Negative Latency and Einstein Express

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joe-c-300x300Over at Scalability.org, Joe Landman has an April Fool’s post that ponders the idea of Negative Latency.

I’ve been thinking for a while that our obsession with reduction of latency in computing and storage could be ameliorated by exploiting a negative latency design. A negative latency design would be one where a hypothetical message would arrive at a receiver before the sender completed sending it. There are a few issues with this. First off is how on earth, or elsewhere, is this possible? Second, aren’t there issues with causality violations? Third, won’t the FBI/SEC/DOJ take actions against organizations using negative latency trading systems?

This all reminds me of that Saturday Night Live skit on Einstein Express.