It will happen. The question is "Will it continue to be legal?".

Why would I want a workalike of Windows? (I haven't used it for over two decades now, so I'm not sure. Linux is superior to the MSWindows that I remember...and it doesn't force updates at their convenience rather than mine.)

You don't have a solid sphere, you have collectors in multiple orbits differing not only in height, but also in angle WRT the plane of rotation of the star. You build it piece by piece, and it's working from the time the first piece is put into orbit. But I really prefer topopolis, which is also built piece by piece, and is easier to get around in. (In the Dyson sphere variation all the pieces need to be separate...which is a real problem. Of course, one could do a cross between the two, and have multiple topopolis instances in slightly different orbits and at slightly different angles.)

In both cases the trick is to use a design where you can start with just one piece, and expand from there.

What's the population size that these 10 are extracted from? In an above post it's claimed that one was a guy that studies meteorites, and another was a nuclear physicist, so if the that's the range, it implies a pretty large population size.

Given the current government, I don't find that evidence of anything except that somebody in government doesn't like them. Perhaps evidence will show up at the trial, if they actually follow through.

They aren't bullshit concepts, but they also aren't even nearly practical now. Give it time. The Dyson sphere (practical variation) would need at least several centuries to be practical, and even then I think topopolis is a better approach, but it's not a bullshit concept. The "space AI" probably needs sustained space-based industry to become practical, and that, itself, has a few problems to overcome, but it's reasonable eventually.

But the company providing the technology also has some agency in the matter. How much it's reasonable to argue about,

It's worse than the halting problem, because different cpus will have different errors and error handling.

You mean just like lawyers and programmers?

*That* depends on the movie. Some movies NEED to be long, others need to be cut. But making each movie the same length is a really bad idea. (E.g. I saw a version of War and Peace that was so long it ran in two days. It didn't need to be cut, but the break was necessary.)

Secretary of War is a more accurate description. I agree that legally it's Secretary of Defense, but that has always been a misnomer.

Generating bad pathogens is quite plausible. Generating narrowly targeted ones that will stay narrowly targeted is currently implausible, and probably will remain so until well after the singularity. It would require designing genomes that were strongly error correcting. Elephants and naked mole rats do a reasonable job of that, but I don't think it's plausible for bacteria.

We can't do that yet, and may never be able to be that specific. Trying to do it, however, could be exceedingly dangerous.

N.B.: All bacteria and viruses have a very high mutation rate.

They may not be, but you can bet that SOMEONE is.

Over evolutionary time, starvation was a major killer. It may be rare today (comparatively), but it used to be a real threat. Even today it's not insignificant. And it directly selects for the ability to eat whatever's available.