Word: digit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...than 47 million have been issued by American Telephone & Telegraph, which operates the long-distance lines that used to be part of the Bell system. The rest have been put out by competitors like MCI. Each AT&T card is supposed to be protected from abuse by a four-digit personal identification number that only the user and the company know. Someone using the card must give both his phone and the identification numbers. But anyone who finds or steals a card, or overhears the numbers being read to an operator, can make illegal calls...
...Digit...
Lingering double-digit inflation and high unemployment, not budget or benefit cuts, were largely to blame, asserted census officials. Nonetheless, on Capitol Hill, the study prompted House Democrats to introduce a bill that would raise the federal contribution to Medicaid, Aid to Families with Dependent Children and other major welfare programs by $ 10.5 billion a year...
Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque is a sprawling research establishment best known for its work on highly secret defense projects, including nuclear weaponry. Last week Sandia exploded a different sort of bombshell. Its mathematicians announced that they had factored a 69-digit number, the largest ever to be subjected to such numerical dissection. Their triumph is more than an intellectual exercise. It could have far-flung repercussions for national security. As anyone who has ever passed through intermediate algebra knows (or once knew), factoring means breaking a number into its smallest whole-number multiplicands greater than 1. For example...
...initials of its three inventors), it employs difficult-to-factor multidigit numbers to encode secrets and keep them secure. These include electronic funds transfers and military messages. By factoring the numbers, the codes can be broken. When RSA was first proposed, its inventors suggested using 80-digit numbers on the assumption that they were too big to be factored. Obviously, with researchers at Sandia closing in on ever larger numbers, even RSA could eventually fall to the code breakers...