My one rule of robotics (and pointed sticks, cars, crackpipes and umbrellas) is this: my stuff ought to perform in accordance with my wishes.

There might be additional laws ("weld here and here, but nowhere else," or "use the rules in /etc/iptables/rules.v4" or "don't shoot at anyone whose IFF transponder returns the correct response") which vary by whatever the specific application is, but these rules aren't as important as The One above.

There are various corollaries that you can infer from the main law, but since they can be derived, they don't need to be laws themselves. (e.g. if my interests conflict with someone else's, then my robot and my umbrella ought to serve my interests at the expense of the other person's interests.)

With regard to harming other robots, that also can be derived. If I desire to kill a knight on a robot horse, then my robot ought to turn them into a pile of bloody gore and shredded circuitboards immediately. OTOH, if I don't desire to kill a robot, then my robot should not do things that incur unnecessary liabilities.

A quick look and some googling on that was interesting. It still requires a state-level effort. It definitely doesn't sound "simple". There isn't any tech that will allow meth cookers to turn into uranium cookers, and that's a good thing.

Tom Clancy published 'The Sum of All Fears' in 1991. In the afterword, he mentions how it was frighteningly easy to piece together, from public domain data, how to build a multistage thermonuclear bomb. How he was couriered design specs for fabrication devices for the asking. How he felt the need to obfuscate some details, even though he knew there was no point, just to assuage his conscience.

As he points out, it's physics, and it's engineering.

The Central Valley of California is sitting on rich topsoil over 100 feet deep. Before the modern water projects, it mostly grew winter wheat, because there's enough moisture in winter (the rainy season in California) for that in most years. The Central Valley is technically a Mediterranean climate, not a desert (though the southern part of the Valley is technically semi-desert). But the water projects made it profitable and possible to grow crops year-round rather than just in the winter, mining that 100 feet of topsoil for food. Telling people they can't mine a resource like that doesn't go down well with Americans, who tend to be an ornery sort.

An example is almonds. Almonds now use close to 10% of water used in California. One almond takes approximately 1.1 gallons of water to create it.

So: Why, in the midst of drought, are California farmers planting *more* almonds? The answer, paradoxically, is because water has become more expensive. The water projects are not delivering water to California farmers, so California farmers have a choice between a) not growing crops (and thereby losing their farm, since no crops means they can't pay the mortgages they took out on their farm equipment and/or farmland to expand in earlier more optimistic times), or b) drilling wells. Drilling wells that in some cases are a thousand feet or more deep. The water from these wells is ridiculously expensive for two reasons: 1) the simple cost of drilling, and 2) the large amount of electricity needed to haul that water (at 8 pounds per gallon) up that 1,000+ feet of pipe to the surface.

In fact, the water from these wells is so expensive that if the farmers used it to grow a low-water-use crop like wheat they'd lose money. Most low-water-use crops like wheat or corn have a relatively low price on the commodities market, a price that will not pay for the cost of the well and the electricity to pump water out of the well. So, paradoxically, expensive water has caused farmers to instead grow almonds -- one of the only crops that sell for a higher price than the cost of the water needed to grow them, yet also one of the most water-thirsty crops on the planet.

And now you know the side of the story you don't get from the Libertarian free market think tanks and their notion that expensive water would cause water usage by farmers to decline. What matters to farmers is *not* the absolute cost of the water. What matters to the farmers is the *marginal* cost of the water -- the difference between what it costs to obtain the water, and what income they get from using the water. When water was cheap but in limited supply, farmers grew crops that were water-thrifty because the price of those commodities was enough to pay for the water. Now that water is expensive but they can pump as much as they wish from the ground (until the aquifer runs dry, anyhow!), the California farmer's slogan becomes "drill, baybee, drill!" and the almond trees go in.

Not to mention that many diseases were a death sentence in 1913. Sure, health care was cheap. The doctor would take a chicken in trade; but all he had was a black bag. Appendicitis? surgical mortality was much higher. Polio? No vaccine. That's why FDR was in a wheel chair. Today? We can even cure some cancers if we catch them in time. Yeah, paying premiums sucks. I just paid mine today. Hate it; but I have no desire to go back to 1913.

The design of the bombs is not the problem. Getting fissile material to build the trigger is the problem. Even a large corporation could probably not enrich uranium without attracting attention. Unless the book contains some method that Joe Sixpack can use to leach highly-enriched uranium from tailings or something, it's not a threat.

Is "quantum comuting" faster than my pickup truck?

I don't know. Have you run over any cats lately? "That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works".

Just get RenderDog instead, it's RenderMan's best friend.

Until the first time you start the program after not using it for too long, and you discover it's chewed up all your meshes, and shit all over your textures.

Maybe. I'd also hazard a guess at flawed recruitment practices: possibly some cops are none too bright, and probably shouldn't be cops. But then, the same can be said of judges, politicians, lawyers, CEOs, CIOs,...

Well, you're indeed correct; whisky is made through treating the malt with peat smoke. Whiskey, otoh, isn't.