It lets a few unobstructed windows do animation without having to involve the compositor => lower latency AND lower energy use. They do NOT have to be full screen at all.

Oh, and they can also handle framebuffer formats that aren't RGB. This is very useful for video, as the natural format there is YUV or something similar. The YUV => RGB conversion step becomes unnecessary.

Most of the benefit came from the sound card doing DMA from a memory buffer instead of using a high-frequency interrupt to have the CPU give it sound samples one or two bytes at a time (fetched from the very same memory buffer(s)).

More sophisticated cards could also do mixing of several sounds in "hardware" (usually by having their own little CPU do the work) instead of having the main CPU doing the mixing. Some of them could even play the constituent sounds at different speeds (Gravis Ultra Sound and Midi cards but the Midi cards usually had fixed sound samples). This mattered for more sophisticated game audio for a few years until x86 performance improvements made it irrelevant. DMA is still crucial.

which is precisely why they can get away with a library seemingly without having to specify or coordinate anything with the compiler.

There are also hard limits on what she can do as president. Brussels doesn't rule over the member states like Beijing rules over the provinces (Chinese + "acquired" ones). Most things need the backing of the Council (= the member states) + the member states can drag things out at home if they want to. The EU doesn't have anything like the US National Guard that can be used in member states to force them to comply (possibly against state laws and state constitutions).

The European Union is the consensus making cooperation machine many European countries have chosen to use and die Uschi is only in charge of one component of that machine.

Doesn't seem very rulery to me.

Here is an earlier programming language (never implemented) that was machine independent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl

Edit: forgot to to write "and asians".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Soldier_of_Tallinn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Night

I mean, how dare Estonia not be ecstatic about the Soviet soldiers who kept them thoroughly liberated until 1991.

Should we (the EU?) have sent weapons to the Venezuelan opposition in 1999? When exactly did Chávez become a dictator? He was clearly not a democrat (coup attempt in 1992) but I think it would have been premature and unlikely to have had good outcomes if we had done it in 1999 or 2000 (he was democratically elected both times). He was obviously a dictator when he died in 2013 but a large part of the Venezuelan population still hadn't cottoned on to it or they thought it was great.

Iran was similar. The crazies were quite popular in 1979.

Punishment is cheap and actually quite likely to work.

There are also massive transfers involved (and the US has had them for at least twenty years) so the property taxes (in the US) have little to do with how much money schools have per pupil.

"Good schools" are mostly about avoiding bad kids and bad parents. Expensive homes (without Section 8 or equivalent in the neighbourhood) is a feature, as it keeps most of them away. It's not a good way of doing it -- it excludes lots of perfectly good kids and parents and it is really expensive. It's just the best way available to most people in the West.

And the Nazis wouldn't have lasted long, anyway.

These days, it's mostly taken as an invitation by very powerful compilers to sometimes do heroic optimizations (that we like) -- and sometimes screw us over in really obscure ways (which we don't like). We would really like to keep their ability to perform heroic optimizations and that's why there's so much pushback against eliminating undefined behaviour.