Today I found an invitation to a Facebook group "We will not pay to use facebook, we're gone if that happens".

I guess this echos the sentiments of a generation that believes that it should get stuff for free. But really, can this really be so? Facebook, google, yahoo, etc can only survive given revenues that may be used to cover costs. Web portals with mounds of data are not easy to maintain.

On the other hand, people are concerned by the concentration of huge amounts of personal data, especially with the social networking sites. Who owns the data?

It briefly hit me that the P2P infrastructure may work reasonably well for social networking. The idea is for the network to be built up in overlapping pieces. Each indivdual stores his own information and those of his/her friends. The informing of others that information has changed may be done through a series of pings.

Naturally, a big issue is that of the storage and transfer of data. A LOT of data may have to be stored for each contact. Furthermore, one has to ask oneself to what extent does one desire to be a conduit for people to contact one's friends and how much bandwidth one is willing to dedicate to that end. Another is that of "closed cliques" being inaccessible to the world.

The latter problem would probably be solvable after some brief thought, but not the former. People are selfish by nature, and the amount of storage space and bandwidth demanded by such an application would be non-trivial.

Well then, is Facebook's current setup as near optimal as we expect? It's hard to move away from a central repository. It makes things so much easier. We can decentralize a little though... Who knows?

I used to go for a walk every night. It was a pleasant habit—exercise, fresh air, quiet time alone to think. I made a point, whenever possible, of walking in an area away from the city lights, where the sky was dark enough that I could get a good look at the stars. I knew how to pick out some of the constellations, though I could never quite understand how anyone could see a goat or an archer in the patterns of stars. Seeing shapes in clouds is one thing, but mentally connecting the dots to form a complex picture didn’t really work for me. That’s not to say I didn’t see anything in the stars, though. As I looked at a particular star, I would think about the possibility of life in outer space, the chance that a planet circling that star may be home to people like me—or unfathomably different beings. I’d think about how Earth is just another one of those countless planets and the sun just another one of those countless stars. And picking my favorite star of the moment, I’d say to myself, “Someday I’ll find a way to go there.”

Looking at the stars and thinking about them in this way always had a very calming effect on me. I felt as though it gave me a sense of proportion, that it put my own crises and ambitions in perspective. It didn’t make me feel insignificantly small; instead, it made me feel somehow privileged to be able to see and understand what may be out there, and to realize I’m a part of something so big.

Nowadays I don’t notice the stars very often, and when I do, I don’t usually think about them as I once did. But every now and then, I’ll be on a trip—an island, a desert, a rural getaway somewhere—and again the stars will catch my attention. Invariably I’ll wonder why I hadn’t noticed them in so long. Is it just that I’m older and busier? That may be part of it, but a bigger part is that the lights of the city often make it very hard to see the stars, always focusing my attention on the surface of my own planet. This is one consequence of the increasing problem of light pollution.

The term “pollution” is apt because excess or unwanted light can be an irritation or even a safety hazard. Like air pollution, light pollution is typically a by-product of machines and devices that were intended to make our lives easier, more convenient, and safer. Another similarity is that light pollution can be reduced greatly with careful attention to design. But because most people have become accustomed to light pollution as a fact of life, there is usually little incentive to worry about it when designing or purchasing lighting products.

I was faintly IETisng and marginally wondering about what a real failure is? I mean, how on earth could you definitively conceptualize the indefinitively conceptualized term ‘failure’?? Is it the image of a man with hands on his head sitting without a job in his mid thirties with all of his life's flashbacking to-and-fro and fro-and-to in a total helter-skelter just to make him believe that he did nothing worth blabbering and tagging about the so-called "great-things" in life or is it failing to pass in an pass oriented scheme of failure centric examination paradigm of failure [;P] or is it some sort of a non-convex entity(as someone says!).

I thought over it again and again in some sortof a complexly aligned unsorted idiotismic concoctions, and realised that failure is not a complete thing in itself. You always fail in something. But nobody cares for something. The sentence never reaches beyond the word ‘fail’. Just the mere acoustics of the word 'fail' is negative, the vibes it emanates is negatively odd power of negative[;-p].And all these coagulative summation of simplistically complicated 'failures' lead us into a world of pathetic self-findings and shell binds. We start finding the reasons for our failures. It even haunts you more if you dont have a so called stud act in your pocket to keep their 'fail' blabbers mouths shut.

I have never ever failed in life. Well, may be it’s like I never accepted any failure in life because I was happy with the kind of success ratio I had. If you fail two times out of ten, you were good. Events like Javelin and long jump have six attempts. (*Lol!*) Well the only thing is who should decide what’s really important for you and what is that which is not!. Sadly, the biggest problem is that- most of us let others decide that for us. Everyone has got their own scheme of fundas.

I dont want to try and beat-around-the-bushes for long. All I wanted to tell is a few little three liner.

I think we’re constantly failing in a lot of things (and thats good!). But, the sad part is that we are not realizing it since we are getting good results elsewhere. What if someone is a day-to-night-to-day slogger of the books and fails getting along with friends/family or perhaps even vice-versa as well. What do you think a real failure is? How do you get your lessons to move on?. The question seems tough, but, the answer is quite unambiguous!