deciding whether wild salmon should be protected under the endangered species act. In short, this is just another step toward the complete despoiling of West coast river habitats.

USA Today has depressing news from Iraq, in the form of a poll that shows that the majority of Iraq want Americans to get the Hell out of their country. When this all started, it was generally believed that what America would need was the willingness to stay the course and help enforce the peace in Iraq for years. It seems apparent at this point that if we’re Iraq much longer, it will be as part of an unwelcome occupation rather than as an appreciated stabilizing force on the country. Before the war, I had no confidence that the Bush administration would succeed in its efforts, it’s too allergic to feedback, accountability, and pragmatism. What I feared most, though, is that we’d pull out before a real democracy was established, leaving an Iraqi version of Islam Karimov in charge. I honestly didn’t think that things would go so badly that Iraqis would this basic loss of faith, but our inability to provide even the illusion of security from day one of the occupation has cost us our credibility, I think.

The Christian Science Monitor has an excellent profile of Moqtada al-Sadr today. It concludes by pointing out that al-Sadr’s main fight is with the mainstream Shiite leadership rather than the United States, further underscoring Richard Clarke’s argument this weekend that the real war being waged is an internecine battle within Islam rather than a battle between the west and Islam. (Not that I think that al-Sadr’s movement is in league with Salafist movements like al-Qaeda but rather that they are both factions opposed to moderation.)