Right, but I wasn't restating CAP, just wondering about a follow on to CAP that considers the probability of remaining consistent, the probability of remaining available, and the probability of no failures due to network partitions in physical terms.
Is this not an interesting thing to consider? What if someone proves a hard limit on the product of these probabilities in some physical computation context? The CAP theorem is absolutely fascinating to me, especially if it has something real to say about the systems we can build in the future. The future looks even more distributed.
> It is pointful for networks that experience partitions. It just doesn't apply to reliable networks.
Is there such a thing as a "reliable" network when thousands or millions of computational nodes are involved? Are the routers and switches which connect such a network 100% available? If an amplification attack saturates some network segment with noise, what then?
As programmers, we desperately want things to work, and it's easy to greet something like CAP with flat out denial. I know I'm always fighting it. "It will never fail." No, it can and will fail.
