Sorry, but this argument is the worst kind of wrong - it is half true. 100.00000% consistency/availability is of course impossible in any circumstances. 'It is

Sorry, but this argument is the worst kind of wrong - it is half true. 100.00000% consistency/availability is of course impossible in any circumstances. 'It is only relevant for a few dozen companies' ... because of size/volume. Your argument would make it relevant to all companies, unless netflix and other large companies have to live to a higher standard - which i do not think is being argued. The CAP theory really is about bottlenecks, high volumes of possibly conflicting data to different nodes cannot be synchronised with guarantees. It is possible to have distributed transactions on lightly loaded servers. These could complete in a timely fashion (<10 secs) 99.9% of the time with, theoretically a geometric drop off for the probability of longer delays. The answer to the disconnected data centre is to have 3 with majority rule. Then the loss of a single link can no longer break consistency. What is more, the article talks about the data being internally inconsistent (dangling references... etc.) this seems to be totally unnecessary for something like private user data. For the rest (recommendations), as discussed other strategies can be employed that at least guarantee internal consistency of a node.