"I thought we'd been talking about that for years (especially around the time of the Olympics) and haven't stopped."

Talking isn't Doing. Only a Gen-Xer or newer would think: "Hey, I got it done—I Tweeted it! I shared it on Facebook!. For the win!". Not hardly. Those crusty Baby Boomers would like you to know: Accomplished in Cyberspace != Accomplished Physically in the Real World i.e For Real. Sheesh.

Where ever an empire puts its assets, its adversaries will seek to capture, control, or disable them.That has been a standard strategy since before the Romans as any student of history would know. Why this is news is a good question since it should have been obvious from the beginning. Any of you folks ever read Sun Tzu? Sheesh. You sound like the "let's ban assault rifles" nannies when 3 to 1 pistols were used in mass shootings and only 323 people where killed with rifles in 2011 while 700+ were killed with fists and 1,700 were killed with knives while over 6,200 were killed with pistols which you'll never ban.

I dunno... What excuse do we have for doing this over Iraqi or Afghani citizenry and with live rounds? The same potential one: fighting insurgents, invaders, criminal gangs, terrorists. You train for the battle you intend to fight. Who those adversaries will be is left as exercise for the reader.

Absolutely right. Even if their leaders can be bought, their people eventually rebel against the selfish leaders.

If they destroy the keys, IPs, and URLs used to access hosted data but not hosted data, it would prevent easy access. People can be tortured to give up information so they had cyanide teeth to bite on but devices are easy—just use them even if you have to break into their security—in time you can. So maybe this is the equivalent of a cyanide tooth for access electronics.

Since all batteries in an airplane application need charging and monitoring circuits and those circuits are likely to fail from time to time, batteries that start fires when circuits fail are indeed part of the fault equation. Pushing off the blame onto just the batteries is most likely a PR strategy of Boeing's. If the circuit is essentially part of the battery without which the battery could not function, then the blame lies with the designers who used it: Boeing, not the battery manufacturer. This PR seems to me a "spin-control" by japan and their battery industry to limit the PR damage to the battery manufacturer because it is clear now that Boeing is going to layoff blame for their poor design on the battery manufacturers. The fact is these batteries should never be used in any place where their failure will have catastrophic consequences. But that was a decision Boeing engineers made, not the battery manufacturers. Let's keep the focus on the firm that designed the airplane and certainly conducted studies regarding the consequences of the failure of monitoring and charging circuitry on batteries and physical airplane integrity. I sense a Ford Pinto gas tank human cost trade-off calculus moment of truth coming. Wait for it.