I can understand us (the US) not wanting Iran to have nukular weapons of massive destruction. Yes, it’s enormously dickish to say “we are the only ones allowed to play with nukes” and forbid every country we don’t trust. The only reason they have to listen to us is that we already have the nukes. We don’t trust them and they don’t trust us, but they can’t force us to give up the WMDs and we (supposedly) can force them (ie. everyone, not just Iran) to not have them. Unless they already do, and then we cautiously ignore them and bully the kids who didn’t bring guns to school (if you catch my metaphor).

Fine, we’re international nukular bullies, I hate it but we’ve all lived with that reality for years.

What I cannot cope with is that we are restricting Iran’s computing power. We are literally telling Iran and other “rogue states” that we can have powerful, general purpose computers and they can’t. Nevermind the fact that we were embargoing “forbidden tech” back when a Gigaflop was considered a “supercomputer” and anybody with enough 486s can assembly a petaflop computer with beowulf clustering.

It’s not bad enough that we have to be top dawg with the brass nuts in the worldwide arms race (btw, who else is running this race?) but now we are getting antsy about their IT department? Yes, they can do nukular simulations. So can a fucking PS3. So can any of those unbelievably massive botnets – that for all we know could be controlled by Iran’s government.

Best case scenario: we control Iran’s CPU intake and they never crawl out from under our technological boot. Information is power and the lack thereof leaves a power vacuum that only WE can fill (mwuhahaha!) and thus Iran is our bitch in perpetuity.
Worst case scenario: they use our American personal computers as zombies (ie. the Storm botnet) and do all their nukular sims on our turf and then blow us to smithereens in an apocalyptic display of irony.

Technology embargoes are the ultimate in douchiness and no matter the justification (dey no make da bombs now cuz dey can’t simulize dem!) that shit just doesn’t dovetail with our declared applications of supercomputation.  They are doing weather simulations, only theirs are maxing out at 0.18% of the US’ best supercomputer (860 GFLOPS to 478.2 TFLOPS).  And yet we’re in all in a tizzy because Iran was never supposed to have access to such “advanced” hardware (Opterons are VERBOTEN!), and those Lunix commies screwed us again with their open source!

Now that’s a big load of dicketry.

First of all, thank you for the prompt service.  That said, slow down long enough to do your job to my satisfaction.  See how I didn’t write “please” in that sentence?  That’s because I’m pissed.  Here’s what’s going on in my brain:

 QUIT STACKING THE PICKLES ON TOP OF EACH OTHER IN THE CORNER OF MY BURGER – IF I BITE INTO ONE MORE PICKLETOWER SO HELP ME GOD SOMEBODY IS GETTING DEEP FRIED

So.  Let’s take a little more care with our craftsmanship, shall we?  Don’t end up a statistic.