Secondly: bullcrap. You can make a bang big enough to kill a plane with laptop batteries - the fact you can make a bigger bang with liquids is surely irrelevant. And also it's perfectly possible to change the contents of a battery - no? So put something more explosive in it....
Batteries are very easy to remove.
The reason liquids were banned is because of the evidence someone came up with the suggest there were liquid bombs being planned (and I think one failed attempt) - not a bad response at all! It's the same reason a lot of airports (especially UK ones) ask you to remove your shoes and Xray them.
At the end of the day they can only respond to the perceived or suspected risks - if you really put your mind too it it shouldnt actually be too hard to smuggle a bomb on a plane.
EDIT: by which I mean it is more a case of making people feel safe (by inconveniencing them, basic psycology) as well as causing more inconvenience for a small number of possible potential attacks. The actual security effect is fairly minimal - simply for practical reasons pointed out a billion times over.
Firstly; I think XKCD was just being amusing....
Secondly: bullcrap. You can make a bang big enough to kill a plane with laptop batteries - the fact you can make a bigger bang with liquids is surely irrelevant. And also it's perfectly possible to change the contents of a battery - no? So put something more explosive in it....
Batteries are very easy to remove.
The reason liquids were banned is because of the evidence someone came up with the suggest there were liquid bombs being planned (and I think one failed attempt) - not a bad response at all! It's the same reason a lot of airports (especially UK ones) ask you to remove your shoes and Xray them.
At the end of the day they can only respond to the perceived or suspected risks - if you really put your mind too it it shouldnt actually be too hard to smuggle a bomb on a plane.
EDIT: by which I mean it is more a case of making people feel safe (by inconveniencing them, basic psycology) as well as causing more inconvenience for a small number of possible potential attacks. The actual security effect is fairly minimal - simply for practical reasons pointed out a billion times over.