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Comment by dunham | Hacker News Reader

I always presumed that they wanted the laptops in a separate bin because they were comparing them to a set of known images (of commercially sold laptops), but perhaps I'm giving them too much credit.

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I doubt it. There are too many makes and models out there to make this a reasonable thing to do. I imagine that it is just to see things more clearly. A laptop is many layers of densely packed electronics. It would be very easy to hide explosives (in place of the battery, for example) and triggering mechanism in there.

"In place of"? It's trivial to cause a lithium-ion battery battery to explode if you know how. Don't tell TSA, though, or you're going to have a very boring flight.

Burn yes. Pop yes, but not the sort of explosion necessary to damage an aircraft. That guy on youtube making "grenades" from batteries ... they are more firecracker than weapon. You could do more damage with a bottle of vodka and a match.

True, but it's enough to make a rather spectacular show to frighten people, and in the end, that's what terrorism is about.

Anyone who's flown RC aircraft in the past decade knows all too well about this..

Spectacular light show, a good burn... yeah. Thats about it though... It wouldn't be worth a terrorists time... it would just be a light show and a smoke show, could start a fire, which would be bad, but honestly fires get suppressed pretty quick on modern airliners as long as they aren't started in the cargo area and ember for a while... in the end, any attack carried out with a LiPo/LiIon would just be an inconvenience...

The scenario that keeps some pilots up at night is unsecured human cargo in a panic. A medium fire won't ignite the plane but it will fill the cabin with fumes. Those drop-down oxygen masks are useless in such scenarios. Get enough people to panic, to run fore or aft, and one could create a crush event or even destabilize the aircraft.

From storeis though, panicked passengers in flight tend to stay calm... there is a sense of helplessness and acceptance that takes over pretty quick when you realize there isnt anything you can do

lol, no.

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