of course, any number in the range of a random number generator is theoretically as likely/unlikely to appear. however, consider the case in which DES keys are generated from ascii sequences or words that people enter in at password prompts, which is in fact how the unix passwd file word. these obviously have far less randomness and Gary's attempt to narrow the keyspace is highly relevant. also, I took his post as suggesting that some parts of the keyspace ought to be searched at higher priority than others. in the above example, keys that correspond to ascii sequences typable on a keyboard should be searched first in the keyspace. a lot of systems use DES only in conjuction with a one-time-key generated for a particular message. (similar to the way PGP uses IDEA for the session key, and transmits this encoded key using RSA). in general I would say these could be considered random in a way that the previous "less-than-random" property doesn't hold.