SSDs often use more than two values. The nice thing about binary is it is the most resistant to fluctuation. In the real world, if 1.2V is high and 0V is low, you are going to see many voltages other than the perfect values especially when transitioning. With binary you can say something like "If > 0.2V, 1, otherwise 0" whereas the more states you add, the more bands you have to create. "If < 0.2V, 0. If >= 0.2 V and < 0.6 V, 1. If >= 0.6 V, 2". The bins will keep getting smaller the more digits you allow.

There isn't really any advantage to adding a third symbol when you can just use more binary digits instead. With two binary digits you can have 4 values, and with 32 digits you can have billions. Sticking with binary allows us to build electronics that are fast, cheap, and reliable.

Literally everything about modern policing is based on the idea that the life of a police officer is more valuable than that of a non-police officer. Including how much risk they should need to take in "fighting crime".

The average American couldn't handle a surprise couple thousand dollar bill. And that's America. 5000 is living like royalty in some places. 20,000 would be a substantial windfall if we're talking about a fairly typical American family of 4 so how would it not be significant if you looked at countries where you could retire on that kind of money?

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I think the answer to this might be hard to understand if you live in a wealthy, western country with relatively low levels of crime but it’s very detrimental for society if law enforcement (which includes police, judges, prosecutors, etc) starts getting targeted by criminal organizations. If judges or police let their fears dictate their ability to enforce the law, it becomes easier for criminals to evade the law.

Their lives aren’t worth more, but it’s not about them specifically, it’s about the institution they work for. Imagine if federal judges or US attorneys were getting whacked off for imprisoning mafia associates. Would you want those judges to start giving lenient sentences because they’re scared? Would you want police to let crime occur because they’re scared of ending up like cops in 1990s Medellin?

By creating such stiff penalties, the hope is to discourage criminals from targeting law enforcement so that they can do their jobs. And, mostly, it’s worked. Even relatively powerful gangs or organized crime groups won’t usually touch a beat cop, much less a judge or district attorney, because they know the crackdown will be so swift afterwards.

Binary was chosen for computers because it was easy to represent with transistors, 1 and 0 represent on and off states for a gate or a transistor.

Creating computers that use 3 positions (trinary) or multiple digits for bit like 0,1,2,3 are possible but the limitation is the hardware itself. You need a single stage electronic device (like a transistor) that can exist in multiple different states to represent those digits.

Such a device could be called a transtator, a replacement for a transistor that can exist in multiple different states. A Quantum computer could be based on such a device.

In theory such a computer would be able to perform significantly denser calculations and have higher speed. But our entire ecosystem of instruction sets and operating systems would also need to be completely redone. So it would have to be worth the significant effort.

there is sucha thnig as a trinary system, but for hardware its not really usable, since binary exists and its way simpler ot map out.

it isp ossible ot design hardware that understand trinary, but this is much more complex than it is worth for no real advantage...at least until we figure out quantum computing.

Yes, you can definitely create a system with {0, 1, 2} and this is in base 3. Binary is in base 2 that uses only {0, 1} and this is machine-readable with an off (0) and an on (1) switch.

We humans use the decimal system which uses {0, 1, …, 9}. And in fact there are even higher bases such as the hexadecimal which uses the same as decimal but with additional A, B, …, F to represent 10, 11, …, 15 respectively. The decimal and hexadecimal are bases 10 and 16 respectively.

The base 3 thing is just not as used unlike the base 2, 10, and 16. But you can for sure define them, as well as for any other higher base

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Off the record means the person is asking not to write that information in an article.

It's a matter of trust that the journalist won't compromise a source by revealing too much information.

Cops are heroes? They have not been anywhere near that in a very long time.

Balanced ternary uses 1, 0, and -1. It saw some use in Soviet computers in the 50s, and that page includes some discussion of its complexity versus binary.

Yes, and it has been done before.

As others noted, it's handy to have just two states, "on" and "off" (actually "mostly on" and "mostly off") because it works well with digital circuit design.

But it can be done, and in some cases (like flash memory) we sometimes use 3 or 4 states. On very rare occasions, even more. This vastly improves some things like storage density, but hurts other things such as complexity and signal to noise ratio.

One of the very good reasons to not use more than two states for most digital circuit design is power. When designing circuits where transistors are "mostly on" or "mostly off", it is possible to arrange things such that there isn't much current flow most of the time. When you add intermediate states to the transistors, it is much harder to avoid current flow and hence power consumption. This is a big deal in circuits that have millions or billions of transistors, even if each individual current path consumes little power.

You could introduce more "states" without them being represented by how much individual transistors are turned on. But that makes the circuits a lot larger, so you lose most of the potential benefit.

Of course, another reason now is legacy software. Everything is written for binary logic. While that's a problem that would be possible to get around, it would be painful. You'd need a darn good reason to do so.

TL/DR: Yes, but it's not binary

Most of the answers seem to miss a fundamental point: binary is a base 2 numal system. This means each demical place, or digit, can only hold two possible values (0 or 1). Our traditional number system is a base ten system, so each digit can hold ten values (0-9). Another common numal system for computers is the hexadecimal system, in which each digit can hold 16 values. It is useful for computers because one byte is also 16 digits (this part may be wrong, it's been a while since I've taken a computer class).

But, crucially, you can have a number system with any base you want. If you wanna add another value to binary and make it trinary, you absolutely can....but it's not binary anymore, it's trinary

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Just my hunch obviously, no one ever disagreed when I said it. Thought it was generally accepted just like the fact that the North-Western world is much richer than Africa or South America.

You never thought what would happen if we all gave half of our money to them? It could def fix poverty there.

the people generally wont treat them any different.

its other cops that take personal offense to it since its " protecing your own", whihc is fine...except when it become a factor in punishment(those stories of a "copkiller" having " accidents" in prison.)

I'm assuming what you meant by this question is less the semantics and mathematics side and actually the computer engineering side. Computer logic operates in binary because the tiny switches that make up all of the logic in processor or microcontroller only have two determinate states, on or off.

The other option would be analog, which would technically be an infnitie number of states. There is a growing field of analog compute-in-memory being pioneered by SST. But this is extremely advanced level semi-conductor architecture and beyond the scope of what this question was likely looking for.

It should be noted that the reason this was likely asked is that an off duty officer was killed yesterday (I think) by a drunk driver. It made news because he tried to run away, but a witness chased him down and restrained him until the cops arrived. The witness didn't know that the guy who was killed was a police officer, and the drunk driver will not get an enhanced sentence because the killed officer was off-duty at the time.

What do you base this on?

Yes, trinary systems exist.

We use binary for computing because it’s really easy to map the state of electrical switches (on, off) to binary digits.

Going trinary, or higher, means you can’t use switches. The math all still works fine but the hardware becomes far more complex. And, since you can emulate any system with any other, and binary is far easier to build, we stick with binary.

Binary works because of switches which can be in one of two positions on or off (open or closed) it doesn't work for a three position switch.

Yes, but by definition that would no linger be binary.

Binary is used because it simplifies the electronics which have easily determined on/off states.

If you introduce 8 other states and add a 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, & 9 you have decimal.

It's a binary system because electricity is either on or off. Adding a "kinda" that's actually stable and reliable is incredibly complex.

With that said, this is pretty much what quantum computing seeks to overturn and why it's assumed to have such an impact on computing.

Both these subjects have been posted about before so you can search for more complete answers.