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China Government The Almighty Buck United States Technology

China To Impose Export Control On High Tech Drones and Supercomputers 67

hackingbear writes: Following similar hi-tech export restriction policies in the U.S. (or perhaps in response to the U.S. ban on China,) China will impose export control on some drones and high performance computers starting on August 15th, according to an announcement published on Friday by China's Ministry of Commerce and the General Administration of Customs. The ban includes (official documents in Chinese) drone that can take off in wind speed exceeding 46.4km/hour or can continuously fly for over 1 hour as well as electronic components specifically designed or modified for supercomputers with speed over 8 petaflops. Companies must acquire specific permits before exporting such items. Drones and supercomputers are the two areas where China is the leader or among the top players. China is using its rapidly expanding defense budget to make impressive advances in (military) drone technology, prompting some to worry that the United States' global dominance in the market could soon be challenged. The tightening of regulations comes two weeks after an incident in disputed Kashmir in which the Pakistani army claimed to have shot down an Indian "spy drone", reportedly Chinese-made. China's 33-petaflops Tianhe-2, currently the fastest supercomputer in the world, while still using Intel Xeon processors, makes use of the home-grown interconnect, arguably the most important component of modern supercomputers.
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China To Impose Export Control On High Tech Drones and Supercomputers

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    while still using Intel Xeon processors

    The U.S. Could reciprocate and ban Intel exports.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Yeah, it could, but it won't.

      The USA back in 1999 transferred ballistic missile technology to China, all friendly like, and suddenly China could reliably launch missiles.

      And that was after it was discovered that China had stolen nuclear warhead designs from the USA.

      The USA are idiots that believe giving away everything to people that hate them are going to suddenly transform enemies into friends.

      It's foolishness.

      • by Kartu ( 1490911 )

        The USA back in 1999 transferred ballistic missile technology to China, all friendly like, and suddenly China could reliably launch missiles.

        And that was after it was discovered that China had stolen nuclear warhead designs from the USA.

        Citation needed...

        • Re:Intel processors (Score:4, Informative)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Sunday August 02, 2015 @02:51PM (#50235777) Homepage Journal

          And that was after it was discovered that China had stolen nuclear warhead designs from the USA.

          Citation needed...

          Even CNN knows [cnn.com], google could have told you, WTF is wrong with you?

          • by Anonymous Coward

            Google tells me everything, including that I still need to buy a new chain for my bike, although I already did that 4 weeks ago. I don't trust Google anymore. Google just tells me want 'they' want me to know. They are not a reliable news source since they use a gameable algorithm. Although most are easy to spot, like the link farms, who knows how many gamed results I fail to spot because I'm too stupid or ignorant. Who knows how subtle but effective some gamed results are that they have gone unnoticed and a

      • by Spy Handler ( 822350 ) on Monday August 03, 2015 @01:45AM (#50238493) Homepage Journal

        The idiots that you refer to are Nixon and Clinton (B, not H).

        Nixon "opened up" China and Clinton gave them "most favored nation" trading status.

        Nixon's motivation is easy to understand, he thought he was breaking up the monolithic Communist bloc and weakening the Soviets who were considered the big threat at the time.

        Clinton's motivation is harder to fathom. Why would he bend over backwards for the Chinese Communist party like that? Soviets were gone, China's human rights were still deplorable, it was still a totalitarian regime, and liberals are not supposed to favor that type of a government. Only answer I can think of is that he's a liberal in name only and he just did what his corporate campaign donors wanted him to do, which is get him cheap labor so they can make more profits (gutting domestic manufacturing jobs be damned).

    • by mysidia ( 191772 )

      The U.S. Could reciprocate and ban Intel exports.

      One of Intel's major chip fabs is in China, so the chips can just be produced at that facility. Also, if the US bans exports, then it's likely that Intel would move existing US based chip fabs to Europe

      • The U.S. Could reciprocate and ban Intel exports.

        One of Intel's major chip fabs is in China, so the chips can just be produced at that facility. Also, if the US bans exports, then it's likely that Intel would move existing US based chip fabs to Europe

        That all depends on the type of ban.

        For instance, a sale ban would still effect the company regardless of which of it's international subsidiary's did the actual sale.

        A design ban would forbid them from designing in the US and exporting the design to facilities elsewhere to even produce chips matching the design.

    • They already did
      http://www.pcworld.com/article... [pcworld.com]

  • wow (Score:3, Funny)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Sunday August 02, 2015 @02:22PM (#50235629) Homepage Journal

    How much does it cost to get your slashvertisements accepted verbatim?

    China's 33-petaflops Tianhe-2, currently the fastest supercomputer in the world, while still using Intel Xeon processors, takes use of the home-grown interconnect, arguably the most important component of modern supercomputers.

    But where does it take it? To the movies? I hear you can get in for just fifty cents [wikipedia.org].

    • *laughs* pretty much.

      I raised my eyebrow when I saw this and thought... "and zero fucks were given"

      The day has not arrived when the US either considers any of china's weapons technology worth emulating or that we couldn't get a copy of it if we actually gave a shit.

      So they're putting an export ban on something... Bored.

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        So China seems to be putting together all of the elements to provide for Government implemented trade sanctions. As many global markets develops and China becomes less dependent upon US trade and can survive upon expanding trade with South America, Africa and Russia, so the threat of trade sanctions applied by China against the US, can start to be considered. Laugh it up fuzz ball but a lot of US corporations can be driven into bankruptcy by the simply action of trade sanctions being applied by China again

        • ... lets unpack this...

          China putting sanctions on stuff we don't want to import in the first place...

          And from this you say we can't put sanctions on stuff to china or from china? We do already... all the time. The US has trade limits on lots of things that can't be exported to china or other places.

          As to china getting independence from US trade... not really. Their dependence on the US is extreme. Keep in mind, we can influence trade throughout the first world and that is the majority of the global market.

    • While the interconnects are certainly a very important part of a supercomptuer, they aren't the hardest part. Building a high performance CPU takes a shit ton of research and infrastructure. The barrier for entry is exceedingly high and takes a long time to spin up. You can see that with China's Longsoon processor which for all the hyped ended up being a license of a MIPS core, built on an old process technology. Building a ton end CPU is just tough stuff.

      Of course then there's the other fact that there are

      • The Russkies have a quite impressive CPU called ELBRUS. And certainly they calculated most of their nuclear weapons on something not more powerful than an 68000 CPU. In other words, computers are overrated.
        • If a computer that you describe as not very powerful can calculate most of their nuclear weapons needs, then I would say that computers are underrated.
          • "Diminishing returns", anyone? I thought that was the point. These days, you probably need more performance rather for such things as aerodynamics. Certainly supercomputer-designed airplanes have made more real world kills until today than supercomputer-designed nuclear weapons.
            • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

              The law of diminishing returns states that in all productive processes, adding more of one factor of production, while holding all others constant, will at some point yield lower incremental per-unit returns.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

              There are three basic resources or factors of production: land, labour, and capital. ... Materials and energy are considered secondary factors in classical economics because they are obtained from land, labour and capital.

              Is onl
      • The CPU may be hard to design, but it's also commodity - there's nothing special about them, so putting them on export control is pointless. If you need a four thousand processors for your super you can just buy a thousand servers from HP. You might have to substitute GPU cards for the Phi, but even those can be obtained as application accelerators for certain servers if you look hard enough.

        The interconnect is non-commodity: The number of computers that actually need FDR Infiniband switches is very small.

  • What goes around.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ITRambo ( 1467509 ) on Sunday August 02, 2015 @02:24PM (#50235633)
    ..comes around. US paranoia on high end electronics exports made this inevitable since China was capable of growing their own tech, and have
    • Q: Why is starting a comment in the Subject: line incredibly irritating?

      US "paranoia" didn't "start" this at all. It's not paranoia when they really are out to steal your tech. Chinese domestic tech sucks, the Chinese know it, everyone in the world apparently knows it but you. Why else are they trying so hard to steal? Chinese are terrible at inventing things. From an early age their creativity is stifled and they are taught only the great masters could invent, the best that students can do is copy per

  • Sounds like an oxymoron to me. When has the Chinese government ever effectively placed any sort of limitations on any behavior by Chinese businesses?

  • The tightening of regulations comes two weeks after an incident in disputed Kashmir in which the Pakistani army claimed to have shot down an Indian "spy drone", reportedly Chinese-made

    India has it's own reasonably successful drone program. It would be naive to assume that a country that can successfully put a payload into mars orbit would import military drones, that too from a hostile country.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • payload is 150 to 350 kg ... /yawns
      • Let's see you do better...
      • 350 kg? If it were an American craft, it could carry, for example, three GBU-53/Bs. Or seven Brimstones, if it were British. Well, I don't know, but that seems like quite a lot of firepower for a small vehicle.
    • How hard is it to build a drone? They were used in WWII and around decades before then. It's fairly common for individuals to build high performance aircraft in their garages.
  • Well, that's definitely good for business. Guess we'll just have to settle for American Made.

  • Our knee jerk sissies are already trying to restrict drone use in the US to extinction with absurd demands for absolute safety. Now it turns out that we had sure as heck encourage all kinds of young people to build ever better drones and make certain they can fly them almost everywhere because if we don't the effect will be to cause foreign powers to have better military drones than we can build which might kill us all one day. In industry we no longer ask if our employees can produce cheaper than
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Problem is that you have not encountered people whose first idea of seeing a drone is "how much payload that goes boom can I put on this and have it fly to the nearby elementary school?"

      Fortunately we are not seeing drones with remotely activated pipe bombs, but it is trivial to do, and once one person does it, we will get plenty of antisocial lunatics doing the same thing.

  • The 'next big leap' is the important thing. Not relatively small incremental jumps over competition by fine tuning and addition of 'more of the same' - what I mean is, whether it's an entirely new architecture or more likely quantum computing, the leap is what will make the difference in competitive technology not the crawl.

    I have no idea where China sits with quantum computing (or entirely new architectures), however, with Google banned and their investment in quantum computing and relationship with the 'w

    • Given that they have cracked the secret of the germanics (of which anglos are part of), you bet they can read the interwebs and some general has found some money to have some smart kids working on a quantum computer. They have the money/wealth/supplies and they know how to use it, simply. See what 1000 millions of peasants can do when they are marshalled by the hand of Adam Smith ? Also, Mao was apparently a well-read man who had a private library. Beside being an autocrat with all the downsides of autocr
    • Quantum is high-risk: There's no guarantee it's even possible.

      • The same could be said for so many revolutionary next-gen leaps in technology, based on what is known at the time. Before they sent people up to space and to the moon, I don't think anyone was like "Yeah it's easy give us X and Y and it's done son." That's sort of part and parcel with discovering something new.

  • by MrKaos ( 858439 ) on Sunday August 02, 2015 @07:25PM (#50237115) Journal

    All the skills to produce these things are being outsourced to China

  • I bought the ARF (almost ready to fly kit ) DJI F450 quadrocopter & Naza V2 flight controller. DJI is a leading Chinese maker.

    I assembled it, learned all features and tested extensively. And also Futaba T10J remote control. I never piloted a drone system so stable and reliable. It uses both GPS & CLONASS satellites antenna. It is something incredible.

    I had a feeling similar when I bought for the first time a PC in 1995 with an internet access, a feeling that the world is about to change beyond
    • I admit, I first read that as Nazi V2...
      • by Max_W ( 812974 )
        Naza is kind of a Chinese goddess or a hero of a fairy tale. Something in-between, as I could understand. My point is that this is another level of flying. This thing sticks in one point in the air even in the wind when one leaves the levers.

        Course Lock mode is a plain miracle. No matter what is an orientation of the quad, it memorizes what was forward at the take off and flies accordingly.

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