You probably should be sorry. The fastest Geodes are antiques (I have two of them right here, whee.)

How do you know how long it was "flat" before you noticed it?

You're a bit late on that one. Pretty much everything is propaganda, and what's more, virtually all of it is fear-based; the remainder focuses on allaying fears, often reasonable ones. My favorite example is automotive advertising. As much as half of it is designed not directly to sell cars, but to make customers feel better about their purchases to try to induce repeat business "down the road", pun intended.

If it bleeds, it leads. Hope is not interesting to people who have more than they need.

We got there because of decades of people systematically giving their money to the most sensational press, which enabled them to become more powerful. It's not something that just happened.

I think that there probably oughta be a law that you can't knowingly tell an outright lie and call it news, but even that seems to be a minority view, which is just another symptom of the same damned need for entertainment.

There's nothing wrong with that, so long as they don't propose to use force to retrieve the data.

Balderdash. There is not a press. What is this, communism, comrade? We have many presses. The problem is that the public follows the sensational ones instead of the informative. We The People have the government, and thus the press, which we deserve.

But it in fact is; it's not all obvious. Being forced to work is slavery even if you get paid, because you're not choosing the terms of your employment. It's like being raped and then having your rapist throw you a few currency units.

Or I can connect it to a Linux VM and see what that has to say about it...

Welcome to the American legal system, where selective prosecution is standard operating procedure. The only reason to have a legal system which does not require prosecution for known crimes is to permit treating some people differently than others. It leads to the proliferation of bad laws.

That 10% more would probably just go into the pockets of their rich. It's not like they don't have them there, too. They infest everything.

And? I didn't say the US didn't have any of these elements. I said that China did.

I note you didn't actually disagree with me. Obviously it isn't complete rubbish.

The specifications for the required ammunition are well-known. The stuff is harder to make than the firearm, however. For that to differ you'll have to use something substantially higher- or lower-tech, e.g. caseless or black powder. And caseless ammo is only easier to produce if you disregard the difficulty of producing a practical propellant.

The Chinese government itself literally operates labor camps where criminals are forced to produce consumer goods.

You clearly do not decide who is credible when you say that slave labor is not slave labor.

The 1911 is Open Source today, you can literally download blueprints for every part of the weapon. It's one of the best-loved and best-performing firearms of all time. It does require the use of appropriate ammunition, but the openness of the design has permitted developers to adapt it to several different types.

A more accurate headline might be Jesse Jackson: Please, Pay Attention to Me!