Thanks for condensing every anti-American platitude into a single post for easy two-minutes of hate consumption. You get bonus points for using Star Wars references while citing exactly zero facts to support your arguments and pointing out exactly zero treaties that the U.S. has "violated".

I wouldn't tax *completely foreign entities*. If a corporation is doing some type of business in the U.S... then by definition it isn't completely foreign! (duh). If you open a shoe shop in Burundi, you don't pay U.S. taxes selling shoes to people in Burundi. If you are multi-national corporation based in Burundi doing business in the U.S., you pay taxes for your U.S. activities. It really isn't that difficult to regulate those businesses since they have to be doing something in the U.S. to begin with.

Uh.. I don't think it's because the police were out of shape. They sure could have tackled and pinned her to the ground, which likely would have caused a hell of a lot more long-term injury to her than simply getting tazed would.

I responded to this in an earlier post: Taxes are on reported profits that arise from business in the U.S. If your company posts zero profits in the U.S., then you get skinned alive by your shareholders in the stock market, so there is a strong incentive to not play games. Also: The Cayman Islands shell corporation game isn't going to help you with the loopholes that allow those games taken out of the system.

Profits are easy: They get reported every quarter for the stockholders. If the CEO wants to cheat on taxes by lying and saying that the company lost money or didn't make a large profit, then he'll get skinned alive by the stock market. The reporting puts checks in place to prevent a company from claiming that it made no money.

It's a rate that isn't confiscatory while also making corporations like GE who don't pay anything right now make some contribution.

The corporate tax rate should be low because there is massive double taxation going on since every person who works for the corporation is paying income taxes, every purchase the corporation makes is getting hit with sales tax, property taxes, etc. etc.

In spite of what most people on Slashdot think (that the U.S. has no taxes at all) the corporate tax rate in the U.S. is one of the highest in the entire world. It should be much much lower, but with no loopholes: All corporations have to play by the same rules instead of rigging the game by pandering to politicians.

The corporate tax rate should be on the order of 10% *but* with zero loopholes: Any profits from sales made in the U.S. get taxed regardless of where the company is based.

That would actually increase taxes on some major companies (but not to the stupid levels for the nominal tax rates that are in place now).

What we have now is a system where politicians can strut around talking about "taxing those evil corporations" while the corporations that pander to the politicians pay zero tax. Offender Number 1: General Electric that was paying zero taxes while Jeffrey Immelt was jetting around the world with Obama at taxpayer expense while the convenient liberals at MSNBC railed that Mitt Romney never paid taxes while conveniently never talking about their own corporate masters.

This can't come soon enough for Linux clients. SAMBA already has SMBv2+ server-side support, with SAMBA 4 apparently even supported SMB 3.0. This is especially true for a high-latency connection through the VPN where the reduced chattiness of newer SMB protocols gives a nice performance bump.

You can post all day & all night about how NFS/CODA/GlusterFS/etc./etc. is better, but at the end of the day the CIFS protocols are supported by every Windows machine out there and should be supported by Linux too. Plus, if you are a free-software purist, then you could setup a 100% GPL'd installation with SAMBA servers and Linux clients, so it would totally make sense for the Linux clients to actually support the modern protocols.

System76 gives good support. They aren't the cheapest option out there though.

If your goal is not to play 3D games, then Intel HD graphics have by far the best open-source support and HD 4000 graphics are actually pretty good overall. If your goal is to play games, then Nvidia or AMD with proprietary drivers will be your best bet, with the edge in driver quality going to Nvidia.

AMD does have some open source support *BUT* the 7000 series cards (meaning everything released in the last year) are extremely poorly supported with AMD only having released part of the necessary documentation so far (and it took them 10 months to release the part that is out there....).

One problem is that xorg is using 75%... but only of one core. Xorg is a notorious offender when it comes to a program that you'd think would be very well multi-threaded but is actually single-threaded (Firefox being another although that is gradually changing).

First of all: Lots of non-x86 high-performance computers have similar memory controller layouts. Look at high-end SPARC or Power architecture systems.

Second of all: Thanks for proving me right with your screed about how ARM chips don't have good memory controllers. Guess what: you're right! They don't! And guess what: The Cortex-A15 is the first ARM chip capable of beating a 4 year old Atom when clocked north of 1.5 Ghz! So that's the type of performance that even the supposedly miraculous ARM gets with its architecture and a similar memory controller! You are now claiming to be insanely smarter than everyone at ARM and Intel simultaneously.. if chips could be designed and built based solely on arrogance & ego, you'd put ARM & Intel out of business by next Tuesday.

So basically you have been trolling this thread calling everybody who has pointed out flaws in the grandiose promises that you have put forth "007" in a smarmy and condescending manner while presenting zero facts to backup your arguments and contradicting yourself at every turn.

From your annoying and repetitive use of "007", do you perchance speak with a British accent? Do you appear in informercials at 2AM pushing whatever fake product of the day some insomniac can buy for $19.95? Because that's exactly how you come across in these discussions, and if you actually are associated with this project and aren't just troll then I'd highly recommend that the FSF immediately disavow this project before they end up getting sued when you make off with somebody's money.

Uh... moron: " In fact, teh only performance difference between float and doubles comes from vectorial SIMD instructions."

Thanks for proving my point: the x86 chips run at 1/2 the effective throughput for double precision operations because the operands are twice as large. I never said a single word about instruction latency, you just invented that to make yourself sound smart while actually being stupid.

Tell me, do you go around to kindergarten classes and call the kids stupid when they say that 1 + 1 = 2 too?

Thanks for that post.. extremely informative and it's good to know that people who really have to deal with these issues on a daily basis are paying attention.

As I said above: I have no problem with a project to build an "open" chip for education & hobbyists, but scam artists that know how to fool their marks with the correct buzzwords and hype are not doing anyone any favors.

unless you consider 1333mhz 32-bit DDR3 not to be a real memory controller?

Thanks for filling in that detail since I didn't know the precise specs (and for proving me right). To reiterate: No, this thing does not have a real memory controller compared to the 128 bit (2 channel 64-bit) or 192 bit (3 channel 64-bit) memory controllers in the AMD and Intel chips, respectively, that are mentioned in TFS.

You can go on and on about some busy-loop that you were able to code that gets all those gigaflops. I can get a 386 to tell me the result of 100 quadrillion quad-precision add-muls where the only operands are zero in less than a second too.. but it isn't useful work.

Trust me, if a chip even remotely like the one you are describing could do all that useful computational work in less than 3 watts using a previous generation process, then it would already have been deployed in supercomputers years ago and this wouldn't be some pie in the sky FSF project.

  I have no problem with a hobby project to build a CPU with an open architecture, but frankly hyperbole and outright dishonesty about performance expectations are not doing you or anyone else in the project any favors. Being "open" should include being honest & realistic first and foremost.

Those performance numbers are pure fantasy. First off, the 38 GFlops is undoubtedly referring to single precision operations while the x86 processors mentioned in TFS are doing that much in *double* precision mode. Second off, the 38 GFlop number is a simple arithmetic estimate of what the magic chip could do IFF every functional unit on the chip operated at 100% perfect efficiency. Guess what: a real memory controller that could keep the chip fed with data at that rate will use > 3 watts all by itself. This chip won't have a real memory controller though, so you can bet the 38 GFlop performance will remain a nice fairytale instead of a real product.