In networking, consider a distributed chat network like IRC, where a user who starts a channel automatically acquires channel-operator privileges. If two users on different servers, on different ends of the same network, try to start the same-named channel at the same time, each user's respective server will grant channel-operator privileges to each user, since neither server will yet have received the other server's signal that it has allocated that channel. (This problem has been largely solved by various IRC server implementations.)