nvidia: here's your hardware, paying customer.

customer: Tha-

us govt: no, i want it! mine!! mine mine mine mine mine!

buying the PC required that they fill in a form and have their drivers license scanned, connecting their name to their purchase.

What if the buyer decides to sell the system or its GPU second-hand years later and that person then sells it overseas? What if the system is stolen and ends up abroad?

One comment on the thread also claims that Micro Center also won't sell an RTX 5090 to a customer if they've ever bought one in the past.

Sounds like ITAR or EAR. Assuming EAR: Welcome to the minefield that is buying a firearm. If it winds up overseas and someone decides to throw the book at you then it's a federal felony. With that driver's license scanned I'm sure it'll be protected very well, so there's no need to worry. If you got a prebuilt through Costco, your purchase probably got recorded through their membership system (or that information could be reported retroactively if the rule is new).

I remember this being an issue for the Playstation 3 (or was it 2) back in the day. Is there anything more recent than the 5090 that this has been applied to?

If this is about Saddam using it to send missilies, it was the PS2

I would be tempted to sell it overseas out of spite. Also I like lying to corpos, so me promising anything to them is like throwing a hotdog down a hallway.

I have never heard that analogy in this type of context.

But anyway isn’t the form more for the government than the “corpos”? This is like export control.

Saddam was using PS2s to launch missiles? Couldn’t you do that better with some old laptop?

That reminds me, did they find a PlayStation along with all the porno VHS tapes in bin laden’s hidey room?

It's like tears in the rain, no one really notices or cares, I just thought that was a more funny way to use that analogy. Insignificance. Also this has no legal standing, explain that to a newly enlisted on how their computer can't leave the country on a deployment. I don't think the government would touch this with a ten foot pole.

There is some inkling of truth to this (the PS2 being used for military use, not Saddam buying them). At launch the Emotion Engine, largely thanks to the VPUs, could achieve a higher theoretical output than the most expensive PC CPUs of the time IF you could parallelize the arithmetic*. They're very well suited to calculate stuff like trajectories.

Anecdotally, Kazuhiko Aoki (the legendary game dev of Chrono Trigger / Final Fantasy fame, not the policitian), said that during the development of Final Fantasy IX, they had to check if the game worked on PS2's backwards compatibility, and they had problems sending a devkit from Japan to Hawaii

*Total of 6.2 GFlops when you combine all three, which is higher than the Pentium 4 Willamette and Athlon Thunderbird.

That is the most interesting use of that phrase I have run across

I'll take that as a compliment, thank you.

Talk about OBE.