Take 5min to read this short essay by Asimov, you won't be dissapointed. Asimov was more than just the guy who wrote about fictional robot laws, for example, he was also well known skeptic. Not the modern anti-science kind, a real skeptic, spelt the old fashioned way!

None of it is about robot ethics, it's a metaphor about the folly of thinking that a list of rules, such as the ten commandments, could ever encapsulate all the vagaries of human morality.

Yeah, because that's how we buy cars and fridges, right?

Sounds like Kryton from Red Dwarf.

I put mantraps on my lawn, why is it my fault if a pregnant woman steps on one?

The three laws demonstrates that morality cannot be codified, it's a critique of the 10 commandments and other such lists of rules that attempt to do the same thing for humans.

As for TFA, what good is a robot that won't fetch a beer? - Might as well get a cat.

>Waiting for a 2+ year battery life which is what I expect of my watches.

I assume you are joking? A "dumb" watch battery life can't be compared to a smart watch. And if you are seriously waiting for a year year battery life, you will be waiting decades (or longer). Of course, if all you want is time/date and maybe an alarm or stopwatch, then you should be fine with a traditional watch.

Meanwhile, I have been VERY happy with my Moto 360 and its 2-day battery life. As long as I can reliably get 24 hours, which is extremely easy on the 360, I (and most people) are set.

The e-ink (and now color e-ink) in the Pebble is what makes it neat and interesting, not the [claimed 1 week] battery life. But I will still choose the 360 over it every time (speed, style, functionality, compatibility, etc).

If you can remember going to school with polio victims we must be in the same age bracket, there's no plague but I did meet a 5yo in the 80's who had mild retardation due to an allergy to cows milk, never met a child that was allergic to nuts. A child gets all the antibodies it's going to get in the first few feeds from mum, after that it's just food. These days too many nurses subscribe to the dogma that if you stop breastfeeding at 3-6 months you're a bad mother, because..???

Rather than berating young mums about choosing not to have their nipples chewed off, it would be more helpful if nurses simply gave common-sense advice about the transition, ie: dilute it with expressed milk, experiment with different formula, do it gradually, and watch out for adverse reactions. I felt sorry for that 5yo boy in the same way one feels sorry for a polio victim but making his mother feel responsible for a freak medical condition is not helping. Sooner or later the kid would have taken a big swig of fresh cows milk anyway.

Never heard the one about honey and botulism mentioned in the comments above, surising but I'm assuming that is also very rare. "Surprising" because honey is a natural antibacterial preservative and who doesn't dip their baby's dummy in honey when a new tooth is on the way? - Yeah, I know, dummies are evil too. Rare as it may be, I don't see anything wrong with informing people to go easy on honey and advising jam instead (my kids had "Bongella" when teething, I don't think you can buy it anymore, it was basically alcoholic jelly, worked wonders).

To me the allergy plague is motivated by the same irrational fear the anti-vaxers have - what if that one in a billion is my child? Problem is, that's the only question they ask. Also there's big money in selling household anti-bacterial gels/sprays, not that long ago obsessing about hand washing and germs was considered a serious mental disorder, hard to pinpoint the change but for the last couple of decades(?) we have been bombarded with adverts telling us that obsessing about hand washing and germs is a "healthy" and desirable middle-class behaviour, and of course every second ad has cartoon characters and a cute kid with a sparkling toilet shoved in their face.

Doesn't matter. What matters is why the officers understand they've been dispatched to the scene, and what they believe they're seeing when they arrive.

Obviously you're able to tell a real gun from a replica at a distance while someone waving it around, but most people can't, including cops, until they have it in hand, personally. You might be comfortable risking other people's lives by making them assume that all guns are toys until they've been shot at, but people who actually do have, as a feature of their daily job, other people assaulting and trying to kill them, probably wouldn't want you armchairing on their behalf.

The solution? Actual thinking parents not sending their kid out into public to act stupid with a replica gun. To teach a kid that when they see a cop car rolling up, to perhaps consider not looking crazy and waiving said replica gun around. This is a 100% lapse on the part of parents and a completely crappy position for the cops to have been put in. I know that you would be safe, because you would omnipotent and know, from a distance, that the replica gun wasn't real, and that if it was real, the universe's special karma system would protect you from the laws of physics because you are A Better Person Than Cops Are, and bullets wouldn't be able to hurt you.

If you're that unable to grasp the difference between the possibility that someone might be carrying a weapon (say, in a violin case), and cops responding to someone's alarmed call about a guy brandishing a gun in public, and having that gun waved at them as they arrive on the scene, then you are completely out of touch with reality. Cops get killed, more often than you seem to know (or perhaps not as often as you'd like?) for misjudging the risk to their lives as they come upon such scenes or make a traffic stop. If you did that all day, every day, and some of your colleagues died doing what you have to do for your job, you might look at it a little differently. You're probably thinking that the police should have just hidden behind their magic bullet-proof cruiser doors like in the movies, right? Yeah. That kid shouldn't be dead. I blame his parents, 100%.

So when they are disobeyed like in the Rwandan genocide, what happens? Seems to me, universal rights are a good idea that's ultimately impossible to enforce.

The land mines themselves could easily be defined as "autonomous killing bots". Unfortunately there are no universal bounds to the atrocities of war and I doubt legal semantics can ever fundamentally change that equation.

Right, because he was already waving a gun around when they showed up.

Volcanos also provide a repeatable aerosol experiment, about once a decade there's an eruption large enough to very slightly dip the global temperature for a year or two after the event, Mt Pinatubo is the classic example.

We have had experimental results for quite some time. Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher pushed for an international cap and trade on sulphur emissions in the late 80's and won. Sulphur emissions were having a slight cooling effect on the planet as do the current aerosol emissions from China. However, the reason the emissions were curbed under international treaties was to reduce acid rain that had become a serious problem in the N hemisphere. I'm not a fan of Reagan or Thatcher but this is one thing they got right (probably because Maggie was a Chemist at Oxford). Thatcher was also the first world leader to take AGW seriously.

Aerosols are the grain of truth in the misleading denier claim that "in the 70's they predicted global cooling". The various "clean air" acts of western nations in the 60's and 70's contributed to AGW by removing much of the aerosols but they still have a significant effect on climate. The clean air acts themselves were introduced because too many people were dying early from respiratory problems, the "pea soup" fog phenomena of the first half of the 20th century was so named because of it's greenish-yellow colour, not because it was thick.

In other words: We know from past experience that sulfur and other some other aerosols from coal fired plants will cool the planet, but we also know that the "aerosol fix" is worse than the current problem. Conversely the same plants will output soot and CO2 which both warm the planet. The obvious fix is to stop the current "experiment" of burning coal for energy as quickly as possible by focusing on renewables, but that frightens some people's wallets so much that they are willing to consider any option that is not the obvious fix, even a suicidal one such as that proposed in TFA. (while claiming it's the greenies who want to kill all humans).

If WP's facts don't line up with your political preconceptions, try Conservapedia