I believe the argument is, that if the liquid is in a greater bottle it can not be (that) easily determined if the amount of liquid is within the limits. If it is already in a small bottle which does not exceed the limit it's clear. So it is probably a way to speed up security checking.

Well, if you understand German, I highly recommend the "Fnord Jahresrückblick" (or Fnord News Show).

And of course watch the Hacker Jeopardy!

The 28C3 ended on December 30th (not 31st), and the Recordings have been available for Days already.

Sorry, no. I'm German and I can't find any correct german sentence where "macht" (make) would be at the end. I'm not sure how you got this idea.

German would be "Ein Kernel macht/ist (noch) kein Betriebssystem" translated wordly to "A Kernel makes/is (yet) no operation system".

Well, i was too lazy to RTFA, but maybe these infected sticks are "lost" on purpose? I mean this has reportedly been done before.

Oh, bollocks.

Yes, there are some sysadmins of the kind you describe out there. But this is really not the norm. More often than not the admins are only carrying out - often stupid - policies forced upon them by the mighty above. Many try (or tried in the past) to fight stupid policies, but they are usually not successful.

Been there, done that, so your accusations are insulting to me, and to many colleagues I know.

Well, be careful and you can score some good deals with Ryanair. Sometimes they really offer flights "all fees included" for only a few bucks.

I flew from Germany to Dublin for only 10 EUR total some while ago, and from Germany to Poland for 5 EUR.

What a BS comment. Many of the legitimate users won't be able to use regular spots because they need to increased width of the handicapped spots. Ever seen a wheelchair user get out of his car?

But these reckless abusers of handicapped parking spots are never short on explanations and justifications for their sad behavior.

This sounds like nonsense. There are VPN providers on non-standard ports. If you have your own server and a spare IP, you can even use some netfilter rewrite magic to allow connection on ANY port of that IP which is helpful in a lot of situations.

I'm a happy customer of overplay.net. For US$ 9.95 you get access to VPN servers in 48 countries, with multiple servers in many cases.

I can't say how secure my data is with them but it works reasonably well with OpenVPN and mostly fast as well.