[vkou]

> The real problem driving this article is the legacy ambient authorities wanting to expand their role, insisting that the informal intentions behind the design of (and decision to run) the code should carry more weight than the code itself!

Just because I accidentally left my door unlocked today doesn't mean that entering my house, and taking all my stuff isn't burglary. You don't have to be a telepath to know that is wrong.

Under the 'code is law' doctrine, just because you could do something, you can do something. This is incompatible with anything resembling civilized society.

Society only functions because we respect the informal intentions of other people.

[mindslight]

> Society only functions because we respect the informal intentions of other people.

I agree wholeheartedly, in the local scale person-to-person sense.

But your argument is knocking down a straw man, by coming at it from the other direction. I'm not advocating for being an asshole via finding loopholes, but against the ridiculousness of creating a second set of half-formal rules to repair deficiencies in the fully formal ones.

> Under the 'code is law' doctrine, just because you could do something, you can do something. This is incompatible with anything resembling civilized society.

Yet this is exactly how the legal system does work. If an action is "wrong" but not illegal you can't actually be sanctioned for it. See: pretty much any large company in the news over some kind of outrage that will ultimately go unpunished.

[vkou]

> If an action is "wrong" but not illegal you can't actually be sanctioned for it. See: pretty much any large company in the news over some kind of outrage that will ultimately go unpunished.

Law is subject to human interpretation, evaluation of intent, and error correction. Every case has a number of unknowns that judges and juries are supposed to clarify. This is a feature, not a bug.

Code does not. The source for any non-trivial program encodes an uncountable number of unknowns that frequently lead us to absurd conclusions, with no ability to sanity check or correct them.

[mindslight]

This flexibility is a feature for human-scale situations (eg it's really nice to distinguish between involuntary manslaughter and premeditated murder), but it doesn't scale - either to larger organizations, or across different cultures.

[IntronExon]

Law is interpreted by the courts, which creates jurisprudence. The letter of the law is subject to the interpretation of the courts to a very great extent.

Edit: I misread the comment I responded to, and as the poster rightly pointed out, my comment is just stating the obvious. Sorry about that.

[mindslight]

How is that aspect not already incorporated in what I've said?

[IntronExon]

You’re absolutely right, I misread your comment.

[hinkley]

    just because you could do something, you can do something. 

There is no more perfect state of Anarchy in the world than code.

What we are missing is good forensics. A number of people in this thread have hinted at this.