🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <8081@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> ajdenner@athena.mit.edu (Alexander J Denner) writes:
>In article <7649@well.UUCP> crunch@well.UUCP (John Draper) writes:
>>   I have heard a LOT of talk about adding Soviet Sites to the UUCP network
>>but have heard nothing but VAPORWARE.    Does anyone out there in Net land
>>WANT to add Soviet sites??

> Andrei Sakahrov has just said that the
>changes are only superficial.  I do not think that he can trust the Soviet
>government at all.  (Even if one believes that Gorbachev is really
>sincere and wants to destroy all weapons on the Earth, it is very possible
>that he will be overthrown by conservatives who wil return to the "old"
>way.)  I think that we have seen how the Soviets have cut research costs
>by copying our Shuttle, why let them get so much information so easily?

Fact: While the Soviets obviously took advantage of the aerodynamics
work done on our shuttle, and copied superficial details such as,
e.g., the heat shield material, their shuttle is fundamentally
different from ours. For one thing, ours has engines -- theirs doesn't
(it piggybacks on their Energia rocket, which is a tad larger than our
old Saturn V was). For another thing, theirs has MUCH better
electronics (i.e., late '70s technology, instead of early '70s
technology), which is why they can do neat things such as have it take
off and land with no pilot on-board.

Let's face it, the U.S. space shuttle was no paragon of innovation...
it was basically obsolete the first time it flew, due to the rampant
underfunding of the U.S. space program (took 10 years to develop,
because of miserly R&D budgets and, also, because of the retirement of
all the Apollo rocket scientists). The Russians obviously looked at
ours, but just as obviously, they haven't limited themselves to
copying our mistakes.

>	Having a UUCP site would make it much easier for them to
>spread a malicious virus in a time of friction.  Also, what if a virus
>from the US leaks into Russia (or a virus from the USSR gets into the US)?
>Such a situation would cause many problems and bad feelings.

Sounds like paranoia to me. Do we even ship the sources groups
overseas?

In any event, the problem with the Russian system is NOT innovation --
they have bright people, too (surely we've learned that Americans have
no monoploy on brains?). Their main problem is PRODUCTION, as you'd
expect from a Communist system that gives little reward for
productivity. E.g. they may know how 1Mb DRAMS are made, but it's
damndably hard to coordinate various government monopolies to, e.g.,
get those fantastically expensive stepper motors needed at the chip
processing stage.

--
Eric Lee Green                            P.O. Box 92191, Lafayette, LA 70509
     {ames,mit-eddie,osu-cis,...}!killer!elg, killer!usl!elg, etc.