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Re:The law depends on compute power by amelius on Saturday July 30, 2016 @03:16PM (#12194280)
> The law is interpreted by humans, based on case law, and attempts to understand the intentions of the law as written.

So what you are saying is that "loopholes" in the law actually don't exist, because those loopholes run counter to the intentions of the law? Interesting!

Re:The law depends on compute power by zyxley on Saturday July 30, 2016 @03:51PM (#12194412)
Generally speaking, "look! I found a clever loophole in the law!" - as performed by any layman who doesn't actually understand the legal system - leads to getting smacked by a judge for being an annoyance.
Re:The law depends on compute power by geofft on Saturday July 30, 2016 @05:53PM (#12194830)
The term "loophole" doesn't refer to what we programmers would think of as implementation bugs; nobody is, e.g., dodging taxes by saying "these rules are for salaries under $100K, these are for over $100K, I'm making exactly $100K so I don't have to pay anything nyaah." It refers to what we programmers would think of as design bugs: the intent of the law does not cover the situation at hand, and it is not a judge's place to say, "Hm, I guess they meant to write a law about this."

A good example is the backdoor Roth IRA, which lets you exceed the Roth contribution limit by transiting your money through a traditional IRA (which has no limit) and then converting it to a Roth IRA (which has no limit). It's well-known that you can do this, and the legislature has had plenty of opportunities to put a contribution on either of these two steps. But they haven't. It would contradict the will of the legislature for a judge to say, "Look, obviously they didn't mean that," because at this point if they meant that they would have said it.

Re:The law depends on compute power by epistasis on Saturday July 30, 2016 @03:20PM (#12194291)
You're going to have to explain that jump quite a bit more.

Oftentimes loopholes are from being overly specific on certain terms, rather than specifying intent more broadly.

Re:The law depends on compute power by tedunangst on Saturday July 30, 2016 @04:13PM (#12194500)
There's more to finding a loophole than choosing to deliberately misinterpret all the case law that comes before.