Except that "too long" is subject to change. Think about cracking cryptographic keys. Over time the hardware gets better, and key lengths that would take "too long" to crack become feasible to crack. Recent methods using multiple GPUs to run massively-parallel attacks have only accelerated that. So something taking too long now doesn't mean it doesn't have utility, just that we don't have the other things needed to exploit that utility yet.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]