Terminally Incoherent

I haven’t watched BSG from the beginning but I’m intrigued by Cylon religion. I did a quick google and it seems that it was never really explained or demystified on the show. I have been thinking about this for a while now, and I think have a slightly controversial theory.

I actually believe that Cylon God is an evolved AI which transcended beyond singularity.

If you are not familiar with Vernor Vinge’s theory of Singularity here is a quick rundown. Vinge theorized that if it is at all possible AI which achieves self-awareness and human-like sentience then it would be possible to improve this AI by means of faster hardware, and better software algorithms, to the point that it is smarted, and quicker than any human could ever be. In other words we can possibly produce a superhuman intelligence which is in all ways superior to homo-sapiens intellect.

This superhuman AI can then use it’s beefed up brain to further improve itself. We might not be able to figure our how to augment our super computer any more, but the super-smart, super-fast thinking AI can possibly figure out technological solutions we would have to spend years developing.

Hence, we have an AI which can actively self improve, figuring out new ways to construct better hardware, better software and squeeze out the most computational power from the available resources. This machine keeps improving, and soon enough it becomes so smart that we can no longer relate to it. In relation to it, we look like modern day chimps - while intelligent, inquisitive and resourcefully compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, they would never be able to comprehend intricacies of human science. Similarly, we would never be able to comprehend the super-intelligent, self-improving AI.

This is a crude explanation, so read Vinge’s paper for a clearer explanation. The main point is - what happens when an AI becomes so smart, we cannot even comprehend the full extent of it’s abilities? For all incenses and purposes it is like a god to us, so logical conclusion would be for humanity to worship this seemingly omnipresent, omnipotent, infallible god-like machine.

And this is what I think happened to Cylon society. Some kind of hyper-turing inteligence evolved beyond our wildest dreams, and now it is commanding hordes of raging cylons as their “one true god”.

One could ask why other Cylons did not evolve this way? They could have been many super-turing intelligences at some point, but I believe they would either fight for ascendancy at some point, or merge with each other to achieve even greater power. Therefore we can conclude that the current Cylon “god” either assimilated or destroyed all remaining AI’s matching it’s intelligence.

But every god needs worshipers, and zealots who would do his biding. That’s why we still have the tin can centurions, and the human like clones. They are like worker and warrior bees, working together to ensure safety and well being of their super-AI queen.

But that’s just my humble opinion. Feel free to disagree. I actually do not expect to be right on this at all. I doubt that BSG writers ever read Vinge. But if they did decide to use singularity to explain the Cylon god I would be really impressed!

Disclaimer: Spoilage ahead. You have been warned.

Last week I was slightly confused about Sharon’s motives. Then I talked to un4scene and she explained it quite easily: Sharon will do whatever is best for her, Helo and the baby. If it would be beneficial for her to shoot Adama, she would do it.

Armed with this knowledge, I watched todays’ episode and I just knew she is not going to shoot Adama! There is no way in hell killing him again would put her in a good position. If she tried that again, she most likely would get shot on the spot. As un4scene said, she would never do anything to put her and the baby at risk so, she chose to show Adama that she is not the same person that shot him. The way they set up this scene, it was plainly obvious from the start.

Sharon gives more hints about Cylon psyche. It appears that they do implant memories on fresh clones, and they do sync up. She remembered the Chief, even though she have never met him. Interesting…

She also says she doesn’t remember the assassination attempt. Which is logical. Boomer was detained and isolated after the attack, so she could not have a chance to sync up with other Cylons. If she did remember it, that would be a different story. For now, however, I think it would be safe to assume that Cylons require close proximity or maybe even physical contact to sync up. That’s why Boomer couldn’t share her memories with others while sitting in the brig.

There seems to be allot of speculation about the “And you ask why?” question. Allot of people are confused about this. I do not think Sharon could know about Adama asking this question over the body of Boomer. I think there are two possibilities here:

• Boomer betrayed and attempted to assassinate Adama. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out what was on Adama’s head. If you were in his place, wouldn’t you ask yourself why? Sharon knew Adama from boomers memories so she could have guessed that this was what he was thinking all this time.
• The question was not aimed at Adama specifically. It could have been aimed at humanity in general as in “And you as why we Cylons pursue you?” or something among those lines. It shook Adama considerably because it was exactly what he asked Boomer in the morgue.

Most likely it is a little bit of both. She asked a very general question, and she hoped that it will also affect Adama personally.

I’m pretty sure Sharon’s’ loyalty lies with humans for now. At least as long as it is beneficial to her. But if someone threatens her, she will be more than willing to turn around and help the other side.

The way I see it, she knows that Helo is loyal to his own species. He does love her, but Sharon is not sure if he loves her enough to betray his own people for her. Once she turns, Helo will have to choose between staying loyal to her or to his own species. She is concerned that might not choose to stay with her and hence, for now she will do anything to avoid this situation. In other words, she will stay on the same side Helo is as long as she can.

Will she be manipulating Helo? Yes, I think she will. Because she knows as long as she stays on Battlestar she is in danger. She is the enemy, and there are plenty of people in the fleet willing to organize an angry mob and come to get her with torches and pitchforks. At some point she might need to run, or do something drastic - and she needs Helo to be there with her. Therefore she will use all available resources to condition Helo to trust her no matter what.

But then again, the exchange between Baltar and #6 at the end could be an evidence of quite the opposite. Sharon could be part of some bigger plan. The question is - does she know about it? She could be instrumental to this plan without knowing it’s details. Cylons could give her the illusion of anonymity, and let her do as she pleases because they know that she will run back to Helo. This way they can deliver the hybrid baby to Baltar and #6 without Sharon even knowing that she is participating in this plan.

I’m beginning to wonder if Baltar is not a Cylon himself. Maybe they purged his memory for some reason so that he would think he is human. Sharon said she had vivid memories of life as a human, but she is aware of what she is. What if they would simply program Baltar to think he is human… An interesting question.

He apparently has no brain chip, but he does see #6. Would it be possible for them to hide the chip so well, that a MRI would not show it? Did he ever try that Cylon detector on himself? I missed many episodes from S1 so I don’t know…

Yay! Kubuntu has been installed!

I have an Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop. It is an old Pentium III machine (700 MHz) with 256 MB of RAM. It has the ATI Radeon Mobile card and E3 Maestro sound support. Kubuntu detected everything! It even grabbed by PCIMCIA ethernet card flawlessly.

The installation went without a hinch. I installed win2k on the first 20GB partition, and then I let Kubuntu partition the rest of the space. I ended up with a 50+ GB root partition, and 1GB for swap. I know I should have had set up a separate home partition but I just didn’t feel like messing around. I wanted to see how Kubuntu will do on its own with a dual boot system.

I was surprised how easy it was. The installer was really simple and user friendly. The ncurses dialogs were clear, and explained each stage well. I was impressed!

Soon enough I booted into KDE and I found that my sound card was supported! Yes! Finally some sound on the good old lappy! I could not get the fucking Maestro soundard working under the 2.4 kernel without patching, and breaking 5 other things. Here it worked out of the box.

KDE has a nice WinXP style loader (note to self: change that shit to something more linuxy) and a beautiful plastic theme. I love it! Of course 5 minutes after loging in my mouse went apeshit. I know for a fact this has nothing to do with Kubuntu - it is my keyboard/touchpad going to shit.

Here is the rundown - some idiot at Dell decided that it would be really cool to put a little rubber knob in the middle of the keyboard, which would act as a mini joystick like mouse replacement. The idea is not that bad, but the design is flawed. Every time you close the lid, the rubber is touching the screen (especially in older laptops where the lids rubber legs are worn down, and the lid is slightly out of alignment). You end up with a nice little dented circular spot on the LCD. Which is ok - the screen is not damaged, it just looks dirty in that area.

The worst part is what the pressure applied to that rubber mouse thingy. Think about it - the way that thing works is it detects pressure applied to it, and translates it into cursor movement. Now, over the months and years the lid is constantly pressing against. Eventually the sensors go out of alignment and your mouse pointer goes apeshit every once in a while. Replacing keyboard solves this issue 98% of the time.

The distro is a little skimpy on the application side - no Firefox for example. I was used to my Knoppix based Debian distro which included oodles of useful apps straight out of the box. It just seems that I will have to configure few things, and download quite a few apps to get to be really comfortable with it. Still, having a working sound card, and seeing apt-get go through a full upgrade without some stupid dependency snag is priceless.

I was especially impressed with the flawless ACPI support. I could put the machine into standby, suspend and hibernate states with perfect recovery. I haven’t been able to do that before with any other distro. Ah, this is just one more benefit of using a recent kernel release.

Now I just need to install Java on it, and then get Eclipse, Jarnal and Azureus. Only problem is that apt-cache search does not find suns Java packages. I can’t remember where did I get my java packages before but I think I got them from stock Debian repositories. The only help I have seen so far is this - I guess I might need to do this the hard way. I hate using alien with rpm’s…

Of course you can always snag java packages from debian repositories, and use them. This seems to be the optimal solution, as I feel much more comfortable using package made for Sarge, rather than one compiled for RH or Fedora.

Next step is importing my mailboxen. This should be relatively easy as I’m using KMail. I just need to grab the HD enclosure (which I left at work, of course) and move the files over.

Side note - what happened to KMail? It’s no longer there! Instead we have Kontact which tries really hard to be the KDE equivalent of Evolution/Outlook. I actually don’t mind - it nicely wraps up KMail, Kalendar, Knotes and the address book into one application. The barebones simplicity of Kmail is still there. I just hope it will perform as good as the stand alone KMail did.

One thing I’m concerned with is getting my linksys wireless card working on this system. I’ll probably need ndiswapper and Windows drivers again. I really, really hope that I can get it working reliably before school starts. I don’t have wireless here at home so I can’t even try it out.

I can’t get used to my laptops making sounds. It is wild! Ah! I can now take earphones to work/school and listen to podcasts! Wohoo!

I’ll be posting updates on my adventure with Kubuntu as I go along.

Pegasus is down again! It has been down all day. When pegasus goes down on Friday, it usually means that it will stay down through Tuesday (if you are lucky that is). I have no clue what happened, because the only person I could ask is gone. So I have no clue if this was yet another power outage, or if they are doing something with the network.

I moved my newly created stylesheets to another server. They work for now. You will probably notice the lack of Fully Cully banner, my picture and the nicetitles script. All that stuff is on pegasus, and I don’t feel like recreating these again… If it comes back up, I’ll move that stuff over, but otherwise, screw it.

For those of you who don’t know what pegasus is, let me tell you a story. MSU network is set up as an NFS network composed of various Sun Spark machines. Pegasus was the login server, a mail server and bunch of other things. There was also an application server (called smile I think) a file server, and few workstations providing various services (such as oracle server and etc…).

Anyways, pegasus had bunch of ports open to the outside world, including ftp, telnet and few other. It was not very smart, but hey - try teaching windows sheeople how to ssh. Our IT was not up to this task. But I digress. If you wanted to do anything on the network, you had to either log into pegasus or use one of the Spark machines on campus. All these machines (including Pegasus) had their /bin and /usr/bin mounted from smile and /home was mounted from the file server - so you could sit at any terminal, and you would have instant access to your home directory. Btw, I think all the workstations on campus authenticate via pegasus… Which made perfect sense when we had 30+ Spark machines in the lab… They are gone now.

Which makes this setup an instant recepie for disaster. If any part of the network goes, all the Spark machines crash horribly. If I’m wrong on the exact details here, please correct me. I never really investigated this throughly - I simply saw side effects of interrupted connection to smile or pegasus. They were not pretty.

Besides, who cares how exactly was the network set up. It was a mess - a house of cards. IT didn’t care because this was not their priority. The sparc network was exclusively used by CS department meaning that they could safely ignore the complaints and do bare minimum as long as no one complained to the Dean.

As a side effect, pegasus - our overworked, login/mail/authentication server hot totally pwn3d few years ago. Someone installed a rootkit, and a few trojans. The IT guys did not touch it. For several YEARS someone else owned the server many professors used for research, and students used for email and homework. The professors knew about it, the Dean knew about it and the more cluefull students knew about it too. No one cared though. Besides, with the crazy NFS setup, it was to much hassle to even touch pegaus.

The problem unexpectedly solved itself in June (I think) when a big campus-wide power outage completely fried pegasus. It had a spectacular crash, and never came back up. IT scrapped it. The whole NFS network was fucked, and they really had to work hard to get things working again. Of course they did not have a replacement ready so students were cut off from their email and network access for most of the summer.

Recently they resurrected pegasus as a Linux machine which did logins, and email. Once you ssh to it, it slogins you into spark station called freddie. All my rsa keys went to shit, and the first time I connected I nearly got a heart attack thinking someone is pulling a man in the middle on me. But I was happy to see it back.

And now it is down once again. I have no clue when it will come back, but I’m sure as hell it won’t happen over the weekend.

Guess what? Some schmucks just figured out that they can abuse the Gorkster ruling. We all knew this was bound to happen - ruling that technology company can be held liable for the actions of its users was a very dangerous move. And we just begin to see the implications.

A pr0n magazine publisher is now trying to sue google because google images section displays thumbnails of their copyrighted photos. Before you blurt out “dumbasses should have used robots.txt” let me finish. They are not pissed that Google is indexing images on their website - they are fine with that. What seems to irk them is that Google indexes web pages that stole their material.

There, now you can say WTF. See, before Gorkster ruling they would have no case. Google would just say “screw you, we are a search engine”. But, now days this is not that easy. Now the search engine company has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it’s technology was not designed to facilitate copyright infringement. I don’t think any reasonable judge would rule against Google on this one but still.

The basic idea here is to siphon some money from the search engine giant using Gorkster as a loophole. The best the publisher can hope for is a settlement with google - which means a nice influx of cash for them. If they really cared about their copyright being violated they would do a RIAA and go after the individuals websites posting these images.

All that said, I still don’t think they have a case. But if it involves copyright you can never be sure what will the courts rule these days…