As others have said, get into a pool unless you have hundreds of CPUs available to you.
It's pretty downheartening when you are new to leave you computer on for weeks and get absolutely nada.

I do think that Japan and China will have a limited war at some point to resolve the issues of the disputed islands. 
I also think that China will overwelm Japan to such an extent that they will just back down and not try to extend the war further.  Nuclear weapons still stop any large scale wars from happening, but large skirmishes should be possible.

He may return but I think the customer base will be very wary of returning.
MCX was doing lots of trade, but in retrospect, it looks like he was pumping his own coins and scamming with the Fees

Whilst I agree that there won't be an immediate sell of at $1000, people are just that stupid.  That's why the market bounces around and stops at round numbers.
$1000 is a big barrier, once we hit 4 digits it will start to feel normal, then we can forget about it until we are ready to hit 5!

I think that a few alts have jumped 1000% in the last few days.  Anoncoin is good, but most respectable businesses don't want to hide who their customers are, it looks very shady.

You mean what a quark is?  
In fairness, subatomic physics isn't that popular.  Maybe people would know if it were a higgs boson coin or a Neutrino coin, but even they might be a stretch.

I posted this on the Amazon thread: All my opinion

The http://qrk.coinmine.pl/index.php pool was definitely the best one.  Use the $100 free from Amazon too, so you can check it out without any expense.

Select a 32 core spot instance.  IMPORTANT, make it a spot instance, they cost about 25-30 cents an hour, normal instances cost $2-3.
Use a linux/unix (amazon VPC) instance.  cc2.8xlarge is the one you want.  Connect with putty as instructed on the amazon website.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install autotools libcurl-dev libjansson-dev make automake unzip (you might have to do them all individually)
sudo wget http://stonefoz.myfastmail.com/cpuminer-quark.zip
sudo unzip cpuminer-quark.zip
cd cpuminer-quark
sudo CFLAGS="-O3 -msse2" ./configure
sudo make
sudo strip minerd
sudo ./minerd -a quark -o stratum+tcp://qrk.coinmine.pl:6010 -u Username.workername -p workerpassword

Let me know if it works for you.  I was getting about 60kh/s per core.

Obviously I would like to see QRK on BTC-e, but I don't think it is essential.
It is growing massively at the moment, but there is no rush, it's not going anywhere (other than up)

It sounds a lot more like you have been hacked that Bitstamp deciding to steal your money.
They are a big and (in BTC terms!) trustworthy company.

If you drip feed it on a big exchange you will get out easily.  I agree that banging them all at one price, or putting in a market order is a bad idea, but 7000 is very withdrawable.  You could also split it between fiat and BTC withdraw if you urgently need to withdraw.

$ parity would have Quark ranked number 3 crypto currency with about half the market cap of litecoin.
I think that is a stretch in the short term, but then on Friday it was 24 QRK per cent, and now it is about 1,5cents per QRK, at that level of increase we'll have $ parity next week! (I know it won't happen.)

As a newbie, it is probably best to forget mining and just either buy some bitcoin or alts.
Mining is laborious and almost always unprofitable for the masses.  A few CPU coins might be ok, but very slow, to mine, but with a normal computer GPU mining is a no go and Bitcoin impossible.

Buying online won't be a problem, buying in a pub or even a small shop might be.
I heard about a bitcoin accepting pub in London that had problems with iPhone users because the default setting was to send coins without a transaction fee, resulting in people waiting hours for their drinks...

Credit cards aren't instantaneous but are treated as such, but the get to the equivilent of 1 confirmation faster than bitcoin does.

That's not donating, that's buying a miner. Nothing wrong with that, but lets call it what it is.

Did you not keep any?
You could do worse than being in at the moment, the devs are doing great work getting it noticed and looking to improve the coin.

That' enough information for me. 1 day old website wants thousands of dollars? No chance in hell

Bitcoin.de is doing the same thing on the 29th.

single digits are gone forever, double digits too.  It's getting hard to imagine $250 BTC now, even though that was the price about a month ago!

It's weird that sometimes bitstamp and gox are exactly the same, but they don't move in unison.
I can't explain it.

All time highs all the way for the next few hours.