BTW, what does this have to do with the price of Apple's stock?
I'm guessing the grandparent was intended as a reply to my first link here, since on slashdot's front page it's right below this story on Apple right now.
It should be pointed out that the evidence which both the US intelligence estimate and the IAEA rely on to determine that there was an Iranian nuclear weapons program prior to 2003 is the so-called "laptop documents" which are fairly clearly forged but for which there are political reasons to ignore that fact.
These forged documents had been used as the basis for a number of inspections by the IAEA of Iranian military facilities. The IAEA's inspections never found any evidence to substantiate the forged documents. Iran permitted such inspections even though they went above and beyond what Iran was required to permit under its NPT agreement. However given that these sorts of inspections were used by the US used to gather detailed targeting data on Iraqi facilities for the Gulf War Iran chose not to allow even more non-required inspections. That's the sole basis of the IAEA's 'concern' and the reason they keep bringing these forged documents up even though they've not been substantiated at all.
As part of the recent nuclear talks Iran insisted that these forged documents be put to rest and not brought up again in the future, which is what this report is supposed to be about.
The linked article by Ariane Tabatabai makes it sound like Iran has now admitted the existence of a nuclear weapons program, but this is false. Instead what Tabatabai is doing is essentially repeating the same cycle of making accusations on the basis of these forged documents and using the previous unsubstantiated accusations as the only 'substantiation'. For example Tabatabai writes:
The IAEA report unsurprisingly indicates that Tehran did have a “coordinated” nuclear weapon development program until 2003.
The report in fact says:
Information available to the Agency prior to November 2011 (i.e., the forged "laptop documents") indicated that Iran had arranged, via a number of different and evolving management structures, for activities to be undertaken in support of a possible military dimension to its nuclear programme. According to this information, the organisational structures covered most of the areas of activity relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device. The information indicated that activities commenced in the late 1980s within Departments of the Physics Research Centre (PHRC) and later, under the leadership of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, became focused in the early 2000s within projects in the AMAD Plan, allegedly managed through the ‘Orchid Office’. Information indicated that activities under the AMAD Plan were brought to a halt in late 2003 and that the work was fully recorded, equipment and work places were either cleaned or disposed of so that there would be little to identify the sensitive nature of the work that had been undertaken. Eventually, according to the information, a new organization known as the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research29 was established by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and based at the Mojdeh Site near Malek Ashtar University in Tehran.
The report goes on describing Iran's response:
In Iran’s submission of 15 August 2015 under the Road-map, Iran provided the Agency with information concerning a number of organisations described in the 2011 Annex (i.e., the forged "laptop documents") and on their relation and functions. In this regard, Iran, inter alia, denied the existence of a coordinated programme aimed at the development of a nuclear explosive device, and specifically denied the existence of the AMAD Plan and the ‘Orchid Office’ as elements of such a programme.
As far as I can tell the documents Iran submitted don't
Your argument doesn't hold water. You state roughly that the Nazis are leftist because all totalitarians are leftist. And as Nazis are totalitarians they must be leftist.
Actually if you read his post you'll see that he placed the Nazi's on the left not by simply equating totalitarianism with leftism, but by listing four Nazi policies: universal health care, minimum wage, social security, and a 102% tax on certain corporations. His argument is more like "These policies are leftist and therefore mark the party implementing them as being on the left."
Note that I'm not taking any position is this argument; I can certainly see problems with his argument. This is simply a 'meta' comment on your discussion to point out that your characterization of his argument is incorrect.
Unless you can name one right wing politician who opposes minimum parking requirements?
Pretty much any libertarian leaning Republican. Not that I particularly support him, but I imagine Sen. Paul would express opposition to minimum parking requirements if asked, and his father certainly would and would have voted against any such legislation.
It's interesting how the left errs on the side of the poor while the right errs on the side of the wealthy.
Actually both sides err on the side of the wealthy, the left only pretends or is fooled into thinking the things it does 'for the poor' actually benefit the poor. For example almost all of the programs that are supposedly to benefit the less well off in fact transfer more from the poorer to the better off than vice versa.
But the bitcoin isn't leaving the cloud; The bitcoin is being transferred between bitcoin addresses like any other bitcoin transaction, recorded in the same global ledger. Even if the token gets sent to someone other than the owner of the original bitcoin address, effectively 'transmitting' money, this is no different than every other bitcoin transaction.
So perhaps every bitcoin transaction needs to be regulated. Perhaps the software should be illegal and using bitcoin should require a State granted license. After all, bitcoin was originally designed and implemented by anarchists for the express purpose of undermining the State.
Because one of the advantages of living in a civilized society is we can depend on the system to keep us protected (to a degree).
Sure, but there's a large body of philosophical and economic work arguing both that these ends don't justify any and all means (and specifically not the means you are advocating for) and that there are alternative, humane means for achieving these ends.
Whether he likes it or not, by engaging in the business he is in, he now falls into a regulated area. Tough shit. That's the cost of doing his business.
that's not an argument that it's right.
And as a consumer, you should be grateful that such systems are in place and you can do all the things I listed above without any thought.
Why should one be grateful for these specific institutions and not advocate for a more humane way of achieving such goals?
If you don't like it, there are plenty of places in the world that do not have such protections. Either him or you are welcome to vote with your feet and pursue a different philosophy of consumer protection.
The problem with the 'love it or leave it,' position is that it seems to me that, philosophically, it should be the aggressors that leave, not the victims.
Those two things are different. In one case the intervention by a third party is prior restraint for the sake of bad consequences not known to be occurring; that is, the third party is involved even when money laundering is not occurring and the individuals transacting are innocent victims of the third party*. In the other situation the two people are actively violating the neighbor's rights.
*(Although a more radical point is that money laundering is entirely legitimate for anyone not under contractual obligations not to engage in it.)
That is an utterly ridiculous way to look at a transaction. All people that at some point in the future get the materials have rights over all previous transactions involving them? That makes no sense and just sounds like a weak attempt at rationalization.
the rules are to protect consumers and other participants
There are two people involved: the guy printing the token and the guy who wants the token printed. If neither of these people want to be protected, or they've taken other measures on their own, why should they be protected by a third party that neither of them wants involved? To me that sound a bit like a 'protection' racket.
Bitcoin -> Currency has and always will be the choke point the government(s) control.
In this case is that the guy is being paid in Bitcoin and is effectively mailing Bitcoin back; That is, it's not a transfer between Bitcoin and another currency that's being regulated here.
There's some controversy over whether the static_if proposal is really right, and modules is a major change which was never expected to get into C++14. As I understand it the current plan is for the committee to release modules as a technical specification separate from the overall C++ spec and then perhaps it will get rolled into C++17 or later.
LLVM no longer stands for 'low level virtual machine'. It's simply random letters used as an umbrella name for a collection of different projects. The LLVM backend and libc++ are separate projects, but libc++ is also separate from clang.
Clang is an open source project; People want OpenMP so they're implementing it. The OpenMP work on clang is being done by Intel engineers. I believe it was Intel that also did an initial prototype of C++AMP on Clang as well.
If an abstraction is being properly used in C++ then a C version program would probably be best with the same abstraction. If C++ has some language support for that abstraction which C lacks and which allows the program intent to be expressed more directly then there's no reason to imagine that whatever hand-built layers are used for that abstraction in C are necessarly going to be better than the more direct expression in C++.
For example, if a program should use dynamic dispatch then a compiler is likely to do better optimizing C++'s virtual functions (using common techinques such as devirtualization) than it will do with some hand-rolled dynamic dispatch systen in C.
The only way C comes out ahead is when comparing well written C to poorly written C++, e.g. a C program that properly does not use dynamic dispatch to a C++ program that uses virtual functions gratuitously.
The decoys aren't for confusing a dumb heat seeking missile, they're for confusing opponents' signals analysis departments, which are full of smart people that can see how much reaction mass an object is putting out at what velocity and how much acceleration is resulting from it, along with lots of other passively observable information.
Not to mention that they'll have telescopes so they can just look at the objects. To go back to your analogy, flares really don't look very much like airplanes.
The bottom line is that decoys probably need to be pretty much the same as actual spacecraft.
I think it was Thomas Sowell who likened the question "What should the Federal Reserve be replaced with?" with the question "What should a cancerous tumor be replaced with?"
Paul's actual plan is to repeal the laws that revent competition with the Federal Reserve. As a gold bug he then expects that people will choose to transact using using gold and silver. (In fact he was instrumental in getting the Federal government to start minting gold and silver coins again in the 80s.) If he's wrong and there's no currency collapse coming then people can just keep on using Federal Reserve notes and nothing happens. If he's right then there's an escape hatch available to everyone, and the economy can keep on working without resorting to black markets. (Of course the very rich have the resources and government connections to protect themselves either way.)
A free market can't solve all problems, but it can do a good deal better at solving many problems than unjust violence. Furthermore the market is only a single institution of a free society. For example the Civil Rights movement was working; many businesses had already changed their policies before the Civil Rights Act. One of the worst things about the Civil Rights Act is that in some ways it stopped the Civil Rights Movement in its tracks. People got the idea that they'd won into their heads, so many stopped fighting. (Sort of like President Obama's election was a huge setback for the anti-war movement.)
Civil Rights legislation was needed to roll back government abuses like Jim Crow and local law enforcement covering up and even participating in crimes against minorities. It wasn't needed to make the world fair.
A free society will never be a perfect, utopian society. But it will be far more just, peaceful, and prosperous than what we've got.
the TSA is enough of a threat that it's worth working with an enemy to get rid of it. I'd say the same about the wiretap insanity and data sharing with other countries. I imagine Paul sees people like me the same way--an enemy,
No, Ron Paul often talks about working with people he disagrees with on issues (and Rand probably has similar feelings). He praises Dennis Kucinich as being good on Civil Liberties and War even though he believes that Kucinich's domestic plans would cause widespread poverty and misery. He worked with Alan Grayson on getting an Audit of the Federal Reserve even though Grayson's views on a lot of other things is anathema to Paul.
Disagreeing with people doesn't make them an enemy. You're looking at things through the lens of tribalism. Working with people on specific issues where you agree is what people ought to do. But we've all been taught that we have to band together, overlook the problems of people in our tribe for the sake of unity, and that the only way to get things done is 'compromise'.
We could do with a good deal less compromise, more cooperation based only on principles, and complete independence or decentralization in areas where groups disagree but can't justly use force.
I see language designers are still making the mistake of trying to represent characters as fixed size entities. Go 1 adds a new data type 'rune' intended to represent a UTF-32 codepoint, which is fine as long as it's only used for code points, but then the example code they show is:
delta:= ''// delta has type rune.
var DELTA rune
DELTA = unicode.ToUpper(delta)
When you design an API that accepts or returns individual characters (as opposed to code units or code points), do not use rune, char, wchar_t, char16_t, char32_t, int, or any other fixed length type to represent a character. Characters are fundamentally variable length.
You should use a string data type because fixed size types can only represent a subset of characters. For example, a single UTF-32 code point cannot represent the Lithuanian characte LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH OGONEK AND ACUTE. In Unicode this character can only be represented as a sequence of multiple code points (<U+0105> <U+0301> or <U+00E1> <U+0328> or <U+0061> <U+0328> <U+301>). So using strings works whereas using a fixed size type will inevitably fail.
Using strings to represent a character has another advantage beyond the fact that it's the only way that works. It eliminates the client's need to convert between the string type and the type used to hold a code point. Clients can just directly use text in whatever the native encoding is.
An underground fortified militiarised nuclear site that was kept secret until exposed by foreign nations
If you're referring to Qom/Fordow, Iran announced that in accordance with its NTP obligations and then very quickly afterwards Obama and other leaders claimed to have exposed it. You can choose to believe the story that Iran only announced it because they learned it was going to be exposed (I don't consider that story credible), but the fact remains that Iran announced it in accordance with their obligations. Nor is there any evidence that any nuclear materials where ever there (which would be a breach of the NPT).
in contrast the number of nations who believe Iran probably has a nuclear weapons programme is much larger
Are there actually any national intelligence agencies that think Iran has a current nuclear weapons program? The US last NIE still said they don't, and prominent members of Israel's intelligence community have confirmed that they believe Iran still has not decided to create a nuclear weapons program. Saudi Arabia may have been urging us to attack Iran, but I'm not sure that has anything to do with them being worried about an Iranian nuclear weapon. Politicians making unfounded statements don't count.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot: Only 36 Percent of Indian Engineers Can Write Compilable Code Says Study
India Graduates Millions, but Too Few Are Fit to Hire
Only 7 per cent engineering graduates employable: What's wrong with India's engineers?
BTW, what does this have to do with the price of Apple's stock?
I'm guessing the grandparent was intended as a reply to my first link here, since on slashdot's front page it's right below this story on Apple right now.
Here's an interview with Gareth Porter on the IAEA's report.
Correction: the mention of the Gulf War should in fact be to Operation Desert Fox.
For anyone interested in this topic there's a great book by investigative journalist Gareth Porter that details the whole saga: Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare
It should be pointed out that the evidence which both the US intelligence estimate and the IAEA rely on to determine that there was an Iranian nuclear weapons program prior to 2003 is the so-called "laptop documents" which are fairly clearly forged but for which there are political reasons to ignore that fact.
These forged documents had been used as the basis for a number of inspections by the IAEA of Iranian military facilities. The IAEA's inspections never found any evidence to substantiate the forged documents. Iran permitted such inspections even though they went above and beyond what Iran was required to permit under its NPT agreement. However given that these sorts of inspections were used by the US used to gather detailed targeting data on Iraqi facilities for the Gulf War Iran chose not to allow even more non-required inspections. That's the sole basis of the IAEA's 'concern' and the reason they keep bringing these forged documents up even though they've not been substantiated at all.
As part of the recent nuclear talks Iran insisted that these forged documents be put to rest and not brought up again in the future, which is what this report is supposed to be about.
The linked article by Ariane Tabatabai makes it sound like Iran has now admitted the existence of a nuclear weapons program, but this is false. Instead what Tabatabai is doing is essentially repeating the same cycle of making accusations on the basis of these forged documents and using the previous unsubstantiated accusations as the only 'substantiation'. For example Tabatabai writes:
The IAEA report unsurprisingly indicates that Tehran did have a “coordinated” nuclear weapon development program until 2003.
The report in fact says:
Information available to the Agency prior to November 2011 (i.e., the forged "laptop documents") indicated that Iran had arranged, via a number of different and evolving management structures, for activities to be undertaken in support of a possible military dimension to its nuclear programme. According to this information, the organisational structures covered most of the areas of activity relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device. The information indicated that activities commenced in the late 1980s within Departments of the Physics Research Centre (PHRC) and later, under the leadership of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, became focused in the early 2000s within projects in the AMAD Plan, allegedly managed through the ‘Orchid Office’. Information indicated that activities under the AMAD Plan were brought to a halt in late 2003 and that the work was fully recorded, equipment and work places were either cleaned or disposed of so that there would be little to identify the sensitive nature of the work that had been undertaken. Eventually, according to the information, a new organization known as the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research29 was established by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and based at the Mojdeh Site near Malek Ashtar University in Tehran.
The report goes on describing Iran's response:
In Iran’s submission of 15 August 2015 under the Road-map, Iran provided the Agency with information concerning a number of organisations described in the 2011 Annex (i.e., the forged "laptop documents") and on their relation and functions. In this regard, Iran, inter alia, denied the existence of a coordinated programme aimed at the development of a nuclear explosive device, and specifically denied the existence of the AMAD Plan and the ‘Orchid Office’ as elements of such a programme.
As far as I can tell the documents Iran submitted don't
Your argument doesn't hold water. You state roughly that the Nazis are leftist because all totalitarians are leftist. And as Nazis are totalitarians they must be leftist.
Actually if you read his post you'll see that he placed the Nazi's on the left not by simply equating totalitarianism with leftism, but by listing four Nazi policies: universal health care, minimum wage, social security, and a 102% tax on certain corporations. His argument is more like "These policies are leftist and therefore mark the party implementing them as being on the left."
Note that I'm not taking any position is this argument; I can certainly see problems with his argument. This is simply a 'meta' comment on your discussion to point out that your characterization of his argument is incorrect.
Unless you can name one right wing politician who opposes minimum parking requirements?
Pretty much any libertarian leaning Republican. Not that I particularly support him, but I imagine Sen. Paul would express opposition to minimum parking requirements if asked, and his father certainly would and would have voted against any such legislation.
It's interesting how the left errs on the side of the poor while the right errs on the side of the wealthy.
Actually both sides err on the side of the wealthy, the left only pretends or is fooled into thinking the things it does 'for the poor' actually benefit the poor. For example almost all of the programs that are supposedly to benefit the less well off in fact transfer more from the poorer to the better off than vice versa.
Ben Powell, "Somalia After State Collapse: Chaos or Improvement"
But the bitcoin isn't leaving the cloud; The bitcoin is being transferred between bitcoin addresses like any other bitcoin transaction, recorded in the same global ledger. Even if the token gets sent to someone other than the owner of the original bitcoin address, effectively 'transmitting' money, this is no different than every other bitcoin transaction.
So perhaps every bitcoin transaction needs to be regulated. Perhaps the software should be illegal and using bitcoin should require a State granted license. After all, bitcoin was originally designed and implemented by anarchists for the express purpose of undermining the State.
Because one of the advantages of living in a civilized society is we can depend on the system to keep us protected (to a degree).
Sure, but there's a large body of philosophical and economic work arguing both that these ends don't justify any and all means (and specifically not the means you are advocating for) and that there are alternative, humane means for achieving these ends.
Whether he likes it or not, by engaging in the business he is in, he now falls into a regulated area. Tough shit. That's the cost of doing his business.
that's not an argument that it's right.
And as a consumer, you should be grateful that such systems are in place and you can do all the things I listed above without any thought.
Why should one be grateful for these specific institutions and not advocate for a more humane way of achieving such goals?
If you don't like it, there are plenty of places in the world that do not have such protections. Either him or you are welcome to vote with your feet and pursue a different philosophy of consumer protection.
The problem with the 'love it or leave it,' position is that it seems to me that, philosophically, it should be the aggressors that leave, not the victims.
Those two things are different. In one case the intervention by a third party is prior restraint for the sake of bad consequences not known to be occurring; that is, the third party is involved even when money laundering is not occurring and the individuals transacting are innocent victims of the third party*. In the other situation the two people are actively violating the neighbor's rights.
*(Although a more radical point is that money laundering is entirely legitimate for anyone not under contractual obligations not to engage in it.)
That is an utterly ridiculous way to look at a transaction. All people that at some point in the future get the materials have rights over all previous transactions involving them? That makes no sense and just sounds like a weak attempt at rationalization.
the rules are to protect consumers and other participants
There are two people involved: the guy printing the token and the guy who wants the token printed. If neither of these people want to be protected, or they've taken other measures on their own, why should they be protected by a third party that neither of them wants involved? To me that sound a bit like a 'protection' racket.
Bitcoin -> Currency has and always will be the choke point the government(s) control.
In this case is that the guy is being paid in Bitcoin and is effectively mailing Bitcoin back; That is, it's not a transfer between Bitcoin and another currency that's being regulated here.
There's some controversy over whether the static_if proposal is really right, and modules is a major change which was never expected to get into C++14. As I understand it the current plan is for the committee to release modules as a technical specification separate from the overall C++ spec and then perhaps it will get rolled into C++17 or later.
LLVM no longer stands for 'low level virtual machine'. It's simply random letters used as an umbrella name for a collection of different projects. The LLVM backend and libc++ are separate projects, but libc++ is also separate from clang.
Clang is an open source project; People want OpenMP so they're implementing it. The OpenMP work on clang is being done by Intel engineers. I believe it was Intel that also did an initial prototype of C++AMP on Clang as well.
If an abstraction is being properly used in C++ then a C version program would probably be best with the same abstraction. If C++ has some language support for that abstraction which C lacks and which allows the program intent to be expressed more directly then there's no reason to imagine that whatever hand-built layers are used for that abstraction in C are necessarly going to be better than the more direct expression in C++.
For example, if a program should use dynamic dispatch then a compiler is likely to do better optimizing C++'s virtual functions (using common techinques such as devirtualization) than it will do with some hand-rolled dynamic dispatch systen in C.
The only way C comes out ahead is when comparing well written C to poorly written C++, e.g. a C program that properly does not use dynamic dispatch to a C++ program that uses virtual functions gratuitously.
The decoys aren't for confusing a dumb heat seeking missile, they're for confusing opponents' signals analysis departments, which are full of smart people that can see how much reaction mass an object is putting out at what velocity and how much acceleration is resulting from it, along with lots of other passively observable information.
Not to mention that they'll have telescopes so they can just look at the objects. To go back to your analogy, flares really don't look very much like airplanes.
The bottom line is that decoys probably need to be pretty much the same as actual spacecraft.
I think it was Thomas Sowell who likened the question "What should the Federal Reserve be replaced with?" with the question "What should a cancerous tumor be replaced with?"
Paul's actual plan is to repeal the laws that revent competition with the Federal Reserve. As a gold bug he then expects that people will choose to transact using using gold and silver. (In fact he was instrumental in getting the Federal government to start minting gold and silver coins again in the 80s.) If he's wrong and there's no currency collapse coming then people can just keep on using Federal Reserve notes and nothing happens. If he's right then there's an escape hatch available to everyone, and the economy can keep on working without resorting to black markets. (Of course the very rich have the resources and government connections to protect themselves either way.)
A free market can't solve all problems, but it can do a good deal better at solving many problems than unjust violence. Furthermore the market is only a single institution of a free society. For example the Civil Rights movement was working; many businesses had already changed their policies before the Civil Rights Act. One of the worst things about the Civil Rights Act is that in some ways it stopped the Civil Rights Movement in its tracks. People got the idea that they'd won into their heads, so many stopped fighting. (Sort of like President Obama's election was a huge setback for the anti-war movement.)
Civil Rights legislation was needed to roll back government abuses like Jim Crow and local law enforcement covering up and even participating in crimes against minorities. It wasn't needed to make the world fair.
A free society will never be a perfect, utopian society. But it will be far more just, peaceful, and prosperous than what we've got.
You forgot to capitalize "Serious".
One of Glen Greenwald's articles about Unserious people: The parade of “shrill, unserious extremists” on display at today’s impeachment hearings
the TSA is enough of a threat that it's worth working with an enemy to get rid of it. I'd say the same about the wiretap insanity and data sharing with other countries. I imagine Paul sees people like me the same way--an enemy,
No, Ron Paul often talks about working with people he disagrees with on issues (and Rand probably has similar feelings). He praises Dennis Kucinich as being good on Civil Liberties and War even though he believes that Kucinich's domestic plans would cause widespread poverty and misery. He worked with Alan Grayson on getting an Audit of the Federal Reserve even though Grayson's views on a lot of other things is anathema to Paul.
Disagreeing with people doesn't make them an enemy. You're looking at things through the lens of tribalism. Working with people on specific issues where you agree is what people ought to do. But we've all been taught that we have to band together, overlook the problems of people in our tribe for the sake of unity, and that the only way to get things done is 'compromise'.
We could do with a good deal less compromise, more cooperation based only on principles, and complete independence or decentralization in areas where groups disagree but can't justly use force.
A great classical liberal. I think if we had just listened things would be so much better.
He also knew what to think of the term 'wage slave'.
I see language designers are still making the mistake of trying to represent characters as fixed size entities. Go 1 adds a new data type 'rune' intended to represent a UTF-32 codepoint, which is fine as long as it's only used for code points, but then the example code they show is:
:= '' // delta has type rune.
delta
var DELTA rune
DELTA = unicode.ToUpper(delta)
When you design an API that accepts or returns individual characters (as opposed to code units or code points), do not use rune, char, wchar_t, char16_t, char32_t, int, or any other fixed length type to represent a character. Characters are fundamentally variable length.
You should use a string data type because fixed size types can only represent a subset of characters. For example, a single UTF-32 code point cannot represent the Lithuanian characte LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH OGONEK AND ACUTE. In Unicode this character can only be represented as a sequence of multiple code points (<U+0105> <U+0301> or <U+00E1> <U+0328> or <U+0061> <U+0328> <U+301>). So using strings works whereas using a fixed size type will inevitably fail.
Using strings to represent a character has another advantage beyond the fact that it's the only way that works. It eliminates the client's need to convert between the string type and the type used to hold a code point. Clients can just directly use text in whatever the native encoding is.
An underground fortified militiarised nuclear site that was kept secret until exposed by foreign nations
If you're referring to Qom/Fordow, Iran announced that in accordance with its NTP obligations and then very quickly afterwards Obama and other leaders claimed to have exposed it. You can choose to believe the story that Iran only announced it because they learned it was going to be exposed (I don't consider that story credible), but the fact remains that Iran announced it in accordance with their obligations. Nor is there any evidence that any nuclear materials where ever there (which would be a breach of the NPT).
in contrast the number of nations who believe Iran probably has a nuclear weapons programme is much larger
Are there actually any national intelligence agencies that think Iran has a current nuclear weapons program? The US last NIE still said they don't, and prominent members of Israel's intelligence community have confirmed that they believe Iran still has not decided to create a nuclear weapons program. Saudi Arabia may have been urging us to attack Iran, but I'm not sure that has anything to do with them being worried about an Iranian nuclear weapon. Politicians making unfounded statements don't count.