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No Human Error in the System

Date: 5-Dec-2008/8:15+3:00

Tags: , , ,

Characters: man, me

In one dream phase I was looking at a screen of video game characters, looking like some kind of Ninja video game. As I walked or pointed, the Ninja would move around. The color scheme and characters reminded me of "The Last Ninja" series of games, but it was an overhead view that reminded me of Capcom's "Commando". I had a tough time telling the difference between throwing star icons that represented attacks on me vs. throwing stars that I was supposed to pick up and use.
At some point, the game screen switched to a graphic of a person in a tavern putting a quarter in an arcade machine, then it went back to the game again. The next time it switched away from the game wasn't to show a graphic of a tavern, but rather to put me into a physical tavern where I could see the game machine and someone playing it. He got up to drink a beer and I tried to talk to him, but a man in a green suit came to get me and take me over to a nearby nicely-decorated area with a hardwood floor and a couple of big chairs.
man: "There you are. You've been expected. Come over here..."
me: "I'll try and do my best to stay as long as I can, but it's not going to be easy. So talk as fast as possible, basically."
Using a dark black pen, he drew a long rectangle on against the slats of the floor...so that the slats were running opposite to the length of the rectangle--to create an array of squares.
man: "There's a series like this--with heavy impedance here, and here."
He began marking some cells in this grid with dashes, and thickening the lines between certain grid cells.
man: "This part has been carbonized, with conduits running along here. It's too bad you'll be taking the hard way."
me: "Hard way? Can you translate this into terms that mean something that I can understand? What does this spell for me in the next day, month, year?"
man: "To give you a top level point of view, there's there's no human error in the system whatsoever. No hidden debug modes, no reflection interfaces, nothing. We're kind of at a loss."
Note Reflection is a technical term in computer science, which is when a system exposes information about itself. A system which has some kind of reflection is easier to get information about if you do not have other documentation.
He walked over and sat in a chair, and began a speech of some kind, while I struggled not to wake up.
man: "Our world is very hard to teach about meaningfully to those who fall into positions of power and responsibility. When you think about it, though, intellectual and spiritual growth are a rare opportunity. For us to expect it to happen all the time is just naive. So we should appreciate it when it does happen, yet realize there are going to be some cases where..."
I awoke.
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The accounts written here are as true as I can manage. While the words are my own, they are not independent creative works of fiction —in any intentional way. Thus I do not consider the material to be protected by anything, other than that you'd have to be crazy to want to try and use it for genuine purposes (much less disingenuous ones!) But who's to say?