you're correct that compression generally makes the data look random. but some compressed formats have highly nonrandom components. bzip2 is organized into blocks so that if one block is corrupted the remaining blocks can be reliably decompressed.

high quality encryption cannot appear completely random, because every arbitrarily long random sequence has arbitrarily long sequences of any arbitrary bit pattern. suppose you used a radioactive source to generate a binary one time pad, then xored your cleartext with it. you'll someday find out the hard way that you transmitted "attack at dawn" in cleartext because your one time pad contained a long string of zeroes!

thus we could detect encrypted signals by watching for signals that appear TOO random. there are many statistical tests for randomness. I expect some of them could distinguish an encrypted signal from pure noise.

The very first communications of human origin that alien civilizations might receive will come from Nikola Tesla's attempt to broadcast electrical power through the air a little over a century ago. Provided they have sensitive and directional enough receivers, and can somehow filter out the radio noise from the Sun, that would mean that any civilization within a little over a hundred light years might already be trying to respond to us.

A while back I asked on an astronomy newsgroup, how far away could a civilization with the level of technology that humanity presently has, detect our own radio signals?

The sorrowful answer was that it was only three light years, which is a light year short of the distance to our nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri, which is also not likely to have any planets that could harbor life. The SETI researcher who responded also said that our strongest radio transmitters are the Distant Early Warning radars that the United States uses to watch for an incoming nuclear attack from the Soviets. That implies that we are only "communicating" with aliens who are in a generally northward direction relative to the earth.

I then asked how SETI hoped to hear from any aliens at all. His answer was that we expect that more advanced civilizations would transmit far more powerful radio signals. That doesn't seem right to me, unless they are specifically trying to communicate with other civilizations, as I would expect more advanced technology to result in lower radio power, rather than more, both to conserve energy and to enable more devices to use the available spectrum.

Nobody seems to be clueing in to my assertion that the Feds could require antivirus firewalls at every Internet border crossing. It would not be hard at all to program those firewalls with the checksums for every open source file found on the entire Internet.

To create an Internet connection with some foreign router without placing such a firewall between would carry a heavy criminal penalty. Recall that the guy who wrote PGP got prosecuted for exporting munitions in violations of arms control laws for no other reason than that he put the PGP source code on his own FTP site, purely within US borders.

It would not work at all for Canonical to have a US presence such as a post office box, or even a brick-and-mortar office. To the extent that the product they provide is developed overseas, they would have to pay the punitive tariff for whatever they imported.

While one can argue that once a single copy of Ubuntu has been imported into the US, every US resident can obtain a copy of that master copy for free, without paying the tariff. But Microsoft - and Apple - could reasonably argue that the amount of that punitive tariff ought to be based on how many copies of that single master import actually get produced, with that number being multiplied by the current wholesale price of Windows or Mac OS X.

  It would cost in the billions of dollars of dollars to import a single ISO installer image. What do you suppose would happen if US Customs caught you failing to pay a billion dollar tariff?

The fact that it would be expensive and impractical to filter every Internet border crossing doesn't mean the Federal Government couldn't pass a law that required it. Failure to do so would mean heavy fines or imprisonment, as would any manner of importation of Open Source software by finding some way to get around United States Customs' firewall.

Yes, source code is free speech, but then it's not an implementation. Software that you can actually execute is a tangible good just like a Nike sneaker or a length of steel pipe. I'd like to see what happens when Richard Stallman shows up in a dirty T-shirt, blue jeans and bare feet to testify to a Congressional subcommittee as to why America's two most profitable companies should not enjoy the same kinds of legal protections that a steel fabricator would.

This is the very first time I've discussed this in public, but I've been puzzling over this question for well over a decade.

The US doesn't charge tariffs for most imported goods. If you lived in Canada and paid ten grand to download a high-end foreign software product over the Internet, and you didn't pay Canada Customs That Which Is Caesar's, you might well end up doing hard time.

Non one has yet given me any reason to believe that software is in any substantial way different from a product that takes physical form. It costs a lot of money to develop, as coders are highly paid, and most substantial software products require enormous amounts of labor, not just for the software engineers, but qa, documentation, management, the equipment and software used to develop it and so on.

I'm totally serious about this. Punitive tariffs are applied all the damn time. You just don't hear about most of them because they are applied to isolated products. They only get press when there is a tit-for-tat between two countries as with China and the US over solar energy.

Software is one of the United States' few remaining really profitable industries. I've never heard anything about the anti-dumping regulations that would imply that the United States' proprietary software vendors qualify for tariff protection any less than the vendors who make physically manufactured goods.

Linux is NOT free! That's just what its price is, which is my whole point. IBM all by itself spends a billion dollars a year on Linux development.

Neither does the fact that Ubuntu and other foreign open source arrive in the US over the Internet means that it somehow isn't being sold for less than what it costs to make it.

If you really don't want to see Blue Coat antivirus firewalls being used to stop open source binaries from crossing into the US, you need to do something to get these regulations changed.

I don't see how downloading over the Internet doesn't qualify as importation of a manufactured good. Software is not free speech. The fact that Internet packets aren't inspected at the us border doesn't mean that they couldn't be if us vendors of proprietary software were to raise hell about predatory dumping by foreign open source firms.

All it would take is to install an antivirus firewall on every Internet border crossing. Before you claim that you would route around the damage, consider what it would be like to do time for smuggling.

Microsoft could petition to have the tariff based on the lost sales that would result from a single item being installed then duplicated.

It wouldn't be hard to estimate how many copies of ubuntu get installed within the us. Just analyze the log files from a variety if web servers. Alternatively ISP packet sniffers could provide the data for the estimate.

Microsoft sells desktop, server and embedded operating systems. They sell applications like Microsoft office and server software like SQL server and Internet information server.

There us just about nothing that Microsoft sells for which the equivalent functionality cannot be had in open source. If you install ubuntu on your home computer and serve your company's website with a lamp stack, those are two computers all by yourself that you have lost Microsoft thousands of dollars in sales.

The headhunters I have to deal with to get software consulting gigs always require me to send them my resume in word format. But it has been years since I last used word; instead I edit my resume In open office then save in word format. Similarly I use openoffice calc for my budget rather than excel, and gnucash for my accounting rather than Microsoft money.

... to do just what he wants, give him a cookie."

You must be quite young, because you clearly don't know much about the software industry. Get back to me after you've read all the recent stories published here about the patent wars.

Actually red hat does not give away manufactured goods of any sort for free. Red hat enterprise Linux is colossally expensive.

Even if they did, it's perfectly legal fir American manufacturers to practice dumping domestically. Totally hypocritical sure, but also totally legal.

Now red hat does provide free source code. That does not meet the legal definition of a manufactured good. Only the compiled binaries do.

    It is for precisely that reason that you don't violate software patents by writing the source code to programs that infringe patent claims. You only infringe a patent when you create an unlicensed implementation. For software, only compiled binaries constitute implementations. I don't know how patent law applies to languages that aren't compiled.

At one time Microft required oems to pay the windows license fee for sac pc they sold, even if windows wasn't actually installed on it. They made the dubious claim that this compensated them for the piracy that would result if pcs were sold with no os at all.

That practice was banned in their antitrust lawsuit. Now pcs are sold without operating systems all the time, with Linux being the os most commonly installed by the end users themselves.

While I agree it would be impractical to charge import duties in open source, it would not be by any means impossible. Just put a blue coat antivirus firewall on every Internet cable that crosses a us border.

While one would still be permitted to download open source files, they would be impounded by a customs department file server. Only by paying the tariff could you receive your file.

Chinas great firewall is quite leaky, but American defense contractors were the original builders of the Internet. Just think about what they could do with the help if the NSA.

You must not be following the occupy wall street movement. The goods you purchase from American companies are largely made in china. American manufacturing is largely a thing of the past.

While we do still make software, piracy is rampant in china, with the Chinese government doing little to stop it.

They come right out and say so in their annual report.

By law and by the constitution the us is permitted to inspect and charge tariffs on imported goods. They can even prevent the item's import if it does not comply with customs regulations.

I don't see how using the Internet as the port of entry has anything to do with it.

-s?

Isn't the whole point of academic research the free and open sharing of knowledge? But universities obtain patents then sell exclusive licenses to them, despite the research generally being done at taxpayer expense.

The us forbids the importation of manufactured goods that are sold for less than what they cost to manufacture. Otherwise foreign firms with deep enough pockets could drive their American competitors completely out of business.

Any us firm that suspects that this "dumping" is taking place can ask the Feds to investigate, which may result in a punitive tariff being used to level the playing field.

Ubuntu comes frOm south Africa and is distributed free of charge. Why can't Microsoft request a punitive tariff on it's import?

Such tariffs are applied quite a lot but I've never heard of them being applied to software.

... say your girl is a lousy lay, but I want you to know that that's not my experience at all.