"As soon as you have any kind of highly-distributed system, accurate clocks are usually..." Let me stop you right there. If you have a highly distributed syste

"As soon as you have any kind of highly-distributed system, accurate clocks are usually..." Let me stop you right there. If you have a highly distributed system, it's design CAN NOT rely on perfectly synchronized clocks among it's components. That's actually the point of the Lamport paper you cited as well as the OP. I actually started writing a detailed rehash of the Lamport's paper but I realize I'd do a poor job of it at best. Instead, I think it's best to just point to excellent and highly readable entire paper here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/time-clocks.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/t...