Forget about those faucets. You will only be able to get a tiny fraction of the minimum wage and you can get more from recycling scrap metals.

It is very easy to generate a large number of addresses with Electrum.

Step 1: Create a Electrum wallet
Step 2: Go to "Console" tab and enter "wallet.storage.put('gap_limit',1000)" if you want to generate 1000 addresses.
Step 3: Shut down the program, and restart it.

Bitcoin blocks are found randomly. So even with the target time at 10 minutes, it is possible to have 6 blocks in 10 minutes or no block in a whole hour.
It is like you expect to get one "6" by rolling a fair dice 6 times, but in fact, you could get "6" three times in a row, or no "6" in 30 rolls.

All altcoins listed are finally removed and are converted to bitcoin. Looks like Coinedup has now come to its final days.

With the installer version, the program will be installed on your pc (by default in C:\Program Files (x86)\Electrum), and the program will create a data dir on your pc (by default in \Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\Local\Electrum) to store your wallet file and a few other files.

With the standalone version, the program will not be installed on your pc, but the program will still create a data dir on your pc (by default in \Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\Local\Electrum).

With the portable version, the program will not be installed on your pc, and the program will create the data dir in the same place you put your electrum-1.9.8-portable.exe.

Bitcoin price is determined purely by market forces. At this current money, 1 BTC is worth $355, which means someone is willing to pay $355 for 1 BTC. So of course bitcoin is having real value.

It is extremely hard to make an estimation on the future mining profitability for altcoins.
First, altcoin prices are many times more volatile than bitcoin. You can see prices going up or down 20% a day regularly.
Another problem is that, the hashrate of a particular altcoin is very unstable. The miners come and go when they find a more profitable coin.

So the more (randomly generated) data the person downloading/uploading to the peers, the more likely he will be rewarded with the to-be-developed altcoin?
That sounds so wrong lol.

Blockchain.info is still the one having the best functionality.
For example, I can put any addresses as watch-only, and with the payment notification feature, I will be notified with email, SMS or Skype messages for any transaction to and from the address within seconds. This is something none of the other block explorers can do as of today AFAIK.

I am pretty sure you are talking about your "activity" rather than "post count".

How "activity" is calculated: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=237597.msg2513302#msg2513302
In short, your activity will be capped at 42 until you make a post in the next period that starts at 09:53:20 UTC tomorrow.

After getting some advices and suggestions, it seems OP's reaction is to leave bitcointalk (he hasn't come back since Oct 13, 2 days after creating this thread)...

Other than buying hardware miners, you may buy cloud mining hashrate.
No matter what you plan to buy, please do some mining profit calculation before making the deal, as it is nowadays hard to get mining profit.

Interesting.
Looking backward, the bitcoin price did have a big rally started in Jan 2013 (a month after 2012 X'mas) and Nov 2013 (a month before 2013 X'mas). I am not sure if it is just coincidence of two data points though.

Not necessarily. There are thin desktop wallets like Electrum that don't require you to download the full blockchain but just the block headers.

I don't think you can get profit with renting dedicated servers to mine coins.
CPU mining primecoin was quite profitable at one time, but the good old days has already been gone.
For bitcoin and litecoin mining, you need an ASIC to compete with other miners at the current high difficulty.

Forgive me for this question, it sounds like you are expecting the bitcoin price will go up during or before Christmas but how is Christmas related to the bitcoin price?

Not necessarily. It depends on how you want to use the program.
The portable version is as safe as the installer if you use it right (don't use it on insecure machine!).

It seems the problem is solved completely now.
OP has created another transaction with standard fee to replace the original one, and it is confirmed already.

To get your friend interested in bitcoin, you first need to know what kinds of advantages of bitcoin over fiat is most relevant to him.

If he is interested in gambling, you can show him how he can do bitcoin gambling easily.
If he is using paypal or other payment systems to buy stuff, accept payments or give donations, you can show him how he can use bitcoin payment at a lower cost.

Welcome to bitcointalk.
To get started, you can visit http://www.coindesk.com/information/ and https://bitcoin.org/en/getting-started. They should provide you an easy-to-follow non-technical introduction of bitcoin.