Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
..so perhaps we were justified going in there after all.
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
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
Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of congressman...
It would be the only cluster in the world to slow down as you add nodes.
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-
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.
Does this mean I need a CCW permit to stick a P4 in my pocket?
Unknown host pong.
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.
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 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
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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!
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...
Details of locations of Intel-chip factories
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
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.
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.
weapons of math destruction
That would be those ancient Pentiums with the FDIV bug.
Infuriate left and right
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.
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)
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."