For example when Monkey Island came out there was no VGA version. The best you could get was 4 color CGA graphics while the Amiga had more colors than that. Same deal with the sound when the PC version had FM synthesis in Adlib while the Amiga had 4-channel PCM digital audio.

The best experience for Monkey Island is installing the much later VGA version with Roland MT-32 audio. But for some games a VGA version never came out and the Amiga version of the game is still superior to the PC version in some way.

Once VGA and SVGA became commonplace the PC had better graphics. But the Amiga had better graphics than PC CGA or EGA.

More often than you would think it does. If the trading partner is a supplier then conquering it may reduce import costs. If the trading partner is a consumer it is not like you cannot find someone else to consume your products.

But what all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about. These gradually furnished the great proprietors with something for which they could exchange the whole surplus produce of their lands, and which they could consume themselves without sharing it either with tenants or retainers. All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons. For a pair of diamond buckles, perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they exchanged the maintenance, or what is the same thing, the price of the maintenance of a thousand men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them. The buckles, however, were to be all their own, and no other human creature was to have any share of them; whereas in the more ancient method of expense they must have shared with at least a thousand people. With the judges that were to determine the preference this difference was perfectly decisive; and thus, for the gratification of the most childish, the meanest, and the most sordid of all vanities, they gradually bartered their whole power and authority.

The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith.

The curious thing is even Adam Smith knew trickle down economics were plain bullshit. The fact is the wealthy already had their basic needs covered with the amount they spent. Any additional money they spend buying toys more likely than not will be buying crap from outside the US and thus funneling wealth outside the US. Case in point: where did Steve Jobs buy his yatch?

When income taxes were high a lot of the wealthy funneled the money into their corporations instead which ended up being a better deal overall rather than buying more useless shit.

What would happen is everyone else's wages would go up as would inflation. The idea that raising the minimum wage would increase unemployment assumes the state cannot increase the money supply which is plain bogus.

Of course what it would also means is that in the long term that minimum wage would be worth the same in real terms as the current minimum wage...

Clippy check-in:
I see you have some bags. Would you like to hear about our wonderful in flight services?

When you say H-1B salaries you mean the salaries that the person working gets paid with or the money Microsoft pays to some Indian intermediary company that actually pays the person doing the job much less?

Plus how much of the money Microsoft pays that Indian company gets back to the people at Microsoft doing the hiring as kickbacks?

Plus how much does Microsoft pay in an H-1B if they want to lay him off?

etc.

Blech. Not a fan. Too verbose.

I will admit there were some interesting concepts in Modula-2 and the later languages like separation of interfaces from implementation but programming in those languages felt a lot like using a straitjacket.

WWI was a mess because they wanted to use Napoleonic War era infantry tactics at a time where armies had machine guns.

All infantry soldiers back then were treated like disposable crap to feed the machine guns and artillery. It had nothing to do with where they came from.

A lot of it is due to geography and some is due to scale. After WWII and the breakup of the European Colonial Empires no European nation could have the economic muscle to compete against the US. The exception was the USSR which, at the time, had about the same population and a lot more natural resources.

Expenses with the Vietnam War followed by the Oil Crisis of the 1970s.

China and India also had utterly obsolete technology sectors and by consequence obsolete armies. China's military today is increasingly less and less obsolete.

Assuming they do wind down without new ones starting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Some architectures (including ARM versions 3 and above, PowerPC, Alpha, SPARC V9, MIPS, PA-RISC, SuperH SH-4 and IA-64) feature a setting which allows for switchable endianness in data segments, code segments or both. This feature can improve performance or simplify the logic of networking devices and software. The word bi-endian, when said of hardware, denotes the capability of the machine to compute or pass data in either endian format.

Want more?

A lot of modern processors have this feature. I am still not convinced. Mixed mode is often sold as a way to improve source level compatibility yes. But it is not sold as a way to improve binary level compatibility which is what we are talking about here. Processors like the original Itanium had actual hardware emulation for certain x86 instructions. Godson also emulates some x86 instructions. However PowerPC has no such thing. Another argument I could make is that IBM, Apple, or Motorola had no reason at all to even waste effort trying to attempt x86 emulation. As for 68k Motorola ended up making a replacement architecture called ColdFire afterwards precisely because PowerPC was not hardware compatible with 68k.