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Does A Pentium 4 Need A Weapons License?
WindBourne writes "It appears to be that the U.S. house of Reps. want to classify Pentium 4 and above CPUs as weapons. This would mean that all these will require export licenses. Apparently, they have not heard about that the far east has developed large CPUs as well that are used in beowulf clusters." According to the article, this clause is unlikely to appear in the final version -- but stranger things have happened.
They were manufactured in Taiwan or someplace... ?! can anyone clarify this to me?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Imagine if they had a beowulf clus... oh wait.
:(
nevermind
Athlon is definitively a dangerous weapon - it can cause 3rd degree skin burns
So can I still fly with my "weapon"?
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
Yes... I'd rather bathe in napalm than be in an unventilated room with of bunch of them
..so perhaps we were justified going in there after all.
(Cue Beavis and Butthead Laughter)
Uhh Huhh...I don't know about the Pentium chip but I've got an unlicensed weapon in my pants. Uhh Huhh...
Foreigners could simply obtain SPARC or MIPS specs and fab a multi-GHz version of those. Since these chips are better designed for multi-processing, foreign powers could scale them just as high as a PIV cluster, and run their nuclear simulations. Time to worry more about refined Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Back when the fastest x86 chip was a Pentium 2, the G3 received this same classification. Apple even ran ads that proclaimed their "weapons grade" status. Looks like Intel is finally catching up with an Apple chip that's two revisions old. :o)
I dunno who it is
but it prolly is fhqwhgads.
This ignorance is often displayed by many politicians, regardless of political orientation. Anything we can do to change it? I really don't think so. Politicians just want to do what they can to get (re)elected.
C:\>
xboxes are already illegal to export(from the US) to certain countries, and Dell also has an export statement when you order
pictures and ramblings
So are wars gonna be decided with Unreal Tournament now?
12:50 - press return.
being in a large room full of developers sitting unhappily at cubicles is bad enough, but no we are all armed with weapons, ahhhh!!!
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
Perhaps there should be a parallel technical/scientific congress to deal with issues like this, but of course, the constitution doesn't allow that. It certainly seems that the current body is incapable of handling them even with the assistance of "technical advisors".
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I guess what I find amusing about this is that very few of the CPUs nowadays are manufactured in the USA. Taiwan, Germany, etc.
So we bring them here when complete and then decide they can't leave the country?? heh.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
my keyboard, in it's current condition, should be classified as a WMD.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I remember when the Playstation 2 was qualified as such (or so I remember) and it couldn't be exported to certain countries because it could be used in weapons or some BS like that.
Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of congressman...
It would be the only cluster in the world to slow down as you add nodes.
Why would they bother to get these chips from us here at the US for expensive US prices when I'm sure they could get them for dirt cheap stolen from the factories in where they're made.
It wasn't "the House of Representatives", it was Representative Duncan Hunter, a San Diego Republican who makes Rush Limbaugh look moderate...and that's coming from a registered Republican!
The amendment will never leave the House.
-h-
So, now we can finally identify the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq!
I was beginning to get worried that my beloved president was wrong.
With a big enough die size (CPUs don't seem to be getting smaller, do they?) I'm sure they could inflict some serious blunt trauma if you were to hit somebody in the head with one... but then, so can a lamp -- and we haven't banned the export of those just yet.
Now we're going to have to arrest you for disseminating this information.
Sincerely,
The Feds
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Does A Pentium 4 Need A Weapons License?
Sure, if you throw one hard enough.
Red Bull gave me wings and I flew into the ceiling fan.
after all anit-virus applications are consider anti-weapon technology
in the states its illegal to build AVP software with better than 128 bit detection schemes or w/e i can remember the right terminology right now
thats why f-protect and serpinski work so much better
back in the day we didnt have no old school
If the US doesn't want to sell me a CPU I'll buy one from elsewhere.
So if this went through, it would make future game consoles "weapons" as well?
Computers are now powerful enough to do stuff that formerly required such computing power that only the government had access to. Never mind the fact that theoretically the chips inside of computers nowadays can be used to guide missiles, and other stuff of the like.
Does this mean I need a CCW permit to stick a P4 in my pocket?
Unknown host pong.
This is nothing new, remember when Zimmerman got in trouble for distributing PGP, due to the status of 'hard encryption' as 'munitions'. Or the problems with exporting playstation 2's to Iraq years ago...
Even my old original box of 'windows operating environment' has an export restriction sticker..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
AMD would presumably love this - their Opterons are produced in Dresden and I can't see the Germans joining in on this.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
I guess an intel chip can be considered a weapon of some sort....
.. If I chuck it at someones head hard enough.
Momma told me that sigs are for the devil
Well, this already happened to the Powermac G4 back in 1999, since it was considered as a "super computer".
More infos here.
Alexis 'jeriqo' BRET
Given the fact that many P4s are made in Malaysia (among other countries), how exactly is the US going to enforce this?
Even if it did make sense, what's the point?
The Xeon is where it's at!
I fail to see how the p4 is the weapon. Guns don't kill people, personal computers do??? WTF?
Of course, you can write software on it that calculates some damned thing that has to do with blowing stuff up, but you can just as easily get a thousand used p3's and do it anyways. I don't think a P4 provides some special abilities... does it?
Maybe if you throw the chip at someone, because it's so big, it might hurt them.
stuff |
The use of a Pentium 4 or better as a weapon can easily be avoided by running any Windows variant on it.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
Congress passes a lot of stupid legislation, but rarely any of it is outright harmful to industry, unless it has a lot of popular support. I'm sure someone will have a lobbyist whisper in a few congresspeople's ears that this is a bad idea, bad for industry, not going to work, etc.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Everybody knows that all computers, and parts thereof are made here in the good old US of A, so if we don't export them, the moozlim ayrab terrorists can't get them. Our congressmen and senators are geniuses!
/sarcasm
How ya like dat?
Let's hope this clause doesn't show up in the final version!
At one time 286s were on this list...
;)
This means Intel can be charged for aiding and abetting terrorists!
I'll give up my Athon 64 bit chip when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers!!!
while they're at it, they need to punish the overclockers for making their weapons run faster
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
Obvious question: what fraction of Intel's chip manufactures is actually located in the USA?
This is a stick-up. Give me all your money.
No seriously, I'm packing a P4 3,4ghz. You do NOT want to fuck with me.
This means every AMD chip on earth after the K6 is a weapon.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Right before the election Dubya will announce that he's found the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction.
They're sitting in boxes at the Bagdad CompUSA store marked "Intel inside"!
Nice work!
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
At what point will they want us to register our CPU ID in a database, and wait 7-10 buisness days before we an actually use it. Oh yea, and you must be of the proper age to purchase a pentium 4 or higher...
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
I'd hate to have to leave my laptop at home when I go to the coffee shop. Of course the part about concealing it could be difficult.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
This is yet another case of Political Representatives creating legeslation on topics they know little to nothing about. They figure if they can create one big blanket soloution it will fix the problem, but instead it simply stifles industry.
What are these stranger things? Are they a threat to national security? *looks all paranoid* Does George W. Bush know about these? ...does he even play with these to piss off Dick Cheney? Did he choke on one of these in early 2002?
Oh my god, why didn't you tell us what these stranger things are? We have a right to know!
Great, now I have to leave a tip to the FBI about you.
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
Sure, the entire future of the semiconductor industry is going to subject itself to export regulation. I give this bill about ten minutes on the floor.
All they have to do is require that the faster chips ship with Longhorn. There won't be enough cycles left for advanced weapons design!
Proven to disable a US Destroyer.
Windows NT.
I suggest that we make it export tariff free and make sure it gets distributed far and wide.
Because that makes about as much logical sense as this legislation.
Oblig. Simpsons Quote:
"Argh.. 7 Days?... But I'm mad now!"
Hmmm.
see subject
This is SOOOOO retarded, I mean the 911 attackers were supposedly using M$ flightsim to train on. This can run on really slow PCs, so why not ban em all.
:)
Surely Osama and chums are more likely to to this than simulate an atomic bomb, ROFL
In other news...
Open source is banned when the Linux kernel is converted into a homebrew nuclear test simulator.... It will happen.
I'm depressed about that feeble comment though.
So what ? Export licensing has been, and will always be, a hell of a joke. If other nations want our tech they can either buy it through third parties, steal it outright, or buy it through the very lossy and buggy 'export license' process. When I worked in defense, it was amazing how easily people could get licenses for all kinds of stuff. Example: ICBM development technology to Pakistan and India in the 1980's. (Sure, they bought their main missle tech from China and the USSR, but they bought a lot of tech from the US of A too.) It was licensed for 'civilian space exploration' and 'satellite launch'. Yeah, right. It's just another potential trade barrier to US goods. Your Tax Dollars at Work !
How many fabs does intel have and where are they located?
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
I feel for California. If this goes through, they'll have legislators pushing for registration, fingerprinting, five day waiting periods, closing the "computer show loophole" and the like. I recommend burying half of your high end computer hardware now so that you can have it available when the government starts confiscating.
This space for rent.
It's news like this that would make ESR drool. Imagine computing and gun-control laws coming together as computers become weapons. I don't think anything would get that dude quite as animated. Well, that or having trouble setting up a printer or whatnot.
I suppose having a P4 could help, but it sure as heck would be a lot easier with software...and we know there's already propaganda out there that OSS supports terrorists. I wonder how far such legislation (if any have been concocted) could go.
Again, my faith in the voting public waivers a tad more. I've seen stranger things pass.
With the amount of heat a Prescott P4 generates, who needs napalm?
just so we can all laugh at the ensuing chaos;
Airport Security Guard: Do you have anything that could be used as a weapon in your carry on luggage?
Traveller: Well, I do have this laptop.
ASG: Do you have an export license for that laptop?
Traveller: Err...no.
ASG: I'll take that then, thank you.
ASG2: Ooh...nice model. That one's a keeper - I'll put it on your pile.
ASG: Get your greedy hands off - that's mine you theiving bastard.(Laughs)
The more I see these things that representatives try to do in Congress the more I hope that we start to see a younger generation of politicians. I am convinced they just have no idea about technology at all and can easily be swayed by lobbiest. (more so than normal)
I just hope that noone in the House or Senate does anything too stupid before we manage to get some technocrats in office.
Is it just me, or is this one more attempt of the Americans to control the entire computer market? If the only people who can get high-powered computers are the americans, that means that america will be the strongest country by far. Is this just yet another attempt to control the entire world by leaving everywhere in hovels?
95% of all computer errors occur between chair and keyboard (TM)
[tinfoil hat on] And so they want to be only ones with enough juice power to break ciphers/ do research in that area...
But the programmers don't need anything over P3 rihgt? Can play games, can send email, can do sound processing... Can cluster... can send attachments and spam...
On the other hand, some free research arround:
this is being optimized for P4 (open sourced, good good).
this can do 35 million md hashes in a second on a pentium 4.(not quite 35, but read the page)
this breaks des and the approximate time for P4 is 4.3 hours (not quite 4.3 but read the page)
I just wonder, if the hardware industry splits, how much the software world will diverge. Of course, other countries don't have the jump US has in this area, but given enough time, the demand will drive the market....
Busting the Biggest PC Myths
Check out the second one on page 4. Holy Geebus of stupidity!
Note to John Ashcroft: raid Pixar tomorrow; they've become too powerful.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
"That level is currently set to the equivalent of a computer using a Pentium 3 processor running at 650MHz, state of the art in 1999 but considered feeble today. " That will also mean any of the current generation of gaming devices as well wouldn't it? If I recall the xbox has 800 or 850 mHz, and the gamecube and ps2 aren't far behind. I imagine PDA's would also fall in this area, and some of the newer generation of cell phones?
Laws like this are silly; they don't stop other parties from getting their hands on the export-controlled product. Period.
Kind of reminds me of the laws on bottles of inseciticide which state "It is unlawful to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labelling." or something to that effect. What does my "professional" landscaper tell me? "Oh, I mix these two together in double the concentration to really zap the weeds!" (And no, I didn't let him do that). The law is basically unenforceable. And let's not even talk about posted speed limits! (Guilty as hell on this one). Yes, much more enforceable, and still not all that effective at preventing the behavior (talking percentages here).
To think the law would do anything useful just goes to show how out of touch some of our elected officials are. Is there really nothing else they can think of doing with their time and position of authority?
Sheesh.
- Leo
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
Congress is in session, and across this great land of ours, many a village is missing its idiot.
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. In the late 80's, similiar debates about export restrictions of then extremely powerful 12Mhz 286 ATs.
One of Intel's biggest corp. directives is to prevent loss in the supply chain. Theft at the plants in any qty. is actually quite rare.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
The idea of restricting CPU's, or ANY form of computer software for that matter, is completly without justification. States do not require Pentium IVs to launch nuclear missiles or detonate nuclear bombs. These systems were deployed in the seventies with primitive CPUs and little memory or storage space.
Anyone determined to launch a missile, develop a weapons program, or design a new figher jet, is going to get their hands on computing power and software very easily. All that will end up happening is exports will be stifled as Joe bloggs in RougeStateistan won't fork over cash to US companies to pay for that PC he wanted so he could send email, browse the web and type up documents. Instead he'll give it to a european or russian company.
You can see the reason for this. The Pentagon is annoyed that foreign governments are using clusters to build supercomputers. Which means that they could start snooping on Pentagon comms instead of the other way around.
Obviously someone dropped a line like, "Terrorists use Computers to build a-bombs", in the House of Representatives caffeteria. Cue the assembled polititions nodding in agreement and shuffling off to draft a law to "protect the free world".
Just before lunch was the best time to drop this as their next meal was only seconds away. They still can't think past it!
May the Maths Be with you!
This has to be the goofiest shit I have ever heard coming out of Washington. I take it all our other problems are solved? A computer by itself is not a weapon. It could, however, be used as one, as could a pencil or a brick.
I hate sigs.
Illegal aliens are flying airplanes into buildings and stealing American jobs.
But the point remains. Being made in Asia and Isreal is certainly not going to make it difficult for anybody to get their hands on these things. It just seems like a ridiculous law, since it's not even preventing anybody from getting them. If you've managed to get Uranium...a P4 is not going to be difficult to find.
maybe it can be used to generate enough heat to fry your opponents?
Now, you must ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?
Well, do you, punk?
I can see that hurting like hell when you get the chip pins indented in your head. Apart from that, the most damage they can do is crashing windows.
A P4 nearly incinerated my house once when the fan stopped working. I still have third-degree burns. This is not a joking matter!
Q: What did it take for the US to build it's first nuclear weapon?
A: Several brilliant people and a hell of a lot less computing power than a single P4 (you could run all the programs they ran on a palm pilot in under a day).
It would take even fewer brilliant people now, since it has been done before... Trying to keep the computing power to build a nuke out of the wrong hands is futile at best.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
They replied to a GNAA post in order to try to gain attention and mod points. Obviously this post should have been posted at the top level and not here, otherwise its an obvious troll.
This wont fly. How can the American Government put restrictions on chips that are not even made in America? Most of the large chip companies use out-sourced factories in other countries, like China, Japan and India.
The U.S. should take a cue from Canada: long parlementary vacation periods.
When our 'leaders' aren't in session to fuck up the country with shit laws, everything runs more smoothly. Three - four month vacation periods here in Canada for parlement (provincial and federal) are not uncommon during a year, sometimes even more. Encourage your leaders to do the same.
"When the 3.2 GHz Prescott was overclocked to 3.57 GHz, the temperature of the Shuttle power supply hit 94 degrees Celsius, which killed it." -- TheInq
http://www.sfftech.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=494&pid= 1845
That's why Intel develops new CPU mounting that works just by pressing the CPU on contacts. Too many tiny extremally sharp pins, dangerous thing! Smash such one into someone's face and they'll bleed to death! That kind of CPU not only should be considered a weapon but banned by Geneva convence as inhumane one!
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
"Colonel Look, A whole stack of Pentium 4s!"
"Good work private. We've finally found those WMDS."
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
As other posters have noted, a lot of chips are made in the US. Why? Because the US is where most of the expertiese(sp?) is. Fabs are almost purely automated, so you would gain very, very little savings in cost of labor. Probably the environment would be the only significant cost savings you could gain, but being away from most of the knowledge is not a good thing. Now this may change as many foriegn-born PhD's decide to return home, but only time may tell on that one.
That's ok, I use AMD chips.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
Those things have, like, hundreds of really sharp pins! They really hurt, especially if you mash yourself in the forehead with it.
paintball
I am assuming this is to prevent terrorists and rogue nations from developing super computers that would...do something bad? Alright, maybe some nuclear weapons simulations? Here's the problem, any country or group of people can get their hands on pentiums if they tried hard enough. I think that the past few years has shown us that a country or terrorist group can accomplish a lot of they are dedicated. This is one of those typical laws that just makes it difficult for the ligitimate people who follow the rules.
I'll bring up an example every slashdotter can relate to. Microsoft's activation didn't prevent piracy one bit. The corporate version or crack patches that would disable activation got around it easily. All it did was inconvienence people who went to the stores and bought the software legally and honestly.
Good way to break the Wintel monopoly. In the final release they will probably classify Microsoft XP and Server 2003 as WMDs.
I would be more worried about people with concealed Athlons. You're minding you're own business, and then some nut with an overclocked Athlon without so much as a fan or heatsink, suddenly produces it in his asbestos mitten, brandishing it at you. You feel the heat coming off it, looking down at death itself. You think of reaching for the P4 holstered at your side, but he's got the drop on you. That would suck.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
closer and closer into the corner, moving steadily....
There are factories in Isreal and a few Asian countries. All it takes is 1 chip for a weapon. I mean honestly this is ridiculous, how could they ever expect to keep enough chips out so that they couldn't put a few on weapons?
Limiting the speed computers are exported won't do anything because every country has a large amount of the most powerful computer (The Human Brain). As you have seen in 9-11 the terrorist basically did mass amount of destruction with the cost of flight tickets, some flight training, and box cutters. Using a P4 or a 286 wouldn't have made a difference. The same thing would of happened if terrorist did this in the 1970s. Most of U.S. computer research in nuclear weapons is towards finding safest ways to use them with less casualties of civilians or other countries. Terrorist care less about this type of stuff, they just want a big boom. By stopping the exports of Fast Computer and chips all it does is hurt the U.S. Echonomy.
1. The obvious money made from selling computer off shore.
2. The money U.S. Sends to other countries for out sourcing.
3. Forcing the world to switch to a non US standard for computing.
4. Stopping the exports of modern software.
All this does is make a leak of money to leave the US without any methods of gaining it back.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"A report published in 2002 by the U.S. General Accounting Office found that most military applications of computer technology require less than 20,000 MTOPS, including programs used to design and simulate nuclear weapons. A currently exportable computer, such as a 32-processor Intel Itanium computer, satisfies nearly 98 percent of the Department of Defense's computing needs, the report said." --Then why in the hell is the DoD spending money systems with hundreds of processors.
Were under attack! Scotty, arm the CPUs!!!
Bring er about and let them have it!!
Fire!!
So will convicted felons now be prohibited from owning a Pentium 4 grade PC? Can we expect background checks, and 5 day waiting periods before we're allowed to pick up our new P4 systems... And be required to take training classes and obtain licenses to carry concealed laptops?
Then again, I know quite a few people that could use a couple of classes in proper handling and use of their dangerous Pentium 4 system... Maybe I'd get less spam forwards and virus-ridden emails from them!
However, while wafers for high end chips are normally fabbed in the US, the work of cutting them and packaging them is still usually labor intensive and therefore often done in 3rd world countries where labor is cheap.
"They have computers...and other Weapons of Mass Destruction."
Laws to restrict technology exports like this are indicative of typical U.S. arrogance. We think that we are the only country with smart people. Why is it that if the rest of the world is smart enough for our corporations to export skilled tech jobs, then they aren't smart enough to design and build cpus and cluster them together to build supercomputers?
It really scares me sometimes that such short-sighted, arrogant people are running our country.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
there is a P4 inside. Oh, I remember I saw a "open your notebook bag" sign at airport, they must searching for P4!
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Also there is another common computer thechnology which is actualy mentioned in international wepons trade agreements. You guessed it cryptography, if your outside the US u couldent get the 128bit SSL from MS bc they couldent export it
When you buy a Dell in Spain you:
a) Must agree (in the web form) that:
- It's you the one using the computer/PDA
- You are not selling the computer to one of those bad countries
b) Must inform them if you're controlling weapons or nuclear stuff with the computer (or printer, since the form is the same).
Maybe some other stupid questions, that I can't remember.
EOF
What they should do is EASE the export restrictions on computers and give the scientists in these "aspiring nuclear weapons states" Slashdot accounts.
Then we'd be safe from nuclear weapons, because nobody would ever get any work done.
While we're at it, let's give them so much porn they choke. (pun intended)
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Pentium 4 a weapon? Well, I need no stinkin' Pentium 4. Soon, I'll be happy with an AMD64 Opteron made in Europe . Meanwhile a PDA, katana and a crossbow are quite sufficient for my arsenal.
BTW, here I didn't seen U.S. made computer components or other electroncs for more than a decade. Everything from chips to cards, boards and displays is made in Taiwan, China, Malaysia, Korea, Ireland. Including Intel CPUs.
There you are, staring at me again.
So what, the UN weapons inspectors will be called in to certify that Microsoft Windows has been removed from them?
The original laws on arms export classified many things as weapons that don't directly kill people. For example, a high strength aluminum alloy tube isn't a weapon, but one far above the grade needed for oil refinery tubing was on the list because the few known reasons anyone would pay 20x as much as the basic model for that precision grade included large rocket launcher tubes.
There's a problem with your analogy, "Guns don't kill people, personal computers do?" the idea is more like Guns don't kill people, guns plus bullets do, and guns plus bullets plus teflon coatings mean going to a lot of extra trouble to preferentially kill people with protective vests. And P4 chip plus CD-ROM drive, 40 Gb Hard drive, Asus MoBo, and a few cards may equal a nice PC, but the question is does P4 + something else = weapon? (and the real decision makers are at least supposed to be thinking of weapons significant enough to matter in war, not weapons as in throw it hard enough and it can do the same damage as a $1.98 glass ashtray).
With that said, the inclusion is wrong. P4s are far too easy to obtain to be an effective choke point even if there is some particular use where a cluster of cheaper chips won't do, and that should be enough reason not to include them right there.
It also looks like the the person adding it to the list does not know of a specific use, but is reacting from a general sense of nebulous potential risks, and that he is responding that way because he is ignorant of many basic facts which he should know and fully comprehend the ramifications of to be competent for his jjob description. (Yes, that last sentence IS awkward as hell, and yes I AM feeling to lazy to rephrase it right now).
Who is John Cabal?
fuck
I for one, welcome our beowulf cluster overlords from Soviet Russia.
If you look at a P1 or a P2 or even P3's, the pentium 4's are quite a bit smaller. The first time I opened one, I was a bit shocked and asked... is this right? It's a bit smaller than I expected.
So yes... they're getting smaller.
Not as popular as its Itanium counter parts Opterons have been expanded beyond 4 way smp.
Great, so they can't get them locally... what'll they do, hack a ton of Windows machines that have fast processors that are almost totally unused by the thumbless muppets that own them (done) and then upload some programs to do the processing remotely? Welcome to the WWW and the Internet, senator.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
especially if they can also get Windows declared a weapon (commence jokes). This might be the impetus to the rest of the world (an' we're still bigger than you - nya, nya) to use a better operating system on a better platform. The more I think about it, the more I love the, um, cough, enlightened thinking of the US gov't.
since weapon is defined as
1 : something (as a club, knife, or gun) used to injure, defeat, or destroy
2 : a means of contending against another
does this make having a degree in CS equivalent to being a terrorist bomb making specialist?
steal this sig
"Right before the election Dubya will announce that he's found the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction. They're sitting in boxes at the Bagdad CompUSA store marked "Intel inside"!"
At a press conference later that same day, Dubya will pull out the same map and declare that they've pinpointed the source of global warming as well.
Step away from teh processor! Does this mean that we will have to get permits?
I can imagine taliking to my grandchildren about the "good ole days" telling them about pre-ban x86 archetecture.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
All major chipmakers have fab's that are outside the country. They just drop ship chips from there.
Remember when the PS2 came along and people claimed someone in the middle east was buying them up to build a super computer :-) It seems this is just some recent way to promote processors - it's so fast they tried to ban its export!
These dim wits still have underdeveloped brains to think that export restrictions will have a negative effect on an enemy (or armory). The world is too small and in the presence of other competing countries and/or technologies the export restrictions will be viewed as a move to prevent other countries (3rd world) from developing.
It is only a matter of time when even internationally sanctioned saturated shiny stuff will also become available! This is the same isolationalist policy of the GW admin.
I remember, about 15 years ago, working for a US company in the UK, having to attend "Export Control" courses (and having attendance recorded on my personnel file) so that we didn't fall into the trap of exporting VAXes to the enemy [a VAX 11/780 could do a lot of damage dropped from 50,000 feet].
Not to mention encryption restrictions...
Not new. Not sensible. Not surprising.
It seems odd that the excuse being used is that these machines will help countries to develop nuclear weapons.
The computing power available to the US when we developed the hydrogen bomb was considerably less than what was available on a desktop even twenty years ago, so to consider fast or advanced processors to be nuclear weapons development technology seems a trifle absurd.
This article may demonstrate that these congressmen's fears may be justified, but it also demonstrates just how absurd the notion of controlling proliferation through limiting technology is. There's no need for a Pentium-IV (or even a computer) to develop nuclear weapons, and attempting to control the spread of computer technology through this kind of lawmaking is misguided and likely doomed to failure.
Read, L
Just check out the category under the export lists that computers fall into, and you will see that it is all about nuclear capability - nuclear effects simulation and the like.
oh no, only Intel are made in America.
AMD are made in third world countries using child labour in sweatshops.
at least according to this Adequacy.org
I saw an Intel pro 100/s network card - it has encryption on it.
On the card was a big sticker warning about export restrictions etc etc.
The chip that actually was doing the encryption that resulted in the sticker: Made in Japan.
So we are importing hardware we then can't export.
Thats politics
A while ago I purchased some Cray J932se's from a gov't contractor. They made me sign an end use certificate and a bunch of other documentation that basically states I admit that I know the laws regarding the exportation of supercomputers.
Even though it isn't very super any more, it's still under all of those regulations. I've had people interested in buying one or two in Germany, Canada and other countries but I could never get a legit answer about selling it outside the US. The worst part is all of the systems that have already been exported (Cray has a department that assists) can be sold to whomever, wherever. I have the main letter framed and hanging in my living room.
In my research I found stories about SGI selling a Power Challenge XL to China (ooops) and IBM selling some SP action to the no-supercomputer-zones. Pretty crazy when you think about it.
I was under the impression that AMD chips are made outside of the US, and Intel has alot of R&D going up in India. This will leed to intellectual property bleed and foreign competitors, so we shouldn't have to worry about this too long.
There have been stinks in the past regarding clusters (I believe the original Beowulf linux mods were pulled down for a while due to the foreign threat).
Oh yea, and if anyone wants a Cray J932se, $4500 USD (can't export!). 3 cabinet, dual IOS, 32 proc. Need the room, need the cash. It's technically sold buy the buyer is being slow and I have the right to sell it from under them. No Unicos.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
Because my c0d1ng sk1||z R 'da b0mb'!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
There are two answers to Iraq, at the moment.
One is that they really were building WMD, were going to attack the US with them, were linked with Al Quaeda and the 9/11 attacks, and GW Bush was completely justified in invading.
The other is "No, we went after a third world pissant who was stabilizing his country."
IMHO, the answer is between these extremes, and well away from either of them. I don't like GW Bush's policies, but my dislike of his policies in no way makes me think Saddam Hussein was a 'good man and leader.'
Occasionally life throws difficult problems at us, with no clear-cut right and wrong. This is one of them, and it happens to have (at least) two wrongs.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
... why not ban bricks? Surely history has shown many people were injured by them. Some of them *gasp* even died!
-- Sig down
So Ali Baba wants to be able to play Doom III what's the big deal? The pentagon shouldn't be the only ones able to play it at full res.
-- Tim
Asst. Mger - Software Team, CSU College of Business
Hasn't anyone seen the G4 commercial about Pentiums being harmless?
weapons of math destruction
That would be those ancient Pentiums with the FDIV bug.
Infuriate left and right
feel free to spam this addy
It should be a weapon too.
Well classify the Pentium IV, as a rock, and the G5, as an atomic bomb.
Or at least considered as dangerous, volatile materials capable of causing massive damage.
...on the Manhattan project, what clock speed were their Pentiums running at?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Especially considering that my last computer was built and shipped to me from one of the countries that they want to ban the export of computers to (China). Don't they realize that computers come from there and arrive here, not the other way around??
I can also use a pen to jab into John Asscroft's jgular vein. Which pen, I wonder, will be classified as a weapon? Bic or Cross?
Now maybe you pansy ass liberals understand how I feel about Clinton's "assault weapons" ban.
I am not sure if the Xbox was for the same reason, but the PS2 could not be exported to certain countries and could not be manufactured in China due to the exceptional 'dual use' potential of the console. I have heard that it could be used for many military uses from guidance systems to low-cost/high density simulators. Nice writeup here.
My Xbox is more than dual use now that I have it with FTP, shoutcast, and full media-center capabilities....
So does this mean that the new Athlon 64 chip would be classified as a WMD? What about a G5 cluster?
This account has been seized by the GNAA. That is all.
I'm violating the assualt weapons ban?
Recent wars were so successful, because we were able to remotely disable important anti-aircraft, defensive gear, but also civilian infrastructure like power plants and water suppliers with viruses (and I'm not meaning the ones developed at Fort Dettrick).
Export controlling powerful CPUs (besides being a silly, unenforceable law) would prevent newer Windows versions (a.k.a. spyware) from spreading even further in civilian infrastructure of present or future enemies. They may switch to that terrorist sponsored and sponsoring OSS stuff we can't control. On a second thought, it's not such a good idea...
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
The heat alone probably makes the P4 a WMD.
Just plug them in here and vpn in.
ASININE
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
I think the part of the article mentioning how this would benefit China was right on. In the last year or so, there's been a lot of noise about how China wants to start producing domestically designed chips, and set up barriers to foreign producers. Even the fact that this legislation has been proposed might serve as adequate justification for measures to prop up their domestic producers if they were ever called on it by the WTO or other trade organization.
Fast forward five years when Chinese chips are being sold in $99 computer systems at Wal-Mart, and legislators are wondering how to make American producers competitive with China...
But the main reason the expertise is American is that's where all the top performance chips are designed. If other countries started producing chips, how long do you think it would take to develop the same level of expertise?
Remember, there was a time when the Japanese didn't have the expertise to make quality cars.
"It appears to be that the U.S. house of Reps. want to classify Pentium 4 and above CPUs as weapons."
But only if you ship them with free copies of Microsoft Windows.
"N Korea has a nuke or three and the missiles to send them as far as Seattle"
The idea that you have a nuke is probably almost as good as actually having a nuke.
Keep that in mind.
Also keep in mind what you read/hear in the media isn't necessarily true.
Like for instance, it turns out Iraq had no WMD's.
BBC article, NCSA Web page. The NCSA built a supercomputer out of a cluster of 70 Playstation 2 computers. They're not actually using the main CPU for numbercrunching - they're using the Emotion Engine graphics chip.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Weapon of Mass Processing ? I know I know, lame joke :(
Won't somebody please think of the Karma!
I thought the whole idea was that these cpus were smart enough to fly cruise missiles or smart bombs. .
Anyone out there want to give a terrorist more ways to kill us?
Oh, wait, the terrorist would just smuggle them out of the country, through one of those wide open borders we have to Mexico, Canada, the coastlines, etc.
And he might steal them, instead of buying them, circumventing the tracking system companies have in place for proscribed exports.
Or get a job as a clerk at Fryes, and buy bunches at an employee discount.
So all this law does is slow down the law-abiding people and businesses, adding to our paperwork load, and undoubtedly increasing our taxes to pay for policing these WMDs, and catch the dumb crooks and dumb terrorists.
Leaving the market for WMD CPUs wide open for the Mafia and smart terrorists.
Great
Give the mafia something to export and make big profits off of, that drug sniffing dogs cannot smell.
This stinks.
wake up and hold your nose
guns plus bullets plus teflon coatings mean going to a lot of extra trouble to preferentially kill people with protective vests.
Teflon doesn't help penetrate vests - that's what steel bullets are for. The point of teflon is to reduce wear on the gun barrel.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
overpriced.
So if you can't find the WMD the old fashioned way, just expand on what you consider a weapon?
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
well, a few flaws, but the two main ones are, we have no top end cut off point for new laws. They are under mandate to always create new laws, that's ALL they are supposed to do, so that's what they do, year in and year out. There's no automatic provision for removing old laws, so they add up. I sincerely doubt now there is a single "legal" human inside the US, everyone is guilty of something now, and it will keep getting worse. Even little babies are born into guilt, before they have done much of anything they "owe" a buncha rich guys a lot of money. How they racked up that debt is beyond me, but it's supposedly the "law" someplace.
The second one is we should have made it completely illegal for a lawyer to be elected to congress, it's a clear cut case of conflict of interest. They have *no* incentive to make government simpler, cheaper, less complex. They have *every* incentive to create as many and as convulted and complex laws as possible.
here's every campaign speech boiled down, any party addressing any demographic.
"vote for me, I will help to make government more complex and expensive, except for YOU though, because YOU are special and we need to make the other guys pay for whatever YOU want"
So that is what happens, and people keep voting for them.
Several of Intel's latest Pentium chips were designed in Israel. Don't think the US holds a monopoly on chip designers.
when accelerated by a C4 explosion.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Mofo #1: And he pulled out his P4 cpu, and I was like damn brotha Mofo #2: Shit thats whack!
[ I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance ] -- Isaac Asimov
So does that mean a Beowolf cluster of these would be considered Weapons of Mass Destruction?
Intel must love this. Their silver lining in abandoning the P4 due to heat problems. If you can't beat AMD in the marketplace, get congress to do it for you!
At 9:13 AM two CPUs crashed into the Sears Tower, killing a dog when it tried to eat them. Terrorist organization al BM has declared that they were responsible for this horrible strike against the western world.
President William Gates III. has announced that the terrorists have been located "somewhere around Europe or something" and that two ICBMs (InterContinental Beowulf Missiles) with a payload of 32x4 GHz have been launched somewhere at Europe's general direction.
Our hearts are with the owners of Fido, who choked on the deadly weapons which crashed into the Sears Tower. Officials suspect them to be Pentium-type processors, but cannot say it before they have been retrieved from the dog's stomach.
The Sears Tower seems to be out of imminent danger of collapsing, but, as some random government suit said: "only a few hundred chips more and they might have smashed a window."
I other news, Apple Defense Systems (ADS) has just finished their new G2000 RISC (Really Incredible Stuff-based Computer) line of ultra-expensive and extremely hip weapons of mass destruction. President Gates has announced that the USA will be saving money for the next five years, hoping that this will generate enough money to actually afford an Apple-brand WMD (or iWMD, as Apple calls them).
This were the 11 o' clock news at 10, with Tejas Barton.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Does that mean I work in the armory?
Get out of the USA and dont sell directly to any USA company, leaves you free to do what you want ... leaves congress with a fucked up economy.
I've got a backyard full of the stuff. :)
You can have some if you'd like
I see the house is still getting their daily ration of acid...
I guess you'd need some sort of operating license (besides a driver's license) for this if it was in America....
--<Mike>--
Given the nonviolent history of these two places, surely nothing that comes from either of them could be classified as a weapon.
A p4 would be massive overkill (pardon the pun) for flying a cruise missle. You could do it on a 386 class machine; perhaps even lower.
I bought a Dell. Dell asked me because they where an Amerikan company. Are you going to use this computer for(no joke) Nuclair weapons? Biologic weapons? Mass murder? chemical weapons? Any terrorist activities we don't now of... ...
Ofcourse as a honest terrorist I answerd to them all YES!!!.
Afterall I was expecting to play C&C...
I don't know where Americans find there politicians. But you U.S.A. people should start looking harder!
Poor troll. Nobody even bothered to respond. I am sorry for you pal. Good luck next time.
Grampa what do you mean? What technological dark age do you mean?
My Bush 2020 processor in my computer runs my star office just fine. What is that disk thing on your shelf with Unreal Tournament written on it?
A Game? do you have it on a encrypted floppitical so we can play?
You shoot thing? Isn't that Illegal?
BUMBER!
I can't use my sig - my computer can't read my handwriting.
I can't believe that someone actually takes this crap seriously. A penetrator missile? Fired from the underside of the plane? Have you notified CNN? I'm sure they'd love to run it through some expensive image processing software. What? They're in on it to? What about the newspapers, CSPAN, maybe even BBC? THEY'RE ALL IN ON IT?!
I'm not paranoid. Everyone *is* out to get me.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I suppose you could file down the edge of a slot 1 connector, then you'd have a blade better than a box cutter, thanks to the ergonomic handle of the CPU. Also, the hundreds of little prongs on the heat sink can be used, kung fu style, to inflict irritation onto your intended victim.
Also, attach two spare pentium II cpu's together with a spare SCSI cable, and you have poor man's nunchucks.
So what are those damn US politicians going to do when one of them bothers to figure out that AMD's main CPU making plants ... FAB30 and FAB36 are in Dresden Germany? ... and that many people consider AMD processors to be as good or better than Pentium 4s?
I'm guessing the almighty demi-god Dubya will be forced to launch a pre-emptive first strike against Germany to destroy the AMD factories, and prevent the chance for the Germans to take a third stab at world domination in less than 100 years.
AMD! choice of der next Furher! zig hail!
Personally I think Dubya just wants to make some money exporting those crappy 1st generation P4's that totally sucked. By making them appear fobidden, they will be more desirable.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Now I feel old.
...but apparently an iPod should!
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Most chips are made in taiwan/asia area aren't they? So once it comes to the US we have to keep it here. Other countries could import direct from East Asia.
Even assuming it's this plan somehow works, within the next 2-4 years almost all chips would be banned for export.
Most supercomputer and mainframe parts could be designated as weapons components. Systems and components made by Siemens have had this designation for a long time, since have been used in many weapons systems for years. Intel has been making a big dent in that market as well, so it's components can fall under the same designation. I've heard that Kraftwerk was using machines with Siemens components (this was a long time ago). They had trouble touring internationally because the same components they were using to make music were also components of many weapons systems. There was also concern that powerful computers could be brought into the country and used to hack the defense network (not likely, but hey, why not?).
TallGreen CMS hosting
Now hackers could be charged for the following things: Terrorism, invasion of privacy and assault with deadly weapon :-)
if we fought wars throught computer games, the asain countries would own.
that's Fox "News".
I forget where I'm plagiarizing that from.
(Score: -infinity, redundant)
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
US Representatives don't produce zero work, they produce negative work. I don't think it's a coincidence that the worst federal gridlock I've seen in my life (Clinton vs. a Republican congress) was followed the longest economic boom. The harder it is for the government to do stuff, the harder it is for them to screw stuff up.
I have seen some books on GPU ( Graphics Processor Unit ) vector processing that knocked my socks off. Its literally amazing what they are doing right on the graphics card these days, as the graphics card's GPU instruction set - programmed in an assembler-like language - is crammed with vector and matrix operations.
Other parts in the book had snippets of assembler for going directly to the floating point processor for extremely tight vector and matrix operations.
When you consider the clock speed of a modern processor... well, let me say I am quite literally blown away by the power of these modern machines... yet we literally consider many of them to be a toy.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
For those looking for a decent PolSci/Econ/History PhD topic or a neat book to write ... interview technology workers who lived in Warsaw Pact countries during the Cold War ... some pretty interesting stories to be heard and much beer/vodka to be consumed.
One story from an East German Service Engineer about the Warsaw Pact Semiconductor industry trying to make chips with smuggled semi capital equipment but being unable to:
Bottom line - export controls probably work if both enforced and obeyedI believe Juanita
they should be considered a weapon..try throwing one at someone..it could put an eye out.
The actual DDR DRAMS are very slow, they are 15ns-per-random-access-cycle = 15'000 picoseconds, very BAD!!!
open4free ©
...they did have computing devices of some sort. I remember reading some of Feynman's anecdotes about them. Can't remember off the top of my head though.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Was advertised as this way back, you guys surely remember, because that caused quite a stir among Wintel people who can't live with provocative advertisement:D
All they do is hurt US citizens/companies. Anyone in the world can get anything they want from us or another country. I can't even write an app that uses Blowfish (public domain algorithm) without permission. That is nonsense.
New Bumper Sticker campaign...
You can have my Laptop (PIV), when you pry it, from my cold dead, Hands.
My cat's picked up a Hammer. HEY! Put down that Hammer. Put Down that Hamm...THUNK!
"You gave those people material to make a nuclear weapon!"
"No we didn't."
"Yes, you did! We traced the signiture back to this facility!"
"Oh yeah, it came from here alright, but that stuff was stolen a couple of years ago. We're just a poor country with lax security."
"Well, we're going to kill you all. You realize that, right?"
"What?! Wait, why?? That's not ethical!"
"Why? I'll tell you why. Because of your so-called lax security, if you are not a terrorist synmpathiser, is the reason My family is dead, hometown is leveled, and body has cancer. That's why, @-hole."
"Please, don't kill MY family in retribution, surely your religion teaches forgiveness, even for such a mistake."
"Yeah well, I will take mercy on your children. However, everyone over the age of 7 is going to pay for your 'mistake' with their lives."
*BOOM*
As much as I may dislike war and the like, the reality of Mutually Assured Destruction is that, if you put down your gun, the only thing keeping the other guy from killing you is his own moral code. Does he love you as much as you love him? If so, let's all put down our guns. If not, well, war is bad, but I'd rather watch it on TV than in my back yard. So would you. So would anyone. That's why there are wars.
:-(
"According to the article, this clause is unlikely to appear in the final version -- but stranger things have happened." This is like saying that the scenario depicted in "The Day After Tomorrow" is unlikely to occur -- but stranger things have happened. If you are stupid and hysterical enough to believe that something that would interfere with Intel's and AMD's profits to this extent would make it through Congress, you obviously aren't smart enough to work in technology. Get out and give the rest of us who are a chance. Someone wanted a boost to their karma and submitted a totally idiotic story so their friends could help them out. Society is totally corrupt.
It so obviously has nothing to do with "rogue states" designing and simulating nuclear weapons (they can cluster lots more less powerful processors or get them from somewhere else) and everything to do with the sales reputation that comes from being the manufacturer whos product is so powerful its classed as a restricted export weapon. I wonder how much Intel is paying and when IBM will get in on it.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
there aren't that many sunshine provisions on the really important laws. Just a few. Easy to prove. How many laws on the books in 1904, compared to now? Were we freer then, or are we freer now? Did government run with balanced books then, do we now? What was the individual income tax rate in 1904? What is it now?
I could go on, but I think the point is made.
And it's still a conflict of interest. The lawyers lobby & guild LOVES laws, oodles and bunches and boatloads, as complex, wordy, involved, complex, obscure and arcane as possible, to cover every bit of human minutiae they can think of. We even have a noun for it, called "legalese" a sarcastic noun, meant to ridicule how atrociously wordy and..stupid it is. This gig of letting them create new laws by the thousands every term makes them MONEY. It makes them wealthy and powerful. It KEEPS them wealthy and powerful. It's job security, job #1, "if you are in the law business,make new laws". And government, being an accumulation of law writers, administrators and enforcers, LOVES laws, well beyond what is truly necessary, because then they get to expand and expand and expand to administer and enforce all the new laws. So then they can say "wow, look at all these laws, well, guess we need bigger government then, we toldyaso. Umm, well, it *will* cost a few more dollars, or we can always put YOU in debt for it"
This is just so obvious.
Anyway, if he was around, you could argufy with this guy,himself one of the guild, you might have heard of him, Thomas Jefferson:
"It is the trade of lawyers to question everything, yield nothing, and to talk by the hour. "
"Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct. "
"That government is best which governs least, because its people discipline themselves."
"And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude."
"Whenever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force."
""Unless the mass retains sufficient control over those entrusted with the powers of their government, these will be perverted totheir own oppression, and to the perpetuation of wealth and power in the individuals and their families selected for the trust.
Whether our Constitution has hit on the exact degree of control necessary, is yet under experiment."
--I think he nailed it. It was an experiment, with a lot of good qualities to it. Some bad though. The constitution was a good attempt, but has become corrupted by weak and greedy men over the years. Now, look at the demographics of who is in congress, what is the number one profession? Look at the corrupt judges, who wouldn't know a constitution if it bit them on the ass, what were they before? How about presidents? Look at the government, is it really working? Or has it betrayed the trust, has it gotten to the point that "these will be perverted to their own oppression, and to the perpetuation of wealth and power in the individuals and their families selected for the trust."?
I'd say that is a "roger" on that last one.
He nailed it. It's human nature. Power corrupts. It gets out of hand. It got out of hand because of a simple conflict of interest basically. Yes we need people who can *understand* the law to write laws, but we don't need professional lawyers who *profit* from those laws to write them. Two entirely completely different things there. It started out OK, as an experiment, it has gone steadily downhill to the point we have it today, which is basically a two class technofuedalistic society, those above the law, the aristocracy, although they won't admit to it, and those who are subservient to it, and to the dictates of the aristocracy, although they won't admit to it either. Not readily anyway.
last quote for this subject
"I love to see honest and honorable men at the helm, men who will not bend their politics to their purses nor pursue measures by which they may profit and then profit by their measures."
Sorry, where did the grandparent imply this? You can "stabilize" your country by oppressing your citizens. In fact, I've seen it argued that Saddam did do exactly that; he stopped internal strife with force.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
ugh. so they are jingoists, and ignorant/retarded. the sad part is that this is not news. Im just suprised they can keep coming up with so many new, insanely stupid ideas.
http://www.thelung.org
Oops. The correct date is August 31. 1999, and refers to the PowerMacintosh g4/400, 450 and 500 models. The 350 model followed in October.
Did anyone else hear that there was an export ban on Playstations to 'rogue nations' a few years ago? Something about a worry that Saddam Hussein would make a massive cluster of them into a supercomputer? Maybe with that many working together, they could smooth out some of those polygons. . .
worst sig ever. . .
This is typical US imperialist oppression and hegemony. Ya know, bomb some country back into the stone age and then forbid them from using any technology deemed dangerous. SEE: The Project for the New American Century
This is great news! This will make governments of developing nations realize that they must invest in their *own* tech, instead of assuming that they'll just be trade partners.
This will be the next wave after outsourcing.
China already went down that road, with the Dragon chip. You can't expect this 21st industrial wave to be in the hands of the US only.
Not so much accusing the grandparent of that as dramatizing the point. In the process of criticizing Bush, which I must do, one must also not lose sight of the fact that Saddam Hussein was a really, really bad man.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Ya know, it's often said that the people who run this country are a bunch of idiots. But this is really the nail in the coffin, that indeed it is true. The ones who run this country are some of the dumbest people on the face of the planet.
If they are manufactured in the US primarily, but packaged in other countries, but you have an export tax... then every one of these things gets taxed... unless you move the packaging for your domestic market (at least) to a domestic factory. Basicly, the companies either have to pay the export tax, or creat more jobs in the US (which also generates tax revenue). Unfortunately, in the long run this might move more chip manufacturing to Israel. But, hey, Israel needs to become more self-sufficient in weapons manufacturing so that they will be less reliant on US foreign aid. So even this helps conserve US tax dollars. But seriously, since when did we have export fees on weapons? I thought you were able to move land mines to third world countries without much difficuty. Exporting weapons offsets (or, rather, drives) our excessive investment in military technology, so the powers-that-be have traditionally made it absurbdly easy to do.
Mathematics is not a crime.
Of Intel's 13 chip manufacturing plants, 6 of them are outside the United States. There's even one in Israel:
Intel's worldwide manufacturing operations.
The road to hell is paved with the best of intentions, and cynical indecisive incompetent decisions by people and leaders.
Laws (most not all) are mediocre at best for preventing criminal activity.
Laws are developed in a reactionary environment after criminal activity.
Laws are approved by legislators that frequently lack knowledge/experience.
Laws are applied, when (by evidence/clues) possible after criminal incidents.
Preventing criminal activities requires walls, locks, security (sensors, guards, ...), ... and other real-physical-things that
require a personal, financial, community, and national commitment.
Fluff-Laws (most not all on science and technology [data, bio, nano, ...]) provide politicians and people with concepts/plans of
Security by Obscurity paralysis by analysis,
point the finger, smear the blame plausibly
deniable, false accusations, adoration
charade, veneer honor, protracted
capriciousness, economic/cultural instability, and
they never prevent/stop criminal/terrorist activity.
Science, weapons, and technology are potential problems/dangers (as is life). Control of science, weapons, and technology by law to prevent a terrorist act is (I believe) a straw-dog waste of life, time, money .... We need to let-loose our guard-dogs and work-horses
of science and technology to protect US and build a strong
learning-environment and economic system for the future. We need to
lockup and secure our weapons technology by stronger physical
measures. No potential enemy should know how we spy, what we can do,
how stealthy are our weapons, or anything about our technology. When
people/companies (by intent/incompetence) sell/provide any weapons
(Small or Mass) education, knowledge, references, ... then we must
destroy the company (make the companies and investors responsible for
security) and imprison the persons involved for life.
Public/Commercial technology may be used as part of weapons, but public/commercial technology OEM/OSD products are not weapons. We are not the only nuclear power, technology developer, science research, computer and gadget manufacturer in this world. I suspect, few nations (China, Russia, France, India, Thailand, Germany, Iran, ...)
will consider USA laws as binding in international commerce/business.
So, guess what happens when you outlaw OEM/OSD products that are
available in other countries (USA economic destruction, global
commerce leaving the USA, declining international investments, ...).
How damn stupid on technology can a collection of legislators be? Well folks if they are in the USA Congress this should leave no doubt. The USA-AG Ashcroft is probably supporting this inane law, and the USA President Bush can be expected to sign on the dotted line with the X to mark the spot.
BRING BACK MAD, for forty years we lived in fear of technology (Nukes), but stupid laws against technology were for the most part avoided. I guess this proves that either fear helped us do the right thing or the USA legislators of the time were more intelligent, better read, and competent about managing a Nations Resources and Interest. We need to just let everyone in the world know including the delusional religious (even those in the USA) that if we go all will go to hell and damnation for more than fifty years now humanity has had the ability for self-extinction the corruption of the natural environment may bring about extinction, maybe a bio/nano plague will cause total humanity annihilation, ... if we
avoid the unknown (science, technology, the Universe) then we may as
well be extinct.
ANOTHER IMPORTANT POINT involves the feeble and foolish attempts by special interest and legislators who conspire to pass laws (against the public interest, supported by PAC-money and vapor-facts) to control Open-Source, Open-Standards, Free Software Foundation, ....
Allowing spe
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Insightful? c'mon.
/. should know (given the amount of anger directed at it, it seems reasonable to assume that everyone has studied it in detail...or at least read it (for the record, I have).
g ov/
Have you actually read the Constitution? There is no "mandate to always create new laws." Simply that Congress ALONE has the power to do so. (Congress is required to do many things, but arbitrarily writing laws is not one of them) Article 1, Section 4 even requires that Congress meet at least once each year.
" The Congress shall assemble at least once in every year, and such meeting shall be on the first Monday in December, unless they shall by law appoint a different day."
"...no automatic provision for removing old laws..."
This is incorrect. Most laws written today with questionalbe sections have "sunset" provisions. The Patriot Act is full of them, which most people on
Additionally, in cases of a conflict between two laws, the older laws are invalidated by the newer.
Your second "point" is equally invalid. The fact that a Rep. or Senator is or is not a lawyer (or any other profession for that matter) has no bearing on whether or not he/she is qualified to representent the people(House) or the states(Senate). Even those who are not lawyers and/or have no law backround have assistants and others who are. Banning lawyers from serving in public office would have about the same effect as "campaign finance reform".
There is incentive for restraining government, it's called re-election. If the people don't like you, they won't vote for you (not a particularly difficult concept to grasp).
Your last "point" simply suggests that voters (i.e the general public) are stupid and/or ignorant. A notion that has nothing to do with the Constitution.
I'd put my Senators up against any others as examples of gov't restraint if you care to dare.
http://sununu.senate.gov/
http://gregg.senate.
For futher reading, try The Federalist. It's quite interesting.
.. And pulls a P4 laptop out of his backpack and says to the clerk, "Hand over the cash or I'll turn this baby on."
There is no spoon, but we have a spork.
... the same applied to the Digital VAX, yet it's a fact that several were dotted around Moscow. Pointless political grandstanding.
[rolling_eyes:true]
After all, NASA completed the moon landing with less computing power than a vic-20 and sliderules.
Shouldn't they be restricting those also?
[rolling_eyes:false]
The Defence department has to realize that computing is entering the era where we just can't prevent the "bad guys" from having computers that are fast enough that they could be potentially used for creating very destructive weapons. Millions of Pentium and AMD processors are being exported around the world. They have become a comodity product, sort of like a digital wrist watch. I'd like to see you to try to prevent the smugling of those processors from countries that are allowed to import them (say Egypt, India, Argentina, or Malaysia) into countries that are not allowed to have them. In addition, a number of computer processors are produced by non-American companies (e.g. Via in Taiwan, Fujitsu, etc). Even if they are not as fast as the fastest American-made CPUs, they might be just fast enough for many uses and clusters of low-cost single processor systems could be built for more demanding applications.
At best, this legislation will have no effect whatsoever. At worst, the American businesses will be seriously hurt while foreign CPU vendors will prosper at their expense.
So what if a US president stopped internal strife with force- then what? How is Saddam different?
I'm surprised no-one has quoted Ken Thompson on Belle. Belle was a chess computer that he wanted to take to the world chess championships in the USSR, but he was denied an export license, leading to the classic ken quote:
"The only way you could
make a weapon out of it is if you dropped it out of a plane and hit
somebody..."
Will they make the C/C++ to FPGA fusemap and C/C++ to VHDL/RTL tools require export permits? Those tools allow me to take the critical portions of an algorithm into silicon at much much faster speeds than an convention processor can muster. That's a hard bell to unring since we import a lot of those tools into the US from overseas.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
You have an excellent point. I'm a diehard Green-registered hippie peacenik lefty, but even I have to admit that the results of the Iraq invasion are potentially very good. Not now, maybe not even in 5-10 years, but if Iraq remains democratic and eventually stabilizes, then Bush may have done a good thing for the world in the long-term.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
it is interesting that you cannot buy a G5 at apple's online store in China, but you can buy it in Japan and Germany. It's not like Apple doesn't ship it's latest products there either, you can buy the latest eMac and powerbook revisions, but no G5...
bush is supposed to be pro-business.
yet he wants to restrict sale of 'high tech' general purpose computing.
"why does bush hate america so much?"
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
But it all would have worked better had he gone though the UN, let the weapons inspectors finish their job, etc. It might have meant invading 6-12 months later, but IMHO the results would be better.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I believe Juanita
I thought it was funny because a Beowulf cluster is the epitome of 'Big & Badass' here on Slashdot, while Ghengis Khan is the equivalent of 'Big & Badass' in the real world.
So it isn't really English-speaking culture vs Mandarin-speaking culture, it's Geek culture vs the rest of the universe. Not that you'd understand that...
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
the funding of wars stuff? Goes all the way back to baron das rottenchild at least. The first (semi modern) guy to really take advantage of the bandwith of pigeons. The original inside trader. Pick a war, the info is there, but I know you know that. Any trolls want to ask, depending on how good they are, I might give em an url; or two. Anyone else really interested can find it though. Search engines are the most awesome thing on the net, the number one reason for it's success, IMO. well, besides... you know. Same reason polaroid corporation made so much money way back.
Sometimes I wonder if it isn't time to tell the US millitary and government to go fuck itself. Welcome to the new empire.
So what if a US president stopped internal strife with force- then what? How is Saddam different?
He actually did what he set out to do.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
feng1 lang2 - literally, "bee" and "wolf" - are you being serious?
Of course once P4 and above are declared to be munitions, every one running a P4 or better is automatically in possession of a restricted weapon.
Then Microsoft could actually claim there are hordes of armed Linux terrorists across the nation, and have it be technically true.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Wow I didn't realise that we'd got them that scared with the /. effect.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
The MIG-15 had a Rolls Royce jet engine. Some were Russian copies, but many were exports. The British government was even exporting the engines during the Korean War.
Probably MI6 they work on extenal threats MI5 work in internal threats. Your not supposed to know about MI42 now turn around this won't hurt much.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
You lie! Bush would never allow US jobs to be lost through outsourcing.
I doubt anyone here know for certain, but how parallelizable are the nuclear simulation programs, anyway? Is it like a render farm, where it scales really well for additional CPUs, or is it better to have fewer, faster chips?
Just wondering... I seem to recall the ASCI computers are massively parallel clusters, but the fastest supercocmputer in the world isn't.
The US Govt denounced Japan, Germany
and Taiwan, the Axis of Evil States, for
the manufacture and spread of Weapons of Mass
Destruction. These countries are known to
have restricted facilities to make powerful
weapons^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcomputer chips, and known
links to terrorist countries around the globe
using these chips.
President Gerorge Dubya Bush told cheering crowds,
"We will out-smoke them from their VIAs".
The Coalition of the United States is preparing
its armies for this fight. The roads of the
City of Dresden, which is expected to be the
first target, are fleeing in large numbers.
Lets remove the only incentive they have to do a proper job: they do their job, they'll be unemployed, they don't do it, they'll be unemployed.
I think that Batmask you are wearing is a bit too tight and is cutting the blood circulation to your batbrain. But the idea is good, I promise.
Yours,
The Penguin.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I swear! I'll do it! *whips out a P4* THATS IT!
very similar deal. The local heat thought this guy was a dealer, turns out they had the wrong apartment. They bust in and ransack this couples apartment(general big mess and destruction,never made right), find nothing. The cops are mad and embarrassed, so they arrested them both for co-habitation based on some ancient law that was still on the books. This was back in the 70's. They both got small fines and a probation that included some community service forced labor, along with a "record".
Puh-LEESE. It is obvious that you don't think that western civilization is worth defending against a fanatic and murderous enemy that wants to remove everything you hold dear, even your ability to stay neutral. The Wahhab strain of Islam (which motivates bin Laden) holds that everyone who is not Wahhab is heretic or apostate and may legitimately be killed; the only way to deal with such people is to defeat them, humiliate them, subjugate them or kill them. Remember, Islam once held the center of civilization, and gave it up by refusing to reform and advance while once-pathetic Europe outstripped it; to fawn over Islamists as if their imagined complaints have any legitimacy is to deny the foundation of every freedom you enjoy and everything that puts you beyond the Middle Ages. Howard Jacobson wrote this in the October 19 2002 _Guardian_, talking about people of your stripe:
(Quoted in "Free Inquiry", Volume 24 #3, p. 30)Yes, the response should be military. It should be extremely aggressive. And it should make everyone who survives it shiver at the thought of allowing their government, their soil or their faith be part of such an atrocity against anyone ever again. The field of Applied Physics would not exist if the civilized world had not beaten back the various forces of oppression (including but not limited to theocracy) in centuries past. If you refuse to admit that the effort to defend Applied Physics and its underpinnings back to the Enlightenment is worth a fight - a fight until the enemy has surrendered and given up, as individuals, as nations and as a religion - you have SOLD OUT.
I'll stick to the Power5 then.
We could, if we got rid of the income tax and went back to excise taxes levied at the border, and if we just shut down about 3/4ths of the federal government bureaucracy. We are a large enough nation we can primarily trade with ourselves and prosper from it, by keeping the money re circulating inside the borders, and by keeping the jobs home as much as possible. We had the most productive growth and true wealth creation when we actually created wealth, not by redistributing already produced wealth. Our leaders keep claiming all we need to do is to keep rearranging wealth. this is completely erroneous thinking, but man, it sure makes a few fatcats tons of money. Especially outside the nation,and into the hands of transnational loyal to nothing and no one corporationsm, and racking up deficits in government spending, and huge trade imbalances, which according to the gloablists speeches I started listening to 30 years ago, "would never happen". They swore up and down that by shipping jobs overseas that the other nations would re trade back with us and still buy our stuff. Hasn't happened, not even once,not one dollar, we have run a steady trade imbalance not in our favor since the start of massive globalisation and outsourcing, starting with the manufacturing jobs. And they still insist they are correct, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
I have no problems getting rid of buggywhip jobs, that will happen either way, but shipping off manufacturing and R&D and other sorts of IT jobs, while they are still being worked at, is *nuts*,and destroying our domestic agriculture and forestry and mining and fishing is nuts, they are all still useful and necessary for our economy, as in having a large and diversely employed middle class which is primarily engaged in wealth producing activities, instead of what is *actually* happening, the destruction of the middle class and the replacement of it with a two class styled economy with a skewed wealth possession split, in favor of 1% at the top.
there's an old fairy tale most adults missed, called jack and the beanstalk and the cow and the magic beans. It applies to this situation completely. We listened to those crooks and they traded off OUR cow for their profits and left us with the magic beans. And we keep electing the same crooks to office, cycle after cycle, and keep rewarding the same economists, cycle after cycle with bonuses and raises, as more and more folks are forced into downgrading and losing jobs, income, benefits that we HAD but no longer exist here.
that while Bush father and Bubba were in the office, they held up the debt. That seems to be the point of the GPP.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
so did Stalin.
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
Genhis Khan would be the Mandarin version of Grendel.
but I will of necessity have to be brief, because it's very complex. I can simplify it though, but first a slight background. I am primarily concerned with the over all soundness of the united states. I am by nature a nationalist (benevolent sort) and a populist. This has been a study of mine for many years, and I approached the subject as a skeptic, but with an open mind as well, as much as I was able to given human nature.
I was very lucky at an early age to be exposed to government secrets,higher than normal political secrets and realities, with what was spoken in public officially, as compared to what was really going on, and found out young enough to know to always watch for the lies, half truths, and propoganda disguised as news. I was also shown how to "read"what is going on, as a lot of these trends are pretty much open, you just have to do your own work and gather the data and do your analysis, and to never be afraid of using new data.
I have been observing a huge number of seeminly odd occurrences over the years that have lead me to some rather disturbing conclusions. I am not so naieve or paranoid to think I have all the answers, but I believe I have enough of them to form an over all set of postulates that can be demonstrated to be more true than not, given all the data and evidence that is now readily available to the average person via the internet.
One, your observations are correct, the situation is a disaster in th near making, and you don't know why. The answer is simple, it's being done on purpose.
The next question anyone might have is "why?", why is this being done?
That answer is again simple, the world has only enough resources to maintain around a billion souls at something approaching a western nations middle class lifestyle. The worlds leaders, industrialists, high level politicians, and scientists would more or less agree on this, given all the data available. The tip over point into rapid decline is approaching approximately at the end of this decade.
The worlds populations are nearing 6 billion, and in the undeveloped second world and third world nations the populations are increasing at an even faster pace than in the west.
The worlds true rulers, the people who really decide policy, have determined it will be necessary to drastically reduce the worlds populations in the next decade or so, through any means necessary. In the second and third world, it will be primarily by warfare and fast moving diseases. In the developed countries it is being accomplished through what has been termed "stealth" warfare, via "slow" plagues brougt about by poisoned food and water and medicines.
The worlds rulers can run simple sums well enough. The western nations all have what are called a baby boom generation approaching retirement, which will completely swamp any sort of pension schemes, social security, health care, etc. the current elderly have already approached that point, tripling that or more within the next 15 years is quite *impossible*, no economy can sustain it. It cannot be done, it is simply impossible to do so. There simply doesn't exist the raw materials to maintain what we have now, and to actually try to increase it to include the exploding populations in asia, africa, the near and mid east, etc, PLUS, concurrently, keep the same or better quality of life in the western nations, PLUS provide for the retiring populations.
Those populations will be reduced, and while they are at it, their accumulated lifelong wealth will be transferred upstream into the hands of the worlds elite, moreso than now. it's just gravy for them and what they want anyway, anfeudalistic system. it's what the worlds elite have always wanted, and always maintained as much as possible. it is only very near in historical terms that we haven't had an over schismatic two class general society, for most of western mans history it was two basic classes, royals and serfs.
You can see that now in health care and costs with the elderly. Their last f
The US government's imperialist policies which have for many decades made war on US manufacturing, shipping technology to foreign countries in order to boost the profits of a greedy aristocracy may make importers wealthy, but they destroy the technological advantage that has formed the basis of US security and superiority for over a hundred years. The US can no longer control distribution of technological products or education, and the last 15 years of handing out limitless student visas for engineering and science students makes pursuit of technology "spies" laughable. Exporting manufacturing may be profitable in the short run, but you can't have your cake and eat it too.
Mr. Hand: Am I hallucinating here? Just what in the hell do you think you're doing?
Jeff Spicoli: Learning about Cuba, and having some food.
I feel like Mr. Hand here. I mean, if the P4 is going to be considered a "weapon", wouldn't we need to classify supercomputers as WMD's? Hey, if you accept the premise, the conclusion is totally practical.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
IIRC, Dell's licence agreement also says that you must not use the computers for the "production of Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Weapons".
(I'm sorry....I just had to)
--<Mike>--