Data points

From schneier:  The official US terrorist watch list has now hit one million names.  Yup, that's right — the US Government now considers one in every 304 Americans to be a suspected terrorist.  Statistically speaking, assuming for the sake of argument that the distribution is uniform and random, that means Congress and the White House staff together should contain about two terrorists (nominations, anyone?), and about one in every ten school classes contains a terrorist.  Reports indicate the terrorist watch list is growing by 20,000 names a month.

And from danjite, the UK has the highest per-capita income in Europe, yet has the lowest standard of living.  The high cost of energy in the UK is a major factor — Britons pay among the highest prices in Europe for electricity, gas, gasoline and diesel fuel, ranging from 5% above the European average for electricity to 49% above average for gas.

Your tax dollars at work

The Department of Health and Human Services is seeking to redefine contraception as abortion in order to allow blocking access to it.  One wonders what the next step will be in the quest to return to the Dark Ages....

When Jurassic Park meets City Hall

Remember the annoying, slimy hacker in Jurassic Park?  Seems the City of San Francisco has a very similar problem.

Prosecutors say Childs, who works in the Department of Technology at a base salary of just over $126,000, tampered with the city's new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials' e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates' bookings are stored.

Childs created a password that granted him exclusive access to the system, authorities said. He initially gave pass codes to police, but they didn't work. When pressed, Childs refused to divulge the real code even when threatened with arrest, they said.

Unfortunately, it's probably too much to hope for that this one will get eaten by spitting dinosaurs (or any other kind, for that matter).