I think you are reading a lot into a two panel comic that isn't really there. the punchline is simply that the nerd didn't understand their threat model in two

I think you are reading a lot into a two panel comic that isn't really there. the punchline is simply that the nerd didn't understand their threat model in two ways: 1) someone who would consider spending a million dollars to decrypt your hard drive probably would consider physical attacks as well, and 2) no one is likely to invest that amount of resources into accessing a random nerd's hard drive in the first place. I read the overall message as being the flip side of what you say here: > If the cost of attacking is higher than the value of whatever it is, the security is good. if the effort/resources spent on defense is greater than the value of the thing being defended, it is a waste. full disk encryption was not commonly used by consumers when the comic was published in 2009, and would have come with a significant performance penalty on laptop hardware of the era. the feature wasn't even included in vista home SKUs. it probably wasn't a worthwhile tradeoff for this hypothetical nerd.