Disqus - Latest Comments for curtisschweitzer

Re: Culture Haven

curtisschweitzer — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 03:29:59 -0000

For those who enjoy reading a score, there's a wonderfully clear version of the 2-hand version here:

http://erato.uvt.nl/files/i...

For a look at the original manuscript (1-piano, 4-hands), you can see Brahms' original here:

http://erato.uvt.nl/files/i...

Ah the joy of romanticism. Now to see if I can find some videos of Kissin playing Rachmaninoff's Preludes...

Thank you for this!

Re: twdsc.us: @Gartenberg. "Consensus seems the Google Wave is a game changer. No agreement as to what game gets changed though."

curtisschweitzer — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:55:55 -0000

Google mentions two: Email and IM. Now, you may disagree that they are in fact going to change anything about those "games", but they do mention them. Realtime updates and collaborative editing and sharing of content are also heavily featured-- again, while there seems to be disagreement on whether or not Google is going to actually revolutionize these technologies, I think its fair to say that *everyone* knows and agrees exactly what game gets changed.

Re: twdsc.us: @davewiner. "First impression of Google Wave: It is totally not what I wanted. But totally predictable."

curtisschweitzer — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:47:02 -0000

I think the really interesting part is that it brings a lot of coherence to the complex and often seemingly ADD world of Google's web services/apps/etc. As a "revolutionary" service I think its less interesting than how it helps Google make their ecosystem relevant and easy to use.

Re: Twitter as coral reef, cont'd (Scripting News)

curtisschweitzer — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:56:43 -0000

I'm interested to see if we can't just kill off SMS as web access becomes more and more ubiquitous on phones. If your phone is just a pipe, why 140 characters? 160 characters? Why can't I write 5 GB of text if I want to? SMS is great *now*, but in the future I think its dominance is probably going to wane significantly.

Re: Twitter as coral reef, cont'd (Scripting News)

curtisschweitzer — Thu, 28 May 2009 11:27:50 -0000

Twitter's conversation feature is supposedly one of its strengths, but precisely for the reasons you've mentioned it doesn't always work, or provide the necessary features to engender any kind of helpful debate. (Debating on twitter feels like trying to find your way in a dark room while wearing sunglasses). Good call on identifying and attempting a solution for a thorny problem.

Re: Hey Sulzberger, there's money over here (Scripting News)

curtisschweitzer — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 03:05:23 -0000

This is exactly right. We constantly hear people questioning why the US can't be the same as Europe or Japan in terms of certain kinds of infrastructure, but we rarely discuss how different those places are and what sort of challenges that provides. Its far more expensive to build high-speed rail between, say, Los Angeles and Las Vegas (not to mention Los Angeles to New York) than it is to build up the same kind of rail between major metropolitan centers in Europe. The same goes with broadband.

This isn't to say it should be better, but it is to suggest that we should keep those differences in mind when discussing this.

Re: CNBC interviews Palin (Scripting News)

curtisschweitzer — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:17:57 -0000

Its rather funny, eas, that you criticize Palin for "ot wanting to burn any bridges (so to speak) with Alaskans until they no longer serve her ambition", when Obama's entire political career seems based on throwing whoever he wants under the bus once it becomes convenient. (See Jeremiah Wright, et. al.)

Dave: At what point does she seem dumb or unpolished? I fail to see how you think this will change anyone's mind.

Re: Download the major DNC speeches (Scripting News)

curtisschweitzer — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:40:43 -0000

Thanks for doing this Dave-- I'll seed what I can. (Though with Comcast that might not be much....)

Re: Bill Clinton got it back (Scripting News)

curtisschweitzer — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:30:57 -0000

Great turn of phrase, to be sure. Reminds me of a line in that horrendously crappy (but wonderfully entertaining) thriller "Vantage Point", where a Presidential adviser shouts "We have to look strong!" and the actual President turns to him and says "no, we have to *be* strong".

Re: Next stop Denver! (Scripting News)

curtisschweitzer — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:49:38 -0000

As a Colorado resident (I'll be living up in Greeley, not too far from Denver during the convention), let me welcome you to our state! If you need any directions or have any questions for a local, feel free to send me a tweet at @cschweitzer.

Re: Yeah of course it's about the oil and that's all it's about (Scripting News)

curtisschweitzer — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:05:17 -0000

The fact of the matter is, although the West is remarkably dependent on oil to run their economies, those people who have the oil are far, far more addicted to the dollars (or Euros or anything else) that flow into their countries in exchange for it. Remove oil income from the UAE, or Saudi Arabia, or even Russia, and whole nations will have massively collapsed economies-- especially those that have grown addicted not only to the money itself, but the massive excess (the Burj Dubai, anyone?) that inevitably accompany it.

As has already been pointed out in this thread, invading Iraq for oil doesn't make sense-- for anyone. And it didn't make sense in 2003. Big Oil would have been far happier had the United States merely lifted sanctions and economic restrictions on Iraq instead of using military force. They'd be better off, too, even than they are today-- after all, one thing that wouldn't change would be the soaring demand for oil in countries like China and India, which would have push prices higher even if no U.S. troops had ever set foot in Iraq. Keeping the comparatively smaller amount of oil (115 billion barrels in Iraq versus the 138 billion in Iran, the 101 billion in tiny Kuwait or the 264 billion in Saudi Arabia) flowing from Iraq is much easier simply through buying it. The Iraq war is about many things, but oil doesn't really seem to be one of them. (Indeed, reconstruction efforts in Iraq, though deplorably managed by incompetent individuals, have gone almost exclusively to reconstruction).

Outside the U.S., no one wants "to call our bullshit" not because of our military, but because instability in any region, be it dispute territories in Israel, Afghanistan Chechnya, or even the Sudan has proven to be a breeding ground for very dangerous movements. These areas exist outside the globalized world for a variety of reasons, most of them having to do with cultural differences that are at once understandable and vastly incompatible with many core Western values. (A good discussion on this can be found at this link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=.... In any case, military action by Western powers (usually via the United States) are inevitably in such regions-- and for reasons completely unrelated to oil at all.

Opposing the Iraq war isn't wrong in and of itself. I disagree with this sort of opinion, but I certainly respect those that have it. Opposing it based on terrible and frankly ignorant ideas regarding it really is.

Re: Why the Bear Sterns bailout was a good thing for small investors (Scripting News)

curtisschweitzer — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:41:32 -0000

Its probably because its complicated to explain both what a bank run is, how it will affect the average American, and how the government's move avoids that. Its extremely difficult to fit something that complicated into the soundbites that have come to rule the 24-hour news cycle. Your lucid post, as efficient as it is with words, is still 8 paragraphs-- an eternity of words on Fox news, for example, and probably an eternity they have no interest in crossing.

I think the real problem isn't even the networks-- its the fact that people don't demand those networks given them the real story. Rightly or wrongly, Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN believe that the best way to attract viewers is to spoon feed them short, easy, often incorrect answers. Perhaps change begins by people merely telling the networks that they want the whole story. Maybe then they'll actually listen and be useful again.

Re: Today's Clinton conference call MP3 (Scripting News)

curtisschweitzer — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:25:13 -0000

Dave, I appreciate the hard work you're doing on trying to keep the American voter informed on these issues. As I've noted before, I disagree strongly with your political views, but something I think we both believe in is open access to information. That you're doing the legwork to get more of this information out into the open where the American voter can decide for him or herself is, I think, a real service to everyone worldwide. The things these people are talking about are literally going to affect every human being on the planet, and I think its important that they be held in an open, honest, and easy-to-access way.

Thanks for all you do.

Re: Mixing tech industry politics with U.S. politics (Scripting News)

curtisschweitzer — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:16:44 -0000

stwf, this is precisely the kind of attitude that makes talking about politics at all so very difficult. It should be possible in a free and open society for people to reasonably discuss politics in any arena. The problem with today's discourse isn't where its happening, its how. I disagree STRONGLY with Dave Winer on his political views, but by and large I find them to be challenging, reasonable, and intelligent, and as such an asset to the larger conversation. Hence, I keep coming back here to listen to him, even though I prefer his tech opinions to his political ones. Stopping discussion of politics simply because it isn't his main focus would be, I think, a real tragedy.