[xyzzyz]

Machines are better served with explicit synchronisation (paxos, distributed transactions) or not at all (eventual consistency)

Using atomic clocks to sync distributed systems is actually done in practice.

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...

[batou]

Utterly insane IMHO. If there's a single error in any temporal data, what happens?

Even relatively reliable frequency/time standards (HP/Agilent come to mind) aren't 100% available.