I've seen this before. The way to see the future with the concentration of sheer corporate power.

That's a budong!

Most of the new development was carried in Kyiv, Ukraine. But Moscow had a technology to grind x86 chips slice by slice to reverse engineer Intel technology. So they send a committee from Moscow to Kyiv to choose a path for the industry for the next decade. Due to enmity between russians and ukrainians committee chose to continue with grinding and reverse engineering and the development of own technologies was canceled. Some years later Intel launched 80386 with 3D chip structure and russians were unable to guess its schematics like it was with 8086/88 and 80286.

No wonder he succeded. He had a roommate with 4-digit ID on /. And that must count for something.

It's moving fast against the wind.

Ukraine: to sell VoIP services operators are required to buy a license. Without a license it's qualified as a "refile" and results in seizure of equipment and hefty fine.

Copper theft in Soviet Russia (well, actually, also in Ukraine and Belarus) made neighbour Estonia major exporter of color metals back in 90.