Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.parallel
From: Henry Baker <hbaker@netcom.com>
Subject: Speculative execution illegal in some countries???
Organization: nil
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 1995 13:42:57 GMT
Message-ID: <hbaker-0701951500260001@192.0.2.1>

Found in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1994:

"The Islamic law of transactions as a whole is dominated by the doctrine
of riba. Basically, this is the prohibition of usury, but the notion of
riba was rigorously extended to cover, and therefore preclude, any form of
interest on a capital loan or investment. And since this doctrine was
coupled with the general prohibition on gambling transactions, Islamic law
does not, in general, permit any kind of _speculative_ transaction the
results of which, in terms of the material benefits accruing to the
parties, cannot be precisely forecast."
[emphasis supplied]

So speculative execution is illegal?  What about optimistic concurrency
control??  Ethernets would seem to be bad, but perhaps token-rings are
ok??

[Mod note: major smilies should have been included here. =:] }


