Yeah pure battery won't work well. Hybrid+battery/capacitor would be better. Electric motor tech is fine for heavy stuff - diesel electric locomotives are really heavy.

Depending on the engine/turbine you could even have multi-fuel support - gas, petrol diesel, vegetable oil. This gives you more options in crisis scenarios.

"Mutual of Osama is people you can 'count on' when the going's tough"

Now, I never claimed the Vatican was not a business. I went to my church's business meeting Sunday night, in fact. You're attempting to shift the question off of what the Pope legally, personally owns, and whether or not there is power other than temporal wealth.

I'm sure you're only observing, and neither approving, nor suggesting alternatives.

You make winning the last two Presidential elections sound like a bad thing.

The satcom device does not have to have been on the aircraft.

Once you can replace an 18 wheeler's diesel engine with an electric drive system, then you've changed the world and made a real impact on emissions.

Why bother? Just run the diesel engine you already have on biodiesel.

Besides, there are far more effective ways for the president to "Lead" us into a greener future. (Maybe cutting back on those vacations that are half a planet worth of jet fuel away for one.)

More like "vacations that are a full plane load worth of secret service agents and other assorted aides away" -- if the Prez flew commercial it wouldn't be such a big deal.

Yes, it takes a brand new invention called a pickpocket. Or a weapon. True, that happens with cash too- but it happens to a fraction of what you own, because the rest is in a bank. With the wallet on a USB stick, its your life savings.

Even if it was for a "good cause". Let's for a moment even assume that the NSA is an all-holy entity that could never do anything wrong and that we trusted them implicitly, not because our software forces us to but because we genuinely wanted to.

Note the subjunctive.

Even then the security software would be a security hazard. Simply and plainly because there is (at least) one way to access data that is absolutely beyond your control. You cannot even audit the security level of the entity holding the additional key to your data.

If you need to give your non-tech boss a way to understand the severity, that's like having a general key to your office and the safe with all the highly classified and mission critical papers deposited at your local police force. While by itself not a problem (provided you trust your police), they are not required to give you any information concerning the key's storage or whereabouts. You will not be notified how they themselves will keep that key safe, nor do you get any kind of information should that key get stolen. You will not be notified if some potential attacker or burglar, or even a competitor, gets access to that key, legally or illegally.

Remotely wiping a stolen mobile phone ought to still be controlled by the main phone OS. All the modem should be responsible for is receiving the wipe request and passing it to the main OS's monitoring process.

Or an LG Nexus, if he wants a phone instead of a tablet.

The important question, which I am keenly interested in as the owner of a Nexus 5, is whether LG phones have a similar backdoor.

With some (all?) Chromebooks -- and I would expect a Chromebox to be the same -- you can just enable "developer mode" and chroot. See this article for more details.

go home Sean Young, you're drunk