It would rock if they programmed it in Lisp...

Good question. It seems to me that a "firewall" in the normal sense of the thing that allows connections only on particular ports using particular protocols will not protect against such infections, but I got the impression from the article that the author was using the term more loosely than that. His example of the SQL Slammer suggests this, because presumably it arrives through acceptable firewall (in the strict sense) doors...

So how does this protect users against infected flash drives, downloaded tarballs, &c.?

This is absurd. Dr. Weiner published his seminal book "Cybernetics" in 1948...

"An idea sketched out by a [HP] research team?" At least the reporter corrected HP's claim to innovation. In fact, here in VT, CVPS has been doing this for years...

I can agree with all of this except the "backed by a major vendor" part, which seems superfluous... Design is all about maintaining a coherent vision of the end product, whereas hammering a tin shed on the side of the Taj Mahal is always a bad idea, particularly for maintainability and robustness. What isn't clear to me is why I need a vendor to supply my vision when I've already had years of education and experience...

With apologies to Isaac Asimov, "Google, is there any way to reverse entropy?"

The "Russian tradition of building secret towns?" Towns like Oak Ridge, TN, or Los Alamos, NM, or Hanford, WA, maybe? Explain again how this project is doomed to fail as a government effort to make a technological leap. On the contrary, our own experience is great success doing this sort of thing. Nor is this an American peculiarity--the Germans very successfully built an entire town at Peenemunde to develop and construct V-2 rockets. In fact, here in America we capitalized on this success by moving its authors, notably Werner von Braun, to Huntsville, AL where we created yet another failed government experiment to land men on the moon...

I'm thinking that people should read a bit less Ayn Rand science fiction and a bit more actual history.

You don't need carpentry skills to build a chair, either, just the tools. It will, however, be a piece of junk. It will be wobbly, ugly, dangerous, and short-lived.

...perhaps they can harvest some of that cheese from the moon again?