Yes.

On the other hand I would not want to work with holier-then-thou self righteous assholes such as yourself. But you already know this, and that's why you're posting as AC.

I'm intrigued how you can make those claims. It's a historical fact that USSR has:

1. Raised the extremely poor, utterly huge country out of rural economy and devastating improvershment caused by WW1 and civil war and pushed it into an industrial giant in record time (post Russian civil war, pre WW2, massive human sacrifices and incredible rise to prosperity of the nation).
2. Raised the country utterly devastated by WW2 occupation into an industrial and scientific giant for the second time, again in record time, to the point where it beat US in the race to space among other things. This in spite of US having no need to do territorial post-war recovery work and no destroyed infrastructure.

Fact is, USSR style totalitarianism certainly did work, and it did work WELL. Something that is very disturbing to any person with any kind of belief in humanity and basic freedoms so many of us get to enjoy today in part thanks to the collapse of USSR. And arguably, if they had an economic base on par with that of NATO and no massive economic shocks of Afghanistan and Chernobyl, they would have stood a very good chance of winning the cold war.

Frankly, we got very lucky they did not have those. And that is one of the reasons why, in my humble opinion, work on things like human rights in totalitarian countries must be actively supported even in face of their opposition. Because these parts of our values are important for humanity as a whole, and if possible should be pushed even at detriment to economic advancement.

Hilariously, I smell envy that even poster himself likely doesn't realize to be his/her motivator in this one. Fact is, he managed to get himself into the position where he doesn't have to care about office politics, political correctness or any other similar things that most of us have to deal with, regardless of our actual desire to do so. Most of us can only dream of ever reaching such a point in our lives.

And he has an excellent point - much of the office backstabbing does come from buildup of being unable to call someone who is an asshole or a bitch just that to the face to reduce the pressure. So instead you get typical office crap that every one of us who works in the office has likely had to put up with where people hold grudges unable to act on them until they can do something REALLY nasty. As in something that would actually impact life and work performance, instead of just calling someone a bad word and moving on.

If I were ever given a choice, I'd sure rather go for nasty expletives. But I wasn't. Linux on the other hand gets a choice, and he made it.

Technically most of the Europe has not so much "free speech" as "privileged speech". I.e. most of the speech cannot be banned unless it meets very certain criteria (nazi propaganda for example). In some countries it works quite well. In some, not so much.

But arguing that it's a "joke", you may wish to compare UK right to free speech to one in USSR or DPRK for example. It most certainly is NOT a joke.

No, those on top have had significant practice in that discipline and a world-class athletes. Grassroots guys on the other hand do that all the time.

There was a form of communism that was not totalitarian back in stone age when it was a necessity for survival.

In large numbers of today, it's likely impossible to implement even with the full agreement of populace (which is unlikely to be ever acquired in the first place and mandatory for such implementation) simply due to greed. In larger numbers, greed easily escapes the only thing that can control it - direct peer pressure.

On the other hand I'm somewhat confused as to how US isn't capitalist right now. It used to be using a mix of capitalism for top end and socialism for bottom end of populace, which is currently the best-performing system we have tried, as it allows both risk and social mobility for low end as well as provides incentives for high end to not "sit on the money and collect profits".

Unfortunately as long as there are more capitalist regions that offer less socialism for low end, that system will suffer economic drain, as happened with entire West and globalization. This is essentially the same as with North-South pre-civil war cituation, slave labor (or near slave labor) is simply too profitable for high end people to pass on. Essentially you could argue that where perfect communism is simply impossible to implement, perfect capitalism may be possible to implement as long as it's held in check by extremely tight regulation and is backed by social mobility-enabling socialism on low end (Nordic model) but it is self-destructive by its nature when even one of these checks fails (current situation in US).

Did you understand the post above? I guess not.

And have a phone constantly reminding the self-conscious user that it's thicker than his penis/her cup?

C'mon, that's not going to happen.

And now we have IRC. And twitter. And facebook.

And suddenly, it starts to look like we've regressed :D

Indeed. Perfect forms of government never existed. However adaptation of these did. Difference being that US does in fact adapt a form of capitalism, whereas USSR did not adapt any form of communism. Instead it adapted a form of totalitarianism that it chose to call "communism" to gain acceptance from the masses.

If you ever really want to find what I'm talking about, find a translated version of "Industrial communism" if there is one. It's a damnably think book that anyone getting higher education in USSR essentially required to know by heart and not getting high marks on exams on that book killed your career chances. It is a wonderful thesis on stalinism, which explains that oppression of people of the nation by party is not actually oppression but "meaningful and necessary guidance".

It's essentially how communist party of USSR indoctrinated those who were gifted enough to potentially join its ranks. Compare to: current DPRK. Note how that particular country calls itself "democratic". Should we assume that DPRK is in fact a model of democracy?

Again, snake oil talk. "Feeling of disconnect" requires MEANINGFUL latency. As in one that your nervous system would actually be able to detect. Even eyes, located on the single fastest and lowest latency data bus of the entire nervous system could not track those speeds.

Essentially, you're again talking about placebo effect. "You'll understand it once you expect it". That is the textbook definition of placebo. The fact that you chose to link the video in question reinforces the point, as it talk about capacitive touch screens, reinforces the point. Capacitive touch screens are INACCURATE BY DESIGN. As a result you get in-built latency because they have to approximate your actual input. Again: this is BY DESIGN. Making capacitive touch with high polling rate and high detection accuracy is extremely difficult and costly. That is why most applications that require low latency input and accurate input use mouse input or similar, or when touchscreen is required, they use a resistive film instead.

Do note that modern optical mice and keyboards do not suffer from such problems because they are - surprise - not capacitive touch based.

Most interesting claim with zero arguments backing it. Would you care to back it up? After all, we have several organizations making studies about corruption, such as Transparency International, and they tend to conduct wide studies on the subject.

Or is your claim based simply on the fact that you believe in capitalism, and therefore like all religions, anything that tries to deny it is simply heresy and therefore can be bashed in the best traditions of "intelligent design style bashing of evolution" as you just did?

You conveniently choose to ignore that back then top rich didn't own but a tiny fraction of the total privately owned property and industry in relation to total. Taxes are indeed relative to many things. One of them for example is what are you paying tax for. If your income is far greater in relation to rest of population than before, as currently is for top earners, you will obviously pay a bigger portion of tax.

There's just one problem: speed of input beyond certain minimum has little to no impact on actual gameplay. The little impact it has is likely in the fraction of percent compared to things like, for example, play skill, quality of environment in which player is playing, comfort of player's sitting position and other factors.

Squeezing extra milliseconds out of your keyboard is snake oil because just like snake oil, it focuses tiny fraction of things that impact performance and only offers a tiny improvement at best and only at that narrow subset. As a result, it is wholly irrelevant to actual performance beyond placebo effect.

You can find this in professional sports in droves. Creation of placebo effect is very easy to profit off.

What you call "communism" was "totalitarianism" that called itself communism.

About the only times when humanity actually had communism as far as historians know it, was back in the stone age when small tribes were effectively forced to share everything because tribe could only survive as a whole. USSR's communism for example severely lacked in the whole "communistic" features, as it had the party that was awash in riches, while people were dirt poor. In this regard, it wasn't very different from capitalism in most 3rd world countries, with exception of it having some social net (i.e. guaranteed jobs for everyone, but these jobs paid for bare necessities in life and that's it).