The really ironic issue of late has been supercomputer exports. We now have the spectacle of William Reinsch saying that export restrictions on supercomputer *hardware* are unworkable because the technology is available all around the world. This is the very same Commerce official who still says with a straight face that export controls on encryption *software* are workable and desirable. And we have the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the same committee that recently approved the SAFE act to deregulate crypto exports, calling for an investigation into Commerce's approval of recent supercomputer exports to China. Yet I presume nobody minds that we can ship as many Pentiums as we want to China. Somebody really needs to say the words "distributed computing" to Congress. Perhaps that will be the major benefit of the DES Challenge project when (not if) it succeeds. Phil