There is a very obvious anonymous payment system run by the US Treasury and its counterpart organizations in other countries. At registration time ask for the serial number of a one dollar bill, and require that the bill be sent by snail mail to confirm that it is real, and to help with site expenses. No names or return addresses are required and no spammer will go anywhere near that.

Oh I see what you mean. The following approach may be worth experimenting with, but no promises: 1) Configure one browser the way you like it, using the method described above. 2) Look in your .mozilla/firefox/(profile name) directory for a file called cert8.db 3) Push that file out to other desktops in your installation.

In firefox 3.0.5:

Edit -> Preferences and select the "advanced" (gear) icon. From there, select the "encryption" tab. Under that tab, click "view certificates" and then "authorities". Select any CA that you want to remove and click "delete".

and I think we know better than "no one will ever want more than 640K" or 4GB as the case may be. The latest trendy accessory is ultra expensive ($25/GB) Intel X25-E flash drives and a lot of the motivation for buying them is inadequate ram capacity in the host computer (since the flash disk costs more per GB than RAM which is 100x faster, though volatile).

Yeah a lot of people are still running 32 bit OS's, but almost all desktop hardware now being shipped is 64 bit-- we're in something like the tail end of the Windows 3.x era. I think most serious users will run 64 bit OS's pretty soon. The Mac Pro uses FB-DIMM and has 8 sockets (wish it had 16) and for a big class of data crunching tasks, what matters most is the amount of ram you can throw at it. The recent collapse in ram prices has been amazing. If enough sockets were available we could fit out $5000 boxes (think of a fully loaded Dell Precision or Mac Pro, not exactly a mass market consumer pc, but not a high end Sun server either) with 128GB or maybe even 256GB. That really extends the range of problems you can attack. But, the bottleneck even in server boards seems to always be ram sockets.

The Nehalem/i7 uses DDR3 which is a lot more expensive per GB compared to DDR2 and not available in as high capacity. It has more bandwidth but its latency (which matters more) is about the same. The usual desktop mobo is limited to 2 dram modules per channel. DDR2 boards usually have 2 channels (4 sockets max) while DDR3 boards have 3 channels (6 sockets). But 4GB DDR2 modules are around $100 (link) while DDR3 currently maxes out at 2GB. So you can populate a Phenom or Core 2 mobo with 16gb of ram for $400 but you can't put that much on a normal consumer i7 board for any amount of money. 2GB DDR2 parts are a lot cheaper still, you can put on 8gb (4x 2gb) at around $15/gb, $120 total. Right now a 2gb DDR3 part is $50-ish, 3x as expensive (link). It helps that you can put 6 of them on a board (12gb total, $300) but you have to take the cost difference per GB into account with 2GB parts, and comparing with 4GB DDR2 parts there is $/GB parity but lower total capacity (4x4gb vs 6x2gb). And of course when 4gb ddr3 does come out, it will bring a welcome increase to 24gb total capacity, but it will be WAY expensive for quite a while (the 4gb ddr2 modules that are $100 now were $500+ for most of this year).

I just don't understand why there aren't more consumer boards with a lot more sockets, using FB-DIMM or registered DDR. You have to go to server boards for that ($$$).