VFAT patent avoidance and patent workarounds

Posted Jun 30, 2009 21:03 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: VFAT patent avoidance and patent workarounds by drag
Parent article: VFAT patent avoidance and patent workarounds

I'd say the law is *exactly* like what code would be like if it was
written over many centuries, by people who never understood more than a
fraction of the codebase, and with a goal of consistency above all despite
that.

(In many sufficiently long-lived legal systems, the very oldest laws don't
even get repealed: they just drop out of use because almost nobody can
even understand the language they're written in, and they're not important
enough for the legislature to waste any time on as nobody ever actually
uses said moribund laws for anything. Some of the oldest
still-technically-valid UK laws are written in Anglo-Norman, but unless
they've been renewed more recently, they're probably forgotten except as
curiosities. Most laws that are actually enforced are either terribly
significant so they don't get forgotten or a couple of centuries or less
old. This probably helps keep the set of active laws from imploding from
sheer size...)

VFAT patent avoidance and patent workarounds

Posted Jun 30, 2009 21:29 UTC (Tue) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link] (5 responses)

> I'd say the law is *exactly* like what code would be like if it was
> written over many centuries, by people who never understood more than a
> fraction of the codebase, and with a goal of consistency above all despite
> that.

I think that's an excessively reductionist view of human society and the way it interacts with its laws.

Code is a set of instructions performed by a machine. This is true even of 'big ball of mud' type systems. Any attempt to reduce the operation of human society to that of a machine will get into the more extensional (and pointless) aspects of the philosophy of AI.

VFAT patent avoidance and patent workarounds

Posted Jun 30, 2009 21:54 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

I was actually being cynical about code quality, rather than reductionist
about the law. I suspect that code *will* get as hopelessly inconsistent
as legal systems do, if you let them accrete for as long: i.e., the
driving factor here is time.

(That's why I mentioned old laws getting ignored: that's one major
difference, because old code doesn't get ignored. Machines have no common
sense. Most judges do, and even some legislators...)

VFAT patent avoidance and patent workarounds

Posted Jul 1, 2009 5:22 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (2 responses)

> That's why I mentioned old laws getting ignored: that's one major difference, because old code doesn't get ignored

Heh, I just read it as part of the analogy, with the old laws like the old modules that end up sitting in a corner mumbling quietly to themselves without actually being hooked into anything that matters anymore.

VFAT patent avoidance and patent workarounds

Posted Jul 1, 2009 22:05 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

That works, too.

Anyway, my apologies for introducing an analogy unrelated to cars, but as
I don't drive I have to make my own fun.

VFAT patent avoidance and patent workarounds

Posted Jul 1, 2009 22:47 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

As part of the rising interest in "green" computing, I propose that henceforth we make analogies involving biking, walking, and light rail whenever possible.

VFAT patent avoidance and patent workarounds

Posted Jul 3, 2009 19:03 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

Code is a set of instructions performed by a machine.

That's a bad way of thinking about code. It's an accurate description of machine code, but since the work of Grace Hopper, good code is a description of the solution to a computational problem. It's written in a language simple enough that a computer can understand the solution and implement it. So calling code instructions to a computer is like calling a manuscript instructions to a publisher.

So the way I would compare law to code is that law is what code would be like if we had much more advanced computer technology (and I do think we'll get there eventually). Imagine code that technically says to iterate forever, but the computer understands you didn't really want an infinite loop and stops after a reasonable number of iterations. Law can do that.