Hey! I'm the author of that cartoon, and was delighted to see your reply. Thanks!
Certainly, a bottle of water is harmless, but I was actually assuming the water bottle was also an explosive.
Laptop batteries have relatively high energy density. The two batteries I travel with (which I've never had anyone object to, contrary to your stated policy) combine to hold roughly the same energy in a 6-oz bottle of pure nitroglycerine. This energy cannot all be released quite as rapidly, but my friends have made laptop batteries explode with enough violence to, in one test, take the top off a small tree (when nestled in a fork of the trunk).
I understand that practicality plays into the decision of what to ban, and the joke of the comic was mainly how silly it would be to explain to a security guard how you could make a bomb with the expectation that it would have a good outcome. The laptop battery is a borderline case at best.
But I really do think there are some pretty serious problems with our approach to airport security, and that the rules we've come up with are more the result of a desire to do something than out of a practical assessment of what would make us safer. Articles like this one make the point better than I could:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/airport-security
I mean, when liquids are confiscated, what happens to them? Are they destroyed with explosives, tested, or just thrown away? If they're just thrown away (or set aside until days later), what's the point of confiscating them at all? The terrorist can just try to sneak some through again the next day, since there are no consequences to failing.
Yet if you don't put on the show, I suppose the airline industry might collapse. I really don't know what the solution is, but I get frustrated dealing with restrictive security procedures whose practical intentions are simply to reassure me.
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