 PLOT: When the students are trying to break into the military  computer, Laslo comments, "Oh, well get in; its just going to take  six hours." A six letter string using only the 26 letters of the  alphabet (and no numbers or case changes) has approximately 308.9  million possible combinations. There are about 31 million seconds in  one year. That means that trying every combination once every five  seconds would give Laslo the chance to try about 6.3 million  combinations per year. Given that there are 300 million possible  combinations, it would take approximately 47 years for Laslo to try  every possible combination.