[TheWorstPlayer]

Josem, way to include no probabilities in your calculation. What impact does prohibiting liquids have on the probability of a plane full of passengers hitting a building? That multiplied by the impact of the catastrophe has to be weighed against the cost of the liquid ban. I'm guessing that impact is basically zero. It is definitely very very small.

And for the racial profiling, I completely agree. No one is saying to give white guys a free pass. They should still go through the normal pre-911 screening process. A process which, at least to my recollection, did not allow many terrorist activities (I don't recall any pre-911, in fact). But people who more closely fit the profile (and that is not just race, it is also dress, stamps on passports, lack of luggage, odd behaviour, etc.) should be subjected to greater scrutiny. And that greater scrutiny should be targeted at those people, rather than randomly.

edit: also, everything seems extremely reactive to me. a guy lights his shoe on fire, so they prohibit shoes. a guy tries to make a liquid bomb, so they prohibit liquid. why dont we have smart people thinking about how they would attack an airplane and then proactively stop that attack from happening? in all honesty, my guess is that the smart people on our side know that it is futile because no matter the precautions we take, unless they are prohibitively expensive/inconvenient they would ALWAYS be able to take over a commercial plane.