Back from a week at the beach. Brilliant. We loved watching the home-spun fireworks all up and down the beach, with the official celebration off the pier in the distance. Some photos.

The blog legitimacy debate continues. Are blogs are derivative or a primary source? Does it matter? By commenting about a blog post about blogs linking to the New York Times, have I just proven the point? Which point?

Here’s a local version of the same debate.

It’s worth noting that futures on the US Treasury bonds, a “derivative,” now trade hundreds of times the volume of the actual securities they’re notionally based on. Easier to use, more liquid, faster… that’s what folks prefer, and that’s where the critical mass ends up.

Meanwhile, pleading conventional-magazine-hood, Nick Denton’s Gawker Media hunkers down, shuffles its deck and drops a few cards.

And a crusading blog is apparently blacklisted by the Governor of Kentucky.

In the net neutrality debate, I’m firmly in the “more internet good, speedbumps bad” camp. Which is to say, I’ve got a net neutrality sticker on my laptop.

Yes, stuff like this “bugged router” sure look scary.

The other side argues that, with customers paying $40 a month for broadband, who will be incented to pay to expand that pipe? Mike Turk, who I like a lot but appears to be on the other side of this issue, cites a WSJ piece citing a $560 a month “cost of future broadband”

But, when bandwidth consumption gets to this volume, won’t the companies providing the last mile just charge consumers for the extra bandwidth? Charge per gigabyte per month and then let the consumer decide what she watches? Works well enough for water, measuring volume without putting any kind of extra filters in to determine what brand of water is being drunk and from what source.