Re:How would this help? (Score 1)

Better yet, as I'm a Brit I can make a killing buying these chips and sellng them on to countries that my government doesn't have silly rules against.

That's certainly not what happened the last time round this loop, back in the days of the ITAR. Instead, the USA... persuaded... other governments to criminalise export of even software for use on anything moderately high power by the standard of the day.

The result was that Brits couldn't buy any nice toys from the USA without promising in blood not to sell them on to the Evil Empire, and faced arrest and imprisonment if they did. Some people did go to jail for (if I recall correctly) diverting some low-end Vaxen. We're not talking supercomputers, here. And, yes, this applied to chips as well as built systems: there was a hokey formula you could run to find out if your processor was too fast. I seem to remember that it was to be found in the chapter immediately following the one on "Military Pyrotechnics".

I know you're joking, OK, but hypothetically if something like this came back my suggestion for anyone running an import/export business along the lines you outline would be not to plan on any holidays in the USA for the rest of their lives... or indeed anywhere the USA has an extradition treaty with.