And the follow-up article, which discusses the usual objections that programmers have to the original article: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/24 . Particularly noteworthy is a comment from a lawyer that a key misunderstanding among programmers is that in law, the humans and their social interactions are the first-class entities of the system, not second-order distractions as they tend to be in engineering. This was a very enlightening moment for me in my journey towards understanding why the law seems so absurd from a mathematical perspective.

Indeed, the only absurd thing about the law is when people try to flirt with it by treating it mathematically.

I think this article does a fantastic job of illustrating why legal problems (determining or enforcing the Colour of something) can never possibly be solved through the use of (colourless) technology - the two are fundamentally incompatible. This is, for example, the reason why DRM has never ever stopped people from sharing copyrighted works - because DRM is trying to solve a legal problem (the Colour of bits) by using a function of those bits (technology), it is destined to fail.