This, I was not aware of. Guess I'll just go on with my day.

War department is Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth doing their fascist circle-jerk.

The DOD/DOW have been working on this for a while. They discovered, early on, that the device had a propensity to cause permanent nerve damage.

It's very unlikely the US have fixed that, as they'd largely sidelined the work as a failure. However, at 36%, Trump needs something he can call a win, no matter what the long-term consequences.

The reading comprehension fail is you failing when reading the GP. They were talking about Falcon 9 replacements being two decades behind. The implication was that nobody will catch up to Starship any time soon.

Only if it happened a decade or two ago.

Falcon 9 did not launch first in 2018; its first launch was in early 2010.

The mistake you seem to be making is your assumption that Falcon 9-lookaline development would begin tomorrow and be bulk launching payloads to orbit just a couple years later. Development takes far longer than that. From conception to first launch may only be a few years, but from there to actually being reliable, cheap, and rapidly reusable takes many, many years. Anyway, here's the playing field:

Tianlong-3: Started in 2022. Almost a direct 1:1 copy. Failed launch this spring; they're redesigning.
Zhuque-3: Started in 2023. Stainless steel and methalox, and a bit wider than Falcon 9, but otherwise a very Falcon 9-like design. First orbital launch and booster landing in August of this year.
Terran R: Started in 2021, pivot in 2023. Larger diameter, 13 engine cluster. Integration/testing phase, no launch attempts yet.
Pallas-1: Started in 2018-2019. Sort of a mini-F9. Flew to orbit for the first time in September of this year.
Nebula-1: Started in 2019-2020. Another mini-F9. Doing small hop tests, of mixed results.

(Amur-SPG isn't worth taking seriously ;) )

There IS work on Starship clones/competitors - Long March 9, Cosmoleap, Xingzhou-1 , Astronstone, Project Jarvis , Nova - but they're varying degrees of long timelines, less ambitious, paper-concept-for-now, etc. Long March 9 is the most likely to be fully realized, since it's run by the state-owned CALT, but they're not even expecting to start their first test launches until the early 2030s. And we've seen how hard test launches can be on a Starship-style vehicle (though at least others can make use of lessons-learned). But who knows, some of the startups may succeed with accelerated timelines.

It's not as important as you might think. If the concern is humanity being able to survive the loss of Earth's biosphere, then the enabling technology to accomplish that is recreating an independently sustainable human-compatible biosphere elsewhere -- which is not something that Starship, on its own, will be able to do within the next 20 years, even if it could place human beings on Mars. So if the Giant Space Asteroid comes for us, we'll be just as doomed with Starship as without it -- the Mars colonists would starve to death a few months after the Earth resupply ships stopped arriving.

And here comes Node.js....

"Important for our species" ... how? Trust me, our species ain't going anywhere. There's nowhere to go.

The split was massively beneficial for GE. Post-split, GE Aerospace went from ~135-160B to ~300B. GE Vernova went from ~35B to ~240B. And GE HealthCare went from ~25B to ~30-40B. The aggregate return of the split was ~300-400%. The new companies have a total market cap of approximately the same value GE had at its absolute peak during the Dotcom boom, dramatically reversing decades of decline. Their value is ~40% more than before GE's Dotcom surge; double that of GE's pre-collapse level (~2016); and ~800% of what it was post-collapse.

It's not just GE. Siemens. Johnson & Johnson. United Technologies. DowDuPont. 3M. Kellogg. Daimler. It's just been the trend to unbundle. Musk's empire is going in precisely the opposite direction. He sustains it with a cult of personality.

No. A court has decided that the stuff emitted by an AI isn't copyright.

What even is the point of Europe?

It took you 2 1/2 centuries to get as centralized as you are. We're still in our "Articles of Confederation" phase, and being just as crippled in crises by it as you were under your Articles of Confederation.

That doesn't mean "give up and die"; it means "work to try to get the extremely high level of agreement needed to unite better (nations, like the early US states, are loathe to give up any sovereignty), while simultaneously doing the best we can with the system that we have".

That's what's so absurd about it all. In general, the market has trended toward splitting up conglomerates. If you're GE and you make both jet engines and electrical equipment, the people who want to invest in jet engines would rather a pure jet engine play, and the people who want to invest in electrical equipment would rather a pure electrical equipment play.

This is all about one person's wants and needs, and that person is Elon Musk.

Because SpaceX acquiring Tesla would count as "a change in control", and in a change of control, the operational goals of Musk's stock compensation package (which he just passed, knowing that the acquisition was possible) - things like 20 million vehicles, 1 million Optimus robots, or 1 million robotaxis in commercial operation - get dropped. Only the $TSLA market cap requirement - just over $500/share - is required for him to get his first tranche. And he can basically force whatever offer he wants to be made for $TSLA to ensure he gets it.

You seem confused. Abliteration is the process of removing harmful behavior to a model, not adding it. And in general, the process of adding harmful behavior is skin-deep, as it's part of posttraining, not pretraining.