Yeah, skimming the start of the Spanner paper (to take a random example from CS), can you really claim with a straight face that any of these would be intelligi

Yeah, skimming the start of the Spanner paper (to take a random example from CS), can you really claim with a straight face that any of these would be intelligible to the average layperson? > At the highest level of abstraction, it is a database that shards data across many sets of Paxos state machines in data centers spread all over the world. Replication is used for global availability and geographic locality; clients automatically failover between replicas. > provides externally consistent reads and writes, and globally-consistent reads across the database at a timestamp. > Spanner assigns globally-meaningful commit timestamps to transactions, even though transactions may be distributed. The timestamps reflect serialization order.