Being somewhat above or below median brain size does not equate to better or worse mental faculties. One has to be far, far worse off in the smaller department before it actually starts to be relevant, and that's usually because whole structures are malformed or missing.

If anything in poverty affects brain development I expect that it's chemical or in the way that structures are formed. It's been demonstrated that some structures are larger in both musicians and mathematicians and that there's a direct correlation, the brain improves that structure as the person develops the skill.

I'm going to venture a guess that some people that are poor, particularly those that do not find themselves in a position to really be able to make important choices due to financial constraints or to exercise their brains in higher thinking, will have brains less suited to that kind of decision making until they're forced to start making those kinds of decisions regularly. I expect conversely that many wealthy people that have never been poor can't empathize with the poor because they simply have no idea how to do so, that their brains do not understand the concepts of making very seemingly small decisions that actually are very important when one has almost no resources.

It'll stop being upgradable when Apple decides to stop making upgrades for it. That'll either be due to too small flash memory and too poor hardware to handle what they want to do, or it will be due to their desire to stop supporting it because they don't want to.

My point was that restricting access to training and materials surrounding sex and reducing the odds of pregnancy won't stop the sex itself, therefore it's not really going to modify behavior and will simply result in more babies.

Neither of those examples is an analog to human behavior though, as both of those examples feature 'birth control' as a function of the male, not of the pregnant female.

At the moment, in the United States, matters related to the female body are hers first and foremost legally. There are attempts at prohibitions on some of her choices, but there really aren't any situations when the male in a conception has any rights over the woman's choices with regard to her body. A human male cannot cause spontaneous abortion/miscarriage through coitus with a pregnant female. He cannot order an abortion against her will and if he engages in an action that causes one the law calls for his prosecution. He cannot kill a newborn baby even if he doesn't want to raise it.

We were several-generations in before Google released the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1 as their launch phone for Android. That still doesn't mean that a new-old-stock G1 will power-up and be able to use all of its built-in cloud functions, or that one could even update it to a new enough version of Android to do anything useful with it. I expect the same is true for first couple of generations of iPhone.

This is part why it makes sense once you buy it, to use a device until it cannot be used anymore. If everyone does this then service providers, like Apple and Google, will be forced to maintain compatibility with older devices. They won't be able to orphan devices because they'll piss-off their customers. Early-adopters get burned because they pay a lot for a device and have to deal with support being dropped due to such a small customer base relative to the new device that comes out later.

Apparently I need more coffee. The last one should have been Buddhists, not Hindus.

And that's where we start to diverge. I don't think that the iWatch will continue to do the things it was sold to do. I think that Apple will modify the services or protocols down the road and this first-generation iWatch will start losing features as it's now not compatible with the new way the services will be provided.

My Accutron won't need an 'upgrade' unless we switch to metric time.

No, abuse is usually defined by the actual vitcimization of someone. "The Very Idea" of something is not a form of victimization. I'm not victimizing Jews and Muslims by eating bacon. I'm not victimizing Christians during this season of Lent by eating bacon on Fridays. I'm not victimizing Hindus by having a bacon cheeseburger. I'm not victimizing Hindus by eating beef.

I'm unfamiliar with this Religion of State that you're talking about. To where do I go to attend services?

But one doesn't need contraception. sex education, or abortion in order to have sex. After all, no other animals on our planet have contraception, sex education, or abortion and they have plenty of sex.

Key words, "in a few years." Right now my old Accutron still performs the function that it was designed for just as well as it did when it was manufactured.

I don't doubt that someday the paradigm shift will happen as it did for cellular phones, but the evolution of the smartwatch is happening even faster than the smartphone, and even that still isn't settled. I expect these first-generation models to quickly not function right as the software on the watch, like on many smartphones, won't be able to be updated to what the back-end servers need before too long, so all of the gadgets and features will stop working as better designs for the watches themselves come up.

This is a market where being an early adopter will mean lots of challenges just to use the devices. I'm happy to let the technology mature a bit before considering it. After all, life was good before smart phones, it'll remain good before smart watches.

Boston Dynamics has been going a long way toward improving how robots handle terrain. I wouldn't be surprised if they do manage to make robots that can handle it in the near future. After all, urban battlefield conditions are probably a good analog for the chaos in a structure fire.

You can also artificially increase that distance if you're willing to have something of a dry moat right at the fence itself, only about four or five feet deep. One could even plant some extremely thin plants that wouldn't help break the fall there, so that it doesn't look like a dry moat.

Secret Service was a division of Treasury for a very long time before they were split off.

$8 million would not build another fully functional White House. That's probably enough to reproduce the grounds, the fencing, a portion of the sidewalks around the grounds, and some basic exterior walls to simulate the footprint of the outside of the White House itself. It would probably take another order of magnitude to reproduce the building with an interior that even has the same layout and basic infrastructure as the real one.

They essentially want a park on which to do training, and they want it somewhere off-limits so that neither their training exercises nor the details for the layout of the grounds can be easily inspected. Unfortunately that means money. On a bright side, if they want to suggest changes to the grounds to see if they'll be effective, having a simulator on which to test them first would mean that they can both find out if they're effective and figure out how to implement them in the shortest time possible at the real site, reducing construction time at the actual White House.