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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.
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.
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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.
Even if it did make sense, what's the point?
You joke, but I can see the legislation now. The government idiots are idiot enough to make the classification and then have its agencies live and die by such a decree, now matter how stupid it is in the pragmatic world.
If the final packaging of the raw chips into usable format is done in a 3rd world country with cheap labor, then people who want to 'smuggle' them will just do it from there rather than the US. The only people who will lose from this kind of export control would be US companies that assemble computers. And that is even assuming you can enforce this sort of thing in the US, which won't work very well. The gov't can't keep billions of dollars worth of illegal products from coming into the US, how will they keep things from going out?
"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?
Doesn't AMD have a big fab plant in Desden, Germany?
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...
Well, fellow idiot, schools instituted "no tolerance" rules to keep students from using those bad illegal drugs, and guess what?!?!? Now students are being expelled for bringing over-the-counter drugs to school. We have a case here where an honor student was seen taking a Motrin tablet for her PMS cramps and the school officials want to send her to an alternative school. They also had the option of expelling her.
Anytime a law or rule is made, you have to think about the EXTREME application of it because the people enforcing it tend to be idiots like you.
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.
From the article:
"You cannot control anything that is made by the millions and which you can put in your pocket."
-Seymore Goodman, professor of International Affairs and Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology
It's too bad more people don't realize this, we could end this silly "war on drugs".
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
Athlons have solved their overheating problems ages ago... Now, Prescotts, OTOH...
Athlons are as hot as ever. It's just that, compared to the Prescott, it doesn't seem so hot after all.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
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."