Given the regularity with which fears of factoring by quantum compters comes up around here, I thought I'd share a brief story: At a party last night, I ran into a couple of acquantances, and was delighted to learn that they are working on the current NIST quantum computing project, making quantum gates out of atomic traps similar to those used by Cornell and Weiman to get a Bose condensate with Rubidium (crypto relevance comes from odd places, eh?) Anyway, I talked them up a bit, and so far they've managed to construct a working "or" gate. The long-term project is to construct a quantum computer capable of factoring 15, which they expect to take at least several years. I mentioned crypto and they literally laughed at me. The word from the trenches is "don't worry about it for a very long time." -- Will