re: bandwidth and spam
"Regarding the spam situation and bandwidth fees, though, it won't solve the spam situation, in my opinion. After all, what do the spammers care if someone gets stuck with a big bill? Their email was already sent. All it will do is annoy the home user."
I think bandwidth fees won't do much to help with the spam problem, but I think (or at least hope) it would probably have a (very small) effect. The reason for this is the same reason Palmetto brought it up -- which has nothing at all to do with whether spammers care if someone else is billed more for consumed bandwidth.
The idea is not that the spammers care -- it's that the people with computers hijacked into spam botnets will care about escalating bandwidth costs, and will start wondering why they're consuming so much bandwidth. This could lead to an increased awareness of system security, which could lead to fewer systems that are allowed to just run indefinitely with spambot infections.
Of course, understanding this assumes you understand the real causes of spam and -- no offense -- I'm not sure you do. You seem to think spam is caused by a protocol, when in fact it's caused by the cost/benefit relationship created by a situation in which (almost) all resource consumption for spammers can be offloaded to other people by cracking security on millions of MS Windows systems.
"But it is a heck of a lot more reasonable that expecting everyone to abandon Windows for a *Nix, or some of the other 'solutions' that I've seen presented."
It may be more reasonable than such an expectation, but improving system security across millions of systems is the single most effective means of reducing spam volume -- and the most effective improvements to security would involve architectural changes, not just shuffling feature sets on architecturally unsecurable systems.
