How to understand the “Availability” of the CAP theorem?

Question

I don\'t know if this is a proper question here.

As we know, in the CAP theorem, \"A\" means \"Availability\". On wikipedia, the explanation of \"Availability\" is:

Answer 1

An interesting point of view by Coda Hale

A system that chooses Availability will handle a network partition by continuing to serve all requests even if they lead to inconsistencies (e.g nodes in different network partitions both accept possibly conflicting writes).

A system that chooses Consistency will limit the amount of legal operations during a network partition (e.g writes are not accepted as they might lead to conflicts/inconsistencies).

It is not possible to choose both.

I suppose a hypothetical system can also choose to just crash during network partitions but this does not seem like a very practical design...