as soon as they were talking about reformatting the hard drive I was ready to get my screwdriver and help them out ’cause I’m no *so* the expert at this now!

Don’t you wish your computer had this kind of recovery speed? Reinstalling windows from scratch usually takes 2-3 hours (if you count formating, all the rebooting, installing all the drivers and etc). Linux is a little better at this (you usually reboot once, and most of the stuff works out of the box), but not all hardware is supported :)

It also kinda scared me a whee bit that even my laptop knows what’s going to happen on BSG.

Oh no! You must have caught the Cylon virus too! lol Btw, if a Sharon model Cylon pops out in your apartment one day offering to help with the infection, can you package her nicely and send here here once you are done? ;)

Um… This is strictly for scientific purposes actually. No really… I’m just interested in… Er… “scientifically” investigating the physiological differences between Cylons and humans.

Wow, very interesting read. I cannot add much to the code discussion other than to say as soon as they were talking about reformatting the hard drive I was ready to get my screwdriver and help them out ’cause I’m no *so* the expert at this now! It also kinda scared me a whee bit that even my laptop knows what’s going to happen on BSG. Anyway, now to what I can add to this conversation…

Sharon’s reaction to seeing the code (which, btw, I had a screen cap off on NL if you want to take a close look), I was a bit worried it was a trigger as well. Heck, it might still be a trigger in the long run, but here is hoping it’s not.

And why send the attack force the way they did… to me I don’t believe for one second she is a liability and they want her destroyed. They were either there (1) as was pointed out, to allow her to show her allegiances; or, (2) to cripple galactica and reclaim her. Although they had plenty of chance to do that on Caprica while she was tailing Kara and Helo, but ya never know.

I also found it great the attack was a direct mirror of the one the cylons lead in the mini.

What’s to prevent the Cylon virus from intercepting the diff output and substituting its own output to show nothing is wrong?

You isolate the two copies of the code code and run it on an unpluged machine that has been formated, and cleaned offline. You just make sure that copies of your code are not executable (chmod -x code). Anyway’s I just make that example to illustrate why I think the stuff they were printing out were hexdumps – not the actual source code.

The look she had after briefly seeing the hexdump was that of a subversive program being activated. We’ve seen that look before….

Very good point. I actually had a discussion about this with someone today. Personally I think she was just shocked that they decided to do this while she was still onboard. But you are rigth – they did say that the child must be protected… Very interesting.

With regard to comparing the old files to the new using a simple diff command, one issue is that the Cylon virus is intelligent, maybe self-aware. It’s not a “rootkit+trojan” as we understand such things.

What’s to prevent the Cylon virus from intercepting the diff output and substituting its own output to show nothing is wrong?

Whether it’s a “logic bomb” or “rootkit+trojan” is irrelevant for one simple reason – it’s an intelligent, autonomous Cylon program so I’m not sure it would be quite as straight-forward to deal with as you have suggested.

Also, have you ever read “Snowcrash?” The premise of that book is that biological human brains were once just as easily programmable as computers are today (or the near future).

Think of how people can be sent into epileptic fits (basically, the brain short-circuiting) by watching rapid flashing patterns of light. In Snowcrash, beneath all the higher order human thoughts is the existence a verbal assembly language, which was once used to control and program the human animal at the dawn of civilization.

I immediately thought of Snowcrash when Sharon was shown the hexdump. Seemingly unintelligible, the patterns on the page consisted of trigger “words of power” that tapped immediately and directly into her brain stem.

The look she had after briefly seeing the hexdump was that of a subversive program being activated. We’ve seen that look before….

Remember, in the previous episode, the Cylons know Sharon is pregnant and indicate the hybrid organism must be protected at all costs. So why send a massive fleet to destroy Galactica? Ocam’s Razer says the only reasonable answer is that the Cylon fleet was sent not to destroy, but to be destroyed….by Sharon. Why? To encourage the humans to trust Sharon a little more and thus emotionally invest themselves in protecting her and the baby.

Once again, the humans think they’ve chalked up another victory, but once again, the Cylons are pulling all the strings.