avatar and fault tolerance

watched the movie with lei, ermin and yehua on the second day of its worldwide release. we had an interesting conversation right after the movie. in the movie, dr. grace augustine said that the roots of the trees on pandora form an enormous and intricate network, and there is communication and information flow. the last part of the movie is about humans trying to destroy this network of life, and they found that there is a mother tree destroying which can destroy everything. so this leads us to find the analogy in the network on our planet, the internet. the fact that they have a mother tree is not very fault tolerant, like a client-server architecture where the server will become the central point of attack. this again shows the importance of distributed system. a purely distributed system means every node is equal. even some nodes fail, the system can still function, and it's hard to take down every node. purely distributed system is hard to implement and only exists in research projects. many p2p systems (skype, bittorrent) are still a hybrid of client-server and p2p architectures. makes me want to change research group even more because i think this area is very important.