I am disappointed at several comments on this thread. Professor Hewitt, I personally think you've enriched the community by putting these claims here. They've led me to read more about several things, which I will list here for anyone else who might be looking for related topics: The difference between indeterminism and nondeterminism, bounded and unbounded nondeterminism, the actor model of computation, local arbitration versus global consensus, and state machines versus configuration-based computation.

You've responded to the ad hominem attacks with class. I hope you do not take them as a reflection of the HN community at large; please keep coming back and posting (provocatively) as you have done, because it induces learning.