— Andy Kessler, July 16, 2010

Although best known for his 10 national championships in a 12-year span at UCLA, in Indiana — at least in my little world — he was better known as a gentleman, a teacher, a leader. That’s what our fathers and coaches — and my grandfather who was captain of the Indiana University basketball team in 1942-43 — told us.

Later, when I met my wife, I learned she had attended the same tiny grammar school as John Wooden — Centerton Elementary. She had also, no doubt like so many other Hoosier students, written her eighth grade term paper about him. She loved him not for his basketball savvy but for his character.

Upon Wooden’s graduation from Centerton, his father Joshua’s gift to him was a list of maxims:

Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.

Wooden kept the list with him for the rest of his life. Literally, and figuratively. He lived the list.

UPDATE: See this wonderful remembrance from Rich Karlgaard noting the “astonishing” parallel lives of John Wooden and Ronald Reagan.

— John H. Cochrane, May 18, 2010, in a terrific commentary on the Greek crisis and the European Union

What we have here is “mission creep.” First, Net Neutrality was about an “open Internet” where no websites were blocked or degraded. But as soon as the whole industry agreed to these perfectly reasonable Open Web principles, Net Neutrality became an exercise in micromanagement of network technologies and broadband business plans. Now, Louderback wants to go even further and regulate prices. But there’s still more! He also wants to regulate the products that broadband providers can offer.

— Andy Kessler, May 8, 2010

A Net Neutrality regime will not make the Internet more “open.” The Internet is already very open. More people create and access more content and applications than ever before. And with the existing Four Principles in place, the Internet will remain open. In fact, a Net Neutrality regime could close off large portions of the Internet for many consumers. By intruding in technical infrastructure decisions and discouraging investment, Net Neutrality could decrease network capacity, connectivity, and robustness; it could increase prices; it could slow the cycle of innovation; and thus shut the window to the Web on millions of consumers. Net Neutrality is not about openness. It is far more accurate to say it is about closing off experimentation, innovation, and opportunity.

China is nowhere near closing for business as it did five centuries ago. One doubts, however, that the Ming emperor knew he was dooming his people for the next couple hundred years, depriving them of the goods and ideas of the coming Industrial Revolution. China’s present day leaders know this history. They know technology. They know turning away from global trade and communication would doom them far more surely than would an open Internet.

In addition to reaching a milestone for peak traffic served this past Friday, the Akamai network also hit a new peak during the same day for video streaming, as well as a near high for total requests served.

• With online interest in major sporting events – including professional golf and baseball – helping to drive the surge in demand, Akamai delivered its largest ever traffic for high definition video streaming.
• Over the course of the day, Akamai logged over 500 billion requests for content, a sum equal to serving content to every human once every 20 minutes
• At peak, Akamai supported over 12 million requests per second – a rate roughly equivalent to serving content to the entire population of the United States every 30 seconds.