PS3 available for preorder @ Toys R Us Canada

[zombie]

http://www.toysrus.ca/webapp/wcs/sto...roductId=87083

$50 deposit.

[Jodi]

It ships ONLY within Canada.
Canadians will dig that news.
Beware....is there not an international law that prohibits the transport of supercomputers (yes, the PS3 is classified as a supercomputer) across international borders?? If you violate that, you'll have a pleasant run in with the folks from the Justice Department and (gulp) the State Department!!!
Even the lowly PS2 (another supercomputer, by definition) is powerful enough to launch nuclear missiles. Seriously.

Jodi

Originally Posted by nyg

http://www.toysrus.ca/webapp/wcs/sto...roductId=87083

$50 deposit.

[Shadowself]

Originally Posted by Jodi

It ships ONLY within Canada.
Canadians will dig that news.
Beware....is there not an international law that prohibits the transport of supercomputers (yes, the PS3 is classified as a supercomputer) across international borders?? If you violate that, you'll have a pleasant run in with the folks from the Justice Department and (gulp) the State Department!!!
Even the lowly PS2 (another supercomputer, by definition) is powerful enough to launch nuclear missiles. Seriously.

Jodi

First, it is not international law. Many countries have laws concerning the shipment of various items into and out of their countries.

The U.S. has certain laws to which you are probably referring. They come under the Department of Commerce (through the Commerce Control List [ML]) and the Department of State (through the Munitions List [ML] and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations [ITAR]). To export the items which show up in these lists you need to get an export license from the relative U.S. agency.

As a designated "super user" with the U.S. Department of State with regard to these matters, I have the disagreeable task of dealing with this kind of stuff all too often.

Some countries have similar laws, lists and regulations.

The PS3 may or may not be controlled by any of these lists. The definition of what is (or is not) a "super computer" is quite odd. It is not based upon the typical definitions of millions of instructions per second (MIPS) or millions of floating point operations per second (MFLOPS) or anything simple like this.

Additionally, since the Macintosh G4 fiasco the U.S. government has changed, rather radically, its rules as to what is a super computer. (The Mac G4 laptop met the requirements of being on the ITAR super computer list when it first came out - so if you flew to certain countries with it in your luggage you were potentially subject to fines or even jail time as soon as you returned to the U.S.) It is very likely that under the new rules the PS3 does not make the list.

With regard to launching missiles... This has nothing to do with where the lines are drawn on restrictions on shipments of computers. Believe it or not just to launch the missiles, a properly configured set of TRS-80s could do it.

The final thing to note is that PS3s are not manufactured in Canada. Thus they must be exported from somewhere else and imported into Canada. As far as I know any computer that can be imported into Canada can also be exported from Canada -- and -- imported into the U.S without restriction.

There are also special exceptions between the U.S. and Canada (they are one of the U.S.'s closes allies, after all) which allow shipment of items between Canada and the U.S. which might be restricted to almost any other country.

Bottom line: this is almost definitely a non-issue.