[lifeisstillgood]

I beleive Schneier does care and was not intending to come across as belittling such things. Despite the Chuck Norris meme I am sure he is as human as the rest of us :-)

Its just we do live in a world where somehow we must efficiently allocate resources. In the UK we use a term QALY (Quality years of life) which is used to decide between which operations should go ahead (likelihood of success x expected number of qualifty years) - so a 80 year old looking for kidney dialysis is lower down the list than a youth looking for a common hip replacement. The US does it simply on income.

We should I feel have a debate on these things - why is it cars can kill thousands but a cancer drug cannot kill one or two. These trade offs get made in odd ways - and while I doubt we shall ever have politicians campaigning on the slogan "vote for me, only a tiny percentage of you will die because of it" its an important discussion.

I would suggest also a poll taken in the security / check-in lines at JFK:

  Would you support allowing one major terrorist outrage 
  a year if it would reduce queueing at airports by 

  a) 1 hour, 
  b) 2 hours 
  c) eliminate queues completely?

:-)