WTF is this? Religious people not just claiming a factually facist souverenity of all things moral but now also claiming the same about passion, poetry and emotion? WTF, dudes?

Just because I believe in science and reason, in the scientific method and in moral values by what Dawkins calls "intelligent design" - i.e. debating, weighing and reasoning - doesn't mean I'm not passionate. I have a diploma in performing arts, love poetry and music, am pratically addicted to dancing tango (i.e. holding hot cuties in my arms while moving to passionate music ... you'd get addicted too, trust me ...) and indulge in stoic philosophy and mysticisim and enjoy studiing and debating religious philosophy and architecture.

I just don't like some religious facist telling me - or anybody else for that matter - what they are supposed to believe, think, advocate, pray, meditate, celebrate or otherwise do due to some invisible dictator in the sky or some ancient bronce-age myth written in a book most people are to dumb to interpret correctly anyway! Or telling others that they will burn in hell if they don't chop of certain parts of their penis or will go to heaven if they wear certain clothes of blow themselves up with some unbelievers!

If anything I'd say that my likes - I like to call them 'free thinkers' - are *more* passionate about most things than 'religious' people, who simply have found a sad and sorry reason to turn off their brains when it comes to difficult questions.

I'm starting to believe we need a more outspoken movement for reason and gotta go out into the street standing right next to the Salafist handing out free Qurans and the J-Wittnesses with their watchtowers and hand out free copies of Hitchens' 'God is not great' and copies of Seneca and Spinoza.

Religious factions made up of losers are starting to claim to much space in public attention, imho. This is getting out of hand and needs a little counter-action, don't you think?

Yet animationmentor.com works just fine. Why? They offer specific training to a specific field, they teach all around the world, they have scheduled online classes using videochat technology, a tight curriculum with deadlines, they have scheduled mentor sessions with the best exerts in the field and they have anual student meetups and regional group meetups.

What's the lesson?
Don't just throw a bunch of material online and expect magic to happen. You have to take care of your courses and student either way. The only thing that's different is that you can save considerable operation costs on buildings, facilities ans such and can inlcude students from all around the planet without them having to relocate to your school.

My 2 cents.

I'll tell you what.

I was warned by my doctor about borderline hypertension. She recommended exercise and weight loss. I lost 40 lbs, and started exercising regularly. Guess what? With daily BP monitoring, my BP did not go down. Then she put me on an alpha blocker called terazosin, and there was no change in BP. I read about the DASH diet, and while I didn't formally adopt a strict regimen, I made myself aware of the salt-content of things I generally ate, and eliminated added salt, and tried to keep my amount under 1500 mg per day. Guess what? My BP went down to a normal range. (otherwise unmedicated).

I'm not sure how relevant that is in the face of statistical evidence from groups of people, but the results were pretty clear in my individual case.

The problem I have with this, is that I never got tested before/after or on an ongoing basis, to report what my sodium levels actually were. That would probably have been more convincing.

The problem with this whole "stress" hypothesis, is that I've heard many medical professionals pronounce that I, or some other person's underlying medical condition was caused by "stress". Unfortunately, exactly ZERO of these pronouncements were driven by hard data: (blood test reporting levels of "stress" hormones, or whatever other indicator you'd like to use).

"Getting stress under control" is such an abstract pronouncement for MOST people, it is not only useless, but probably does more harm than good, because then the Doctor gets to charge you his exorbitant fee for doing doctorly-things, while pretty much invoking this "stress" voodoo, with absolutely no scientific basis. Absolutely NOBODY, can control the quantity of cortisol and adrenaline squirting from their glands. Are there things that a person can do, which have a good chance of reducing these hormones in their body? Sure. Does that work as a cure for stress? Who knows? Lets see data and cause-and-effect, and for that matter, let's see actual test-results that can tell me whether I'm really under stress, or if my doctor just thinks so.

I don't doubt that stress plays a role in some of these illnesses and conditions. I am just not prepared to accept it at some doctor's word, that their irrational belief in the "stress fairy" is enough to be valid medical advice in all cases.

Helium exists in the atmosphere not because of the helium reserve, but because the planet constantly outgasses it. It's a product of the radioactive decay chains within the planet.

And if it costs $7 a liter, you better believe people will consume it a *lot* slower. Mainly recapture, but also less frivolous usage.

. . . according to Man vs. Wild, "simple surviving" pretty much means a willingness to eat bugs and drink your own urine.

It's an important difference.

Fox News is a right-wing punditry operation. They spin everything that happens in a light that promotes the viewpoints of US right-wing policy. If right-wingers are in power, they spin to the government's favor, and otherwise spin against the government.

RT is a literal government propaganda outlet. They have a story of what they want to tell people happened (regardless of whether it did or not), and tell people that it happened, to the point of routinely hiring actors as interview subjects. (side note: the Russia media really needs to get a larger acting pool, though... it's funny but sad when the same actor claims to be several different people for different stations in the same week).

If you see something inflamatory claimed on Fox, it's almost certainly spun. Possibly outright false, but unlikely - generally just highly spun. If you see something inflammatory claimed on RT, it's almost certainly false. Possibly just heavily spun, but generally willfully outright false.

Example: Fox News will pick random true stories from around the country, overplay them, and tell you that there's a War on Christmas. RT will hire a woman to play a refugee from Slavyansk to weepingly tell you that the Ukranian army is crucifying children in the town square to torture their mothers before killing them.

Well, I have to say, I've noticed something about Russia, and also about most (but not all) of the other former USSR states: the exact same sort of thing has kept happening under capitalism. Things like injecting a mother of a dead soldier with a tranquilizer on-camera when she spoke up during a press conference on the Kursk disaster, assassinating dissidents with polonium, arresting and outright assassinating journalists, sham trials to sieze assets either for the state or for Putin allies, heavy media censorship and the requirement for all major blogs to register as media outlets, elections so rigged that Chechnya went 99.59% for "The Butcher of Grozny", and on and on. It's no different today.

So, basically, the presence of these things says nothing about communism; it says that Russia has a history of strongmen leaders who confiscate peoples' belongings, outlaw dissent, condemn people without fair trials, and so forth. And when you look at these third world communist states, you usually find that their third world capitalist brethren rarely behave any better.

I think that communism, at least in its pure form, is terrible as economic policy. But one can easily run the risk of over-conflating.

FYI: Was posted on a tablet with flaky response. Sorry about the typos.

I received my GG2 as a gift, and otherwise would not have spent more than say, $100 on such a device.

It worked well for about 4 months, then my IP67 certified device got wet, and water got inside. After taking it apart and drying it out, the only thing that doesn't work now, is the touch-screen. So yeah: IP67 is bullshit. The degree of immersion was; momentary immersion under maybe 6" of water.

As for the other uses:
Battery life was good, about 3 days.
Charging was awkward, with a little clip-on connector that goes to USB. (Qi charging seems like a no-brainer for a device like this!)
Integration with my Samsung Galaxy S5 was JUST OKAY.

I liked having the time on my wrist (duh).
It was convenient to get my notifications, but I STILL had to dig my phone out of my pocket to send a reply text.
The bluetooth/phone conversation feature, I thought was kind of neat. I never could get used to conversing on a bluetooth earpiece, but being able to have the watch in front of me with a visual indicator that I was in an active phone conversation, really helped. It was kind of geeky, kind of neat, and worked pretty well in most situations, unless it was a private conversation you didn't want on-speaker, or there was too much ambient noise.

Samsung's TIZEN OS is very limiting, with regard to apps.

Contrary to the documentation, I was able to use Google Hangouts as my default messenger app on the phone, and still get notifications. (documentation really wanted me to use the Samsung messenger app - which sucks ass, by the way).

Of all the watch-face selections available, there was one that had the time AND weather on it - which I found very handy, but it was MADDENING that there was not a watch face that could devote a couple dozen square mm to "notifications".
The audio notification, and vibration, were weak enough that they were OFTEN missed in outdoors/noisy situations - (like driving with the windows down, or at outdoor events, etc). This is why you need to at least have some kind of on-screen notification indicator.

The thing has a camera, and video camera. Just plain unnecessary. Why no LED for handy flashlight? The camera was difficult to use due to it's positioning, and not really good enough to take worthwhile shots. Also, it had a very loud "shutter-click" sound, that could not be disabled. I found it annoying. But I guess that someone trying to take "creeper-shots" would probably not be able to get away with it because of that sound.

In my opinion it was stylish enough. Not oversized. So I wasn't embarrassed wearing it at all. (these companies designing "round" smartwatches, are just barking up the wrong tree, I think).

Fitness: Has all the nice GPS/Pedometer/heartrate sensors. They integrate okay with Samsung's SHealth. Not great, and not without problems. Unfortunately, heartrate data does not show up on the graph. You can get max rate, and avg rate; and there's even a line for it on the graph. But the data field is "--". Boggles my mind why Samsung won't integrate this on their own fucking device.

The use-case for this seems like a great idea, but not well-executed. I really look forward to the time where these wearable sensors can not only get your heart rate, but also detect arrythmias, and blood-oxygen levels. (theoretically - this sensor can do that. But Samsung's firmware isn't smart enough yet).

I thought it was also pretty stupid that the watch couldn't track a walk or hike unless the phone was in bluetooth range. So I had to carry the phone with me anyway. The ONLY advantage the watch gave, was continuous heartrate monitoring; and as I said: the continuous data gets discarded and you only get the avg and max. STUPID STUPID STUPID.

Sometimes, on runs or hikes, the watch would just freeze, and I'd lose all the data from that hike.

If I went in and "started" a run or hike on the watch, I would go into the phone and "start" that too. So I would have a backup of the data if the watch froze. SHealth would then record that I took TWO separate hikes at the same time. Yes; sometimes the numbers didn't agree (distance, speed, steps, etc) - but they were always reasonably close to each other.

I think that most of these kinds of problems just trace back to Samsung's Tizen idiocy. I *do* like the fact that it had a 3-day battery life. But if running Android instead, meant that it had a 1-day life, but that the fitness app functionality actually worked, then I would much rather have that option.

Now that it's dead - I *do* miss it. It is still in-warranty, but the warranty explicitly "does not cover water damage" - (yes: even though it is IP67 certified!). I decided to send it back to Korea, see what they do - will they repair it? (they need to replace the digitizer, and that's not trivial, because it's pretty much glued-in to the top half of the case). If they charge me for the repair, it's going to be less than $100, or I'll just tell them to shove it up their asses.

OH - but this article was about Apple's new device!
Okay -so, I am generally a big fan of Mac computers. Not really a fan of iPad, or iPhones. (tried both).
Given a comparison of the GG2 to this Apple device, I can say: whole lotta "meh". I think it's nice that they didn't try to cram a camera into the Apple watch - but it's still $350, innit? Too damn much. The only redeeming feature is the Qi charging. And I suppose it's attractive enough. But 1 day battery life? And requires an iPhone? Forget it.