Well if I'm going that route I might as well settle with a life on Mars and hope the company that runs the place don't start making its moons vanish.....

We can escape to all kinds of places, there are plenty of known planets in the "Goldilocks zone" which may** support life, unfortunately to get there we would have to significantly improve cryogenics or invent some form of faster then light travel.

There disaster averted you may now continue enjoying your bowl of Cheerios.

Did I mention that to get there it could take hundreds if not hundreds of thousands of years to get there?... Ohh well if you really want to escape I suppose your willing to wait the little bit of time to get there.....

Social Security Numbers were not originally intended to be unique identifiers today they are however used in such a manor. While you may be correct that some numbers may have been issued to more then one person or multiple numbers to a single person, I would have to assume that this is a clerical error on the part of the Social Security Administration, you should take a look at Q20 here http://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html ..... well actually you should read all of them they are kinda interesting.

As far as it being useful as a form of identification, well if your employed you know that one of the first things they do as you are hired is record your social security number as required by law. Come to think of it when was the last time you filed taxes, renewed your license, applied for a birth certificate, ect. ect., I bet your SSN was required somewhere near the top of the forms right next to your full legal name.

What he is referring to is the fact that all Americans already have a nine digit social security number attached to them which is tied to us typically within a month of being born and sticks around till we die.

Unfortunately the US rarely produces its own products these days, the most we can say that we do is that we engineer our own stuff and outsource the production and fabrication to another country China, Japan, S. Korea, Ect, Ect. Even then most of the products are re-engineered there to fit a certain type of production method or time table..

The ultra short version is we send shit overseas because its cheaper and ultimately more cost effective all while costing us here in the long run.

After using a few boxed solutions including several mentioned above (ClearOS, Untangle, Smoothwall, Zentyal, & pfSense) I ended up going with ClearOS. They all have their up's and downs, most of them have paid services that they will offer you which with a little configuring and time you can accomplish yourself.

From what I can tell your going to be interested in something more then just a simple router/firewall my suggestion is grab one of the free ones available build a low end machine with two nic's and have fun.

For some more reading take a look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_router_or_firewall_distributions

I settled with ClearOS because I wanted to have a full server at my disposal and it was lite on hardware requirements where as Zentyal in particular were heavy on server resources now while my home router is old it isn't by any means a slouch, dual processor Athlon MP 2200+, 2G Ram, 120G 7200rpm, (10 internets if you can guess the maker/model of the mobo /.) I have held that box at 80mbps inbound constant for days on end downloading..... "TPS reports" yeah that's it, without showing any marked reduction in its performance, since install its only been shutdown twice for hardware maintenance(upgrades) before I shut it down the last time the up-time counter showed 240day's.

After all of that I personally think Clear is more then likely something your client could easily use to monitor traffic to and from the network, utilizing some of the built-in features or adding in something like ntop for ultra detailed logs of everything going on anywhere on the network. Your client could easily access the the logs by going to an internal web page and reading the logs at his leisure, a fair warning though if you go the ntop route the amount of logging is immense when I said everything is logged I mean it you can easily have several gigs of logs per day if the network is heavily trafficked.

"Norton does a good job. But OMG is it bloated like a dead fat cow waiting to burst." As much as I hate defending Norton I would suggest you take the time to actually review the newer versions, 2012 is indeed lite as hell and even the older versions while being bloated were always on par with the best defense on the market. That said If you are on /. there is a good chance you have more then one computer which means it might be more beneficial for you to try something like Symantec Endpoint Protection for your protection instead of the consumer grade Norton products. Ive used it for years and its always been consistently lighter weight then most consumer products and always gave a better degree of protection. Before I was using endpoint I was using Symantec AV. Corp. Ed. & a random 3rd party firewall. The only problem with Endpoint is you have to spend $200ish bucks on 5 client licenses because of the way they sell it.

Don't worry we have Computer Science III, Proxy's, & not one but two firewalls.... were fucked,,,,

The lawyers can get together all they want but thanks to the death star... sorry I mean ATT & the supreme court ruling last year we can no longer file class action suits against them because our lovely contracts have mandatory binding arbitration clauses cooked right into them..

I haven't personally used one of the Unicomp keyboards but from what I understand they hold the rights & are the only company producing the Model M still. Don't retire it, use it on a "retired" machine you can always setup your own router/server with something like clearos or a pbx or better yet both on the same machine ;)