Yes, but the same can be said of every vendor that has electronic access to your credit or debit card.

If there is no more than spending money in USB wallet then customers have limited downside risk and dodgy vendors will meet their fate with market forces (closed fists) eventually.

Yep, you are missing something.
2 5970's (4 GPU) maxes out at around 1.2 GHash/sec
http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php
That's 50 BTC every 3.125 days roughly ... assuming 100% uptime.

So you can roughly half everything you wrote after this point.

Just considering out into the (far?) future if there will be a time when essentially no transaction will go through without a fee.

Aside: I know that some space in each block is set aside for free transactions but if the queue of free transactions is so long that the time for a free transaction to confirm is crazy long then that mechanism is impractical (1 month, 1 year, etc) and free transactions become basically useless.

So, at this point there will be some minimum fee that is required to get a transaction confirm in a practical time. Is there a way to get the current average minimum fee from the network to be sent to the client, so that when selecting a fee for transaction prioritisation the sender has some idea of what is needed for the trade to go through?

If this was implemented allowing for a minimum fee down to the 8th decimal place it would allow for a natural, continuous growth of the use of fees as the number of transactions on the network grows. I.e start using fees sooner rather than later, even if they are only infinitesimal at present and future-proof the infrastructure for when they become  more significant (forward compatible).

EDIT: On the front-end, the bitcoin client would default to include the current minimum fee for a timely transaction, with a zero fee transaction being a user-selectable choice.

This is unsupported poppycock. There is no such thing as "the long run".

Economies lurch from one short-medium growth phase to another as new technologies come on-line, resources are found or depleted, wars, population demographics change.

Building a fixed inflation rate in to bitcoin would be a very bad idea, in the same way that the Federal Reserve inflating the dollar to oblivion was a very bad idea.
EDIT: the 'miracle' of compounding interest is the flaw, after n years the bitcoin supply becomes 21mill*(1.03)^n ... after 100 years your money is well on its way to worthless and your grandchildren are trying to explain to their children what happened to their 'savings'.

A potentially unlimited number of other crypto-currencies can be generated to satisfy any short term hankerings for easy "money", or you could just use dollars in your trades if an inflating currency is what you prefer to deal in.

It could even be simpler than that. The customer carries a USB pen drive with a spending wallet that he plugs into the trusted merchants machine that is running a bitcoin client that pulls up the customers wallet and requests how much to send to the merchant's bitcoin account/address ... simple, done (once someone figures out how to secure the transaction and work around waiting for confirms).

How many hours on the sapphire?

How much over-clocking work has it done?

Do you have a good idea of temperature history? (any recall of the card throttling over extended periods?)

Anything that drives the demand for energy is good in my assessment. Kardashev's categorisation of technologically advanced civilizations is founded on their energy conversion capacity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

Liquid-Fluorine molten salt thorium reactors (LFTR) are on the horizon (very cheap low-risk fission) and a fusion breakthrough is an ever present threat to the fossil fuel shackles; shale reserves should provide the breathing room to transition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

A search for bitcoins (money) becomes a search for better energy sources ... when energy becomes essentially free, money (bitcoin) may no longer be needed.

The block you generated contains/encodes/verifies the transactions that occurred on the network during the time it took you to solve the block.
Some of those transactions included a fee so that they would get to the head of the transaction queue and get into the block you solved first.
Those fees go to the miner who solves the block and encodes the transactions.
There is a wiki, although no great detail about fees.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Blocks
"Bitcoin transactions are broadcast to the network by the sender, and all peers generating coins collect them and add them to the block they're working on."

Bitcoins needs Girls .... they are the killer app.

Girls and money as old as Adam and Eve.

Sounds like it could be hardware related, try another router? Test your connection integrity, packets lost on a ping test?

Now you're getting somewhere .... there are competing interests and factions within the "agencies" and "the company" itself.

What if one faction actually believed that fiat-debt currency was ruining the world (which it obviously is) and set bitcoin loose as competition to the dark-side factions who are desperately trying to cling onto control through the status quo, murder, corruption, manufactured crises, etc ...?

Ultimately, coins come from miners. Maybe we just need a central repository with a list of trusted miners (and traders) and their locales who are willing to sell coins for the cost of local (non-international) bank transfer, or a cash face-to-face transaction.

Bitcoin-otc is kind of like this but it is such a mish-mash of competing trades that actual BTC offers get lost in the mix. Maybe just a separate page on OTC that is reserved for BTC to cash/local transfer offers only.

Internationally traded electronically-generated P2P credits are not the concern of the North Carolina State Attorney's office ... as much as he might wish them to be.

In fact, they are of no-one's concern, they are completely unregulated as far as I know, as in there are no regulators that have a concern or a legal remit encompassing what these are. For now, we are off the reservation of the debt-fiat tax slaves.

Bleeding-edge freedom. One step ahead of the drones and their parasitic handlers.

Yes, it seems it would be vulnerable to a destabilising strategy like this.

It could be got around not having discrete jumps in difficulty but varying it "continuously", on a much shorter time step, say daily or 12 hourly, to smooth out the jumps.

That would be a machine on an order of a 4 Megawatt + ancillaries, call it 5 MW ... not beyond realm of possibilities, but you'd have trouble finding that many 5970s right now I think.

Yes, but now there are other pools the miner can work on equal shares payment (or solo) when not working on late round shares on your pool, so in aggregate you'll be ahead. It appears to me to be already happening, have you not noticed a surge in hash power in your pool after the mean time has been exceeded for a block?

Indulge me. How is it that "most" of the rounds will last shorter than the mean?

Aren't half the rounds shorter than the mean and half the rounds longer than the mean? Isn't that what the mean is in a normal distribution?

The credit markets broke in in Aug 2007. Since then they have limped along with bust mega banks hiding the losses in secret accounts off balance sheets. they even changed some accountancy rules and laws so they would not have to declare big banks bankrupt. Failures to deliver are rife but get papered over with money printing, the whole system is broke and has been for more than 3 years but it has inertia and most people still believe in it and trust the money in their accounts .... the financial crises never went away, it will smoulder away until the debts are extinguished.

scroogle the term "treasury market failure to deliver"
to get started on how broken it is, treasuries are the bedrock of the global credit system, think of them like bitcoins issued by US Govt. and administered by Fed. Res. member banks
http://www.euromoney.com/Article/2060042/CurrentIssue/65745/The-treasury-market-reaches-breaking-point.html

Which actually is part of my point. You get paid more for the second half of a round shares even though they have exactly the same chance of finding the block. So on law of averages if you only mine the second half of the rounds you will get paid more.

How do you know it when the second half of the round starts you ask? Well you just join rounds that have gone longer than the average length for slush's pool ... so at present difficulty joining rounds at 50 mins in is going to earn more than mining the whole block, no?

Slush, now that your pool shares are heavily weighted to those found late in the round what is to stop miners cheating by joining late in the round to cash in on all the easy money then?

By this, I mean that they only join your pool when a round has already gone on for longer than the average time for your pool to find a block. So at present they join your pool after ~50 mins into the round, and at other times go solo or with one of the "equal" share pool.