I'm told that the F35 is the largest, heaviest fighter with an airframe that produces the most drag, that the US has ever produced...

And where did you hear it? According to wikipedia:

Wingspan:
F35: 35'
F14: 64' / 38' (swept)
F15: 42'
F16: 32'
F18 C/D: 40'

Empty Weight
F35: 29,000 lb
F14: 43,700 lb
F15: 28,000 lb
F16: 18,900 lb
F18: 23,000 lb

Combat radius (internal stores)
F35: 600 nm
F14: 500 nm
F15: 1000 nm
F16: 340 nm
F18: 400 nm

Of what can be verified, none of what you heard is correct...

Double kudos for writing it on touch screen devices. I do some Play-by-email roleplaying and at times I do posts on my Nexus 7, and man oh man it's difficult. I wouldn't even dream of doing long prose writing on a tablet.

The fact that someone bothered to make uPnP suggests that there's a need for this capability for average users. Things such as voip, gaming, exchanging files - if you can't have peer-to-peer connections, you're reliant on big centralised services for all of these things. Granted, we seem to have gone down that path already (perhaps driven in no small part by the prevalence of NAT), and these services may have a place, but do we want it to be *all* there is to the internet?

As for your second point - well, Microsoft seem to have managed it, and if they can surely anyone can. I accidentally left my Windows box connected to the internet without an external firewall for a few months with no ill effects. That would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

Monty Python gave the answer ages ago.

I'm even quite sure that's their motivation. Or at the very least their excuse. "We're keeping them safe!"

Ignoring that people should first and foremost have the right to choose whether they WANT to be kept safe. That's the fallacy of self proclaimed "protectors": They don't ask those they "protect" whether they'd want to be protected in the first place. "Protecting" someone against their consent is basically illegal restraint.

But the manager was dead, right? Please say so, I need closure!

Do you really expect the average user to know about IPs, ports, TCP/UDP etc.? That's not very realistic. I don't agree that a safe alternative is impossible - there's no magic power that packets have to hack a computer. Any failings are due to poorly written software.

If an application doesn't need to listen for connections, it shouldn't open a port. A firewall won't make any difference here.
If an application does need to listen for connections the firewall will need to let them through. Again, the firewall doesn't help - at least not at the level of sophistication you'd see in a home router's firewall.

No. That was point:
2) Sometimes the guy at the top doesn't have the best interests of the country in mind, and nobody can make him.

If you want to call that corruption you can. In my mind it merely includes corruption.

FWIW, I don't think that power corrupts, rather it's lack of consequences. This is closely related, but not the same. But it's also true that power attracts the corruptible (as a gradient). Different people are corruptible in different ways and to different degrees. And one consequence of that is that they are attracted in differing amounts to different kinds of power. The guy who's attracted to being a policeman isn't the same as the guy who's attracted to being a politician, and neither is the same as the guy attracted to being a banker.

P.S.: Yes, that's still an oversimplification. Think of it as a finger pointing at the moon. Look at the moon, not the finger.

Quite frankly, and this sounds stupid, but I'm emotionally attached to my glasses. I'm 42 now, and I've been wearing glasses since I was six. Frankly I don't even remember what it was like without them. I freely admit it's an irrational and emotional response, but I like my glasses.

The problem with that is how many home users know how to configure the firewall? There are legitimate reasons to have incoming connections. Unless you want to reinvent uPnP for v6, but that would be needlessly complex and probably have security flaws of its own.

Frankly there's no excuse for any modern software to be vulnerable even if connected directly to the internet with no firewall. This isn't 2003 any more, and in any case it's commonplace for computers to be connected to all sorts of untrusted networks such as public wifi. So anything that assumes "a firewall will take care of it" is utterly irresponsible.

If there are any other government agencies out there looking for a new IT system, I can fail to deliver for $100 million.

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Yeah, the first thing I thought of was: how many people who graduate with any 4-year degree stay in their field of study? Without having anything to compare this to, how do we know that the numbers for STEM graduates are abnormal?

But everybody knows that people with degrees in Communications and Political Science aren't going to work in those fields (if they even exist). But to get a job that requires "a degree" (of any type), going through an EE or physics program is hardly the most efficient route.

It is some kind of a hardship because you still have to figure out which emails are legit - I'm not going to go log in to my bank every time I get a phishing email. When the vast majority of emails claiming to come from my bank are phishing mails, I'm pretty much guaranteed to miss legitimate ones unless the bank give me a trivial way to know that they're legit - MIME signed emails would allow that, but no banks seem to be interested.