Facebook does not share information with advertisers. Facebook's ad system acts as a broker: an advertiser submits an ad, a demographic they wish to see the ad (e.g., gender, age, geographic locale), and a bid. Facebook pairs those ads with users that match the criteria.

I work for Facebook, as an engineer in search.

Sorry to be coming to the game so late here. Disclaimer/credentials: I've worked in VMware's virtual machine monitor group since 2000.

AFAIK, virtualizing 64 bit guests does still require Intel VT or AMD Pacifica support on the CPU regardless on all products that support 64 bit guests.

You're close. AMD Opterons rev-D and higher can support 64-bit virtual machines without any specific virtualization hardware. They provide 64-bit segment limit checking, which enables our binary translator to work in a way similar to our pre-VT and -Pacifica products. See, e.g., http://communities.vmware.com/message/289914

Even if Pacifica technology is present, we don't default to using it for performance reasons unless "RVI", nee NPT, is also present. These came along with AMD's Barcelona chips in '07. Intel's response, EPT, is in Nehalem.

Obviously a conspiracy! Where's Ralph Nader?!?!

Here's a perhaps simpler explanation. CPU benchmarks need to parse CPUID output to decide which instructions to implement. Most likely, the benchmark had never heard of these VIA CPUs that implement hot new SSE12 (or whatever) instructions; by claiming to be another vendor, the benchmark used a different instruction mix. I don't know for certain that this is what happened, but I'd bet solid money something like this is the story; we've seen analogous performance degradations at VMware when we fiddle with CPUID too aggressively.

Chris Dede's group at Harvard is doing something like this:
http://muve.gse.harvard.edu/muvees2003/

I saw him present this at AERA this year.

You have to root around to find the science experiment stuff.