[NickSharp]

Correct. If we as a society could somehow "get used to terrorism" it would be no more of a threat than falling vending machines, as pointed out above.

Plus, we'd save billions of dollars and countless hours of productivity.

Not that I'm expecting this to happen, but one can imagine...

[schrodinger]

I do generally agree that terrorism isn't a threat worth changing our lifestyles over.

However, I wonder if it's a little unfair to average out the probabilities and compare to something closer to an actual random event, like falling vending machines; surely, a terrorist attack is significantly more likely to occur in a place like New York than Middle America, no?

I'd really like to see something like what's the probability of being killed by a "falling vending machine" IN NEW YORK vs a terrorist attack IN NEW YORK, than something country wide.

[CydeWeys]

FYI, getting killed by falling vending machines isn't a random event. It happens because people are rocking vending machines back and forth, either to knock loose a stuck purchased product or just to try to steal from them. If you get killed by a falling vending machine it's because you were doing something stupid.

So long as you never rock vending machines, and you shouldn't!!, you are way more likely to be killed by a terrorist, even though the odds of that are incredibly low (one in many, many millions).