This little quote comes from one of the comments on the article. Superb :)

About two years after 9/11 I was selected at random by a TSA agent for additional security screening at an airport checkpoint. I was asked to remove my hat, shoes, belt and jacket, after which I was told to spread my arms and legs for electronic ‘wanding’.

When I asked why I had been chosen for the extra attention, two more agents quickly appeared and their unsmiling faces emphasized that airport security was, indeed, very serious business. “We need to be sure you don’t have anything you can use to take control of an aircraft”, the screener told me. I will never forget the absurdity of his words.

You see, I was, in fact, about to take control of an aircraft, an Airbus A320 to be precise, and fly it up the Potomac River to LaGuardia. That’s what airline Captains like me get paid to do. That’s why I had showed up at the airport in full uniform, properly credentialed and ready to go.

Stunning! Love the logo, the 500 menu options, the frenetic Flash blob site ... and the copy of course (the clarity of their mission statement is second to none).

They also have a legal agreement t-shirt (actually for sale from Zazzle).

The Buy n Large Corporation acknowledges that this shirt may or may not be worn according to the Buy n Large standardized undergarments usage agreement (BnLSG3ba). [...] The Customer agrees to treat all information obtained while wearing this Buy n Large-branded shirt [...] (individually and collectively, the “Content”) otherwise made available to the Customer as proprietary to Buy n Large. Customer agrees that Content reserved for Buy n Large will be maintained as confidential and shall be protected as a trade secret of Buy n Large Corporation.

So... how many people could conceivably feature on the list? About 2bn people subsist on less than $2 per day, and realistically they're not going to appear. I'm not an expert (at all) on terrorist income levels, but I believe a fair number come from relatively affluent backgrounds (and I would have thought that those potentially flying would certainly tend to).

Let's use (rather rashly) the average annual income in Iran ($5326) or Pakistan ($1884) as a baseline. (These two countries chosen because they've been in the news a lot recently.) According to the Global Rich List, there are 859m (Iran) or 1.16bn (Pakistan) people with an annual income level at least that high. This means that just under 1 in every 1000 people who could conceivably be on the watch list is actually on the watch list. I realise the logic here is somewhat shakey, and the stats may be too, but still that's kinda scary.

PS From Slashdot re. the list:

Facebook 2.0: It's the new social networking sensation!

I have little to add to that said by AP, other than I hope I have misunderstood the quotes in the interview and that the book is actually based on sound science. The idea that the environment must remain static for evolution to take place is completely fallacious. Creatures co-evolve on a constantly varying landscape, shaped by the other organisms in their food web and other environmental factors.

Experiments by Hillis (and many others since) have shown the power of co-evolution as a driving force for change. Kauffman's work on NK landscapes also gives fascinating insights into the complexity and intricacy that can be seen in co-evolutionary systems (Red Queen, etc.).

A rapidly changing environment almost always drives similarly rapid evolution - species are forced to adapt or die. Consider the Cambrian explosion and the Permian extinction as examples of this, presumably the result of significant extrinsic or intrinsic pressures. Kanazawa may have confused a rapidly changing environment with a random environment, in which a random walk (though not standing still) is the best survival strategy.

It's probably true that our rapidly changing environment has (perhaps uniquely) reduced selective pressure on us as a species, but this is because we have adapted the environment, and in such a way as to increase our chances of survival (e.g. by allowing those with certain genetic defects to survive and reproduce). We do get scared by films and turned on by porn, but this is not because we cannot change, it is because it (essentially) doesn't matter. If our environment starts to exert pressure (perhaps through increasing numbers of obese people dying young and childless), selection will kick in. There may also be an argument here re. adaptation rate and population size in an increasingly connected world (cf. genetic drift, etc.), but I'm not really qualified to comment on that.

The thesis alluded to in the book's title seems suspect too. We know from recent history (e.g. Rubens, fashion today) that what are considered to be attractive female characteristics have varied quite substantially over time. The idea that our stone age ancestors presciently selected offspring to meet Vogue magazine's paradigm of beauty today seems suspect to say the least. There is more comment on this (and the subjectivity of beauty) in the Freakonomics post on the book.

This looks like a pro forma agreement they bought for a few dollars on which they just changed the business name. It also looks like a US agreement, despite the company being UK based and the EULA citing UK jurisdiction (e.g. there's no reference to the company's liability for death or personal injury). The clause cited above would almost certainly be held to be unfair in a consumer contract (e.g. see p43 of this document).

(Caveats: I didn't read the whole thing (I read enough of the damn things anyway for stuff I actually do want to install) and, of course, IANAL.)