I've survived quite nicely. Thanks for asking.

Based on the git log of Minix, there are multiple people contributing patches. I would think you'd need to get a contract with more or less every contributor that shows up in the "git blame" of the used release.

It would be very cool (although unlikely) if Intel etched the license in one of the metal layers of the CPU.

Are the management engine binaries stored in the CPU or are they loaded from the motherboard? If the latter, the CPU doesn't ship with Minix and the notices should come with the motherboard, right?

nope.

Well, these just happened to be on my Gentoo boxes, and therefore, of interest.

I run Gentoo!!!

Besides that, I did some very recent Intel CPU benchmarking as I tried to figure out IPC gains over CPU generations. I ran my benchmarks on GCC 4.8/4.9/5.2 and LLVM 3.6 on Nehalem and Ivy Bridge. I also included march=generic vs march=native. Quick summary: For generic integer/floating-point code, the Intel Core-i7 CPUs don't actually benefit much from optimizations for newer architectures, especially on x86-64. The exception here is that 32-bit generic FPU x87 code is slower than SSE2, but the latter is always available in x86-64. Actually, sometimes GCC even produced worse code for march=native on Ivy Bridge.

The above actually makes sense to me. Starting from Nehalem, the internal CPU microarchitecture hasn't changed that much and the new instructions tend to be quite specific. Of course the newer generations have lots of small optimizations, more op execution units, bigger reorder buffers and caches, a bit faster ALUs and other units, and so on. But nothing drastic that would require a new instruction scheduler, for example. Pentium 4 was, of course, a completely different beast that tends to perform badly if the code is not targeted properly due to its excessive pipeline length.

OTOH, for specialized things such as video decoding/encoding, the libraries tend to do run-time CPU detection and use different code paths based on what is available. For example, FFmpeg does this (or at least mplayer did), and AFAIK OpenSSL does this for AES, too.

Bottom line: So, even if I'm a Gentoo user, I wouldn't worry too much about march=generic.

I run Gentoo on my primary machines. Any guesses?

So, in 2013 there was a record 9 cases where criminals used FOSS?

and the whistleblower candidate will be properly flagged, monitored, caught in action, and silently jailed before he/she manages to release anything to the public.

Luckily, NSA and TSA are not considered non-essential government services?

I want one!!!

Besides, I was talking about a worldwide fingerprint db. I, for example, am not a US citizen.

Anyway, my concern is not NSA. My main concern is organized crime. In the future we're likely to have lots of gadgets unlocked by a fingerprint. Cars, house door locks, whatever. When phones have built-in capabilities for transmitting fingerprints to centralized databases, it's only a matter of time until someone is able to tap into that data. Someone breaks into your house and your insurance company won't pay for damages because the fingerprint sensor says you let them in...

And you honestly think that NSA or whatever won't be able to fetch that data from the phone?

One day someone leaves a bag full of stuff with fingerprints somewhere, then they'll have all the justification they need for a worldwide fingerprint db...

No it's not. TSA is expanding to provide its services outside airports. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-elliott/the-tsa-wants-to-be-every_b_2393332.html

Gentoo 64-bit on Core-i7 + NVIDIA GTX 260. I played Serious Sam 3 during the beta and I just tested the original Half-life yesterday. I have experienced no serious problems, only some minor Gentoo packaging-related glitches early December during the beta. Yesterday I installed the Steam client to my laptop (Ivy Bridge, Intel HD4000, Gentoo) and the installation went smoothly from the steam portage layout. HL seemed to ran fine on that machine, too.