"Interesting that this has again to do with "colour" of the bits, per:

http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

Interesting also that signatures deal with colour as well; a signed

copy of (say) a debian package is semantically different than an

unsigned one, even though they may contain the same bits. And a

binary you compiled yourself has a different colour than one you

downloaded. And so on. It's about provenance.

Yes, everyone should read that article :-)"

Jared, this is awesome:

Bits do not naturally have Colour. Colour, in this sense, is not part of the natural universe. Most importantly, you cannot look at bits and observe what Colour they are. I encountered an amusing example of bit Colour recently: one of my friends was talking about how he'd performed John Cage's famous silent musical composition 4'33" for MP3. Okay, we said, (paraphrasing the conversation here) so you took an appropriate-sized file of zeroes out of /dev/zero and compressed that with an MP3 compressor? No, no, he said. If I did that, it wouldn't really be 4'33" because to perform the composition, you have to make the silence in a certain way, according to the rules laid down by the composer. It's not just four minutes and thirty-three seconds of any old silence.

That just blew my mind.