Quite frankly, if your information or data is so valuable, you wouldn’t have it on a laptop that you take out into the wilds anyway. Once the laptop is stolen the possibility of someone getting the data off it is still high. Anyone involved in any sort of espionage, industrial or otherwise, is highly likely to have access to the information required to get around any security measure, including disk encryption.
I am amused by the desire for disk encryption in these threads. Quite frankly I see this as just a case of ‘having the warm fuzzies’. Yeah, sure it may take someone another month to access your data, but anyone with access to suitable tools will get at that data if they really want it.