Re: floating point crypto?

[rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga)]

At 6:51 PM 1/5/95, Timothy C. May wrote:
>Robert H. has asked that we reply in e-mail to him, to avoid
>"cluttering the list more than I already have...," but the logic of
>this is faulty. The few lines of a response such as this one, or even
>of several such responses, are as nothing compared to dozens or more
>people sifting their own archives so they can each independently send
>Robert what they find. Hence my public reply.

Got that right. No one can be more chagrined than I about this, because
I've seen it happen. I remember Way Back in Ancient History (1985) when
someone who couldn't remember the name of the movie posted the plot to
"Slient Running" to net.sf(?), and asked for e-mail answers, so it
"wouldn't clog the newsgroup". He was begging for mercy as little as 4
hours later... How soon they forget. I'm lucky it didn't happen to me.
Thanks Tim, for saving my bacon.

Nonetheless, I *am* thankful to Jim Gillogly, who sent me a great bunch of
stuff about what the pentium.whistleblower, Dr. Nicely, was working on. Jim
said he got it out of WWW, and maybe he'll post the URL here and that will
be that. Nicely was working with finding multiple primes: Prime twins,
prime triplets, etc.

I will now proceed to post the relevant bits of Jim's and Tim's stuff to
the newsgroup I got "called" in. Thanks to everyone who sent me comments,
pointers, etc.

>Not to sound strident, but if folks would keep copies of articles and
>spend some time organizing them in data bases or in other searchable
>forms, this would help the list. In my opinion, having personal access
>to past posts is several orders of magnitude more important than
>having MIDI-MIME JPEG-II TeX players that can display "Cypherpunks R
>Us" in the correct font and with the "R" reversed according to spec.

Indeed.

Having limited space on my poor PowerBook, I have kept mostly the "excrable
e$" types of files, to wit: anything mentioning money, finance, economics,
and whatever crypto is specific to those areas.

Since I started hanging out here this spring, I've accumulated about 10
megs of stuff between this list and www-buyinfo. I just archived everything
from November backwards into Stuffit-compressed Eudora mailboxes. If you
want those, I've got 'em. I did search the files I have after the "great
squeeze", but to no avail. Unfortunately, I did not think I would have to
keep anything to do with WIntel and their potential tribulations. I am,
after all a Certified Macintosh Bigot�.

Thanks again, everyone.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

-----------------
Robert Hettinga  (rah@shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone
Shipwright Development Corporation     who eats too little and sees Heaven and
44 Farquhar Street                       someone who drinks too much and sees
Boston, MA 02331 USA                       snakes." -- Bertrand Russell
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