Since partition tolerance is a fundamental requirement for distributed applications, it becomes a question of what to sacrifice: consistency or availability.

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In a market-based system of finance, the risk of losing your money is not an avoidable nuisance but a fundamental requirement.

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Global identifiers for financial institutions and for products are a fundamental requirement for risk reduction, says Allan Grody, president of Financial InterGroup Holdings, Ltd.

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But Ms Bradshaw said the always-on requirement was "fundamental" to what the company wanted to do with SimCity and it was "designed" with multiplayer in mind.

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Their aim is to achieve highest scientific standards by carrying out a rigorous peer review that is, as a minimum requirement, supposed to be able to identify fundamental methodological errors or false claims.

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The science, as you can imagine, is a little dense, but involves the requirement of a discrete 3D lattice when simulating the fundamental laws of physics.

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