LP+Apologies if I repeat a question which has already been answered. +My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive, and I miss many +important postings. Some time ago it was asked why Vernor Vinge +made passing reference to humans' naivete in trusting public key +encryption, and some posters were seeking to contact professor +Vinge for clarification. Has any further explanation been +discovered for his distrust of PKE? I once had a girlfriend who factored five digit numbers just by looking at them. "29367? No, that's not prime. It's 117 times 251..." Good ol' Elizabeth. That's what you get for an "IQ" of around 175. Surely there might be higher "IQ's" someplace else in Universe? Albert Szent-Georgi once told me his thought that an IQ difference of thirty points meant that one person solves by inspetion problems which no amount of explanation can make clear to the other. He added that in a normal day we run into people spanning three such gulfs. If an IQ of 100 routinely factors two digit decimal numbers, and you get another digit for every twenty or thirty points, then you're looking for beings with IQ's in the 1,000 range to factor 100 digits binary... Cheers, -dlj. david.lloyd-jones@canrem.com * 1st 1.11 #3818 * "640k should be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates, 1981.