That's not what this discussion is about. OP said: > as soon as you decided to distribute your system across a network you opted into a world where partition c

That's not what this discussion is about. OP said: > as soon as you decided to distribute your system across a network you opted into a world where partition can happen, and you will have to give up consistency or availability. So we are talking in the context of distributed networks. Then: > Mainframes, though, provide consistency and availability by being unpartitionable except through use of a chainsaw. using the words "consistency" and "availability" here is clearly refering to the same words in the sentence before. Hence we are still in the context of distributed networks. And therefore you cannot just rule this out as an "act of god". Had OP said "A mainframe has high availibility compared to my laptop and for me that is more than enough." then I wouldn't have said anything.