Playstation 2 Under Export Controls

Henry Pang writes "The New York Times has this interesting article. It seems like people of China will not be able to buy Playstation 2 next year. " It's The Times, so you need a free account to read it, but it talks about the Playstation being a supercomputer by US standards. Also notes that within 12 months, a $1200 Merced based PC would also be illegal.

Read it 1st.

I counted 4 comments that amount to "The playstation is made in Japan so US law doesn't apply".

The Actual article says that the CPU is made in the US."

Is there a law against reading the article before posting or do we just have a lot of morons around ?
--
"THINK" -: former IBM motto.

Wassenaar and some random thoughts

I do not believe that this has been previously noted, but the 2000 MTOPS export limit is not only a US restriction but is also part of the Wassenaar Arrangement. There is one caveat however. The provisions of the Wassenaar Arrangement are not binding. Each of the 30 something countries involved is free to establish their own national policy wrt to export restrictions. This point was previously discussed here at /. with regard to encryption.

Another person mentioned that this is not an outright export ban. Once again, under the Wassenaar and US policy, exemptions to the export restrictions can be sought and approved. I think that is an important point that should be considered. OTOH, I have had the fun of dealing with export laws wrt to sending equipment overseas so that I could conduct my own research. As I don't have bags full of money to help grease the skids, my experience can be best described by the following phrase: bend over and grab your ankles.

Finally, keep in mind that changes in US export policy changes at a glacier pace that is not commensurate with Moore's law. Changes do occur, but they are driven by the interaction of industry lobbyists and politicans. This mix is not condusive for the establishment of intelligent policy.

As a side note, the Wassenaar Arrangement previously (1996?) had an export restriction of 700 MTOPS, IIRC.

This seems pretty warped..

When the most powerful computer in the world runs on commodity Pentium processors, available under no export restrictions whatsoever.

Sure, it has over 9000 of them, but neither the chips themselves, nor the technology to make interconnects of the required speeds, nor the algorithms to make large-scale distributed applications are under any controls whatsoever.

It makes no sense to make it illegal to buy a Cray mainframe when you can build a computer with similar power from parts that any major PC manufacturer will ship to you no questions asked.

Sure, ASCI Red has lots of custom hardware, but i seriously doubt that the Chinese, Soviets, Indians or any other reasonably developed country in the world are incapable of building or sourcing this type of hardware.

Sure, it's cheaper to buy a pre-built system from a US manufacturer, but if China wants to simulate nuclear explosions, then they'll do it. And theres not much the US Government can do to stop them.

I don't see the problem, they seem to think it's alright to have nukes sitting round in their own back yard, but no-one else gets to play?

Making the PSX-2 illegal to export is just plain ridiculous, if theres sufficient demand in the market, illegal (according to US law) clones will simply be manufactured in Taiwan or Korea for the Chinese market.

Copyright and Patent law? Look at the situation with software in Asia.

Why try and put export controls on technology that is inherently uncontrollable?