2. USENET propogation is not that slow; Between well connected sites (IE, just about any Internet host that isn't swamped for other reasons like Netcom frequently is) I haven't seen a larger lag than a few hours.
Consider the incoming directory on my local news host: -- jlc:/usr/spool/news/in.coming$ ls -l total 401 -rw-r--r-- 1 news news 172237 Feb 1 16:08 21705-000000.t drwxr-xr-x 2 news news 1024 Jan 31 13:43 bad/ -rw-r--r-- 1 news news 79792 Jan 27 12:35 nntp.a00606 -rw-r--r-- 1 news news 130025 Feb 1 16:09 nntp.a21731 drwxr-xr-x 2 news news 21504 Jan 21 12:57 save/ -rwxr-xr-x 1 news news 194 Nov 30 14:22 unz* jlc:/usr/spool/news/in.coming$ grep Date 21705-000000.t | more Date: Mon, 30 Jan 1995 18:28:21 GMT Date: Mon, 30 Jan 1995 18:34:30 GMT Date: 30 Jan 1995 11:03:14 -0800 Date: 30 Jan 95 13:25:19 +0200 Date: 30 Jan 1995 13:35:59 -0500 Date: 30 Jan 95 17:59:27 GMT Date: 30 Jan 1995 13:25:40 -0500 Date: 27 Jan 1995 14:11:51 -0600 Date: 27 Jan 1995 14:50:32 -0500 -- The majority of incoming messages are two days old (this was on Feb 1 at 16:10, GMT -7); the worst instance in this particular batch was six days old (posted from a backwater site in Sweden). Before you object that this is obviously a poorly-connected site, we're on a leased 56K line two hops from the backbone (we're fed by BYU, who is in turn fed by the University of Utah, one of the original four internet sites and as well fed as you get). Our server is keeping up with the incoming news. I suspect this is a pretty typical scenario. -- Kevin