I apologize for my noob ignorance of this, but could you please elaborate on what individual miner luck is? I thought "luck" is just an abstract representation on how fast a block is found by the pool compared to an expected average based on current difficulty and world wide hashing power. And I also thought that I should be happy when people with large datacenters in secret bunkers get 'lucky' for the pool, so then people like me, with a few miners in a closet and a large electric bill (and with better chance to win the state lottery than ever finding a block) get paid. Does it give you any advantage to be the one who found the block for the pool (i.e. the 'lucky one') other than your address being displayed on the hall of fame? Thanks for helping a noob understand things.

Global warming, caused by heat from all the ASICs.

With the risk of being called names, being banned, flamed, having my puny wallet hacked and generally being treated horribly, I felt the need to write my very first post in this forum and say what I think about Eligius and the people who run it and also the people who support it. Just joined after noobing for a few months and getting ripped by other pools and for the first time I understand how things work (by reading this very thread, by the way). You contribute, block is found, 25 bitcoins are split based on contribution, crystal clear. Some days it takes a while to find a block and the payment queue is slow, some days many blocks are found fast and the rewards are sent faster. You can track everything and everything is out in the open. No fees of any kind, that's awesome - in the true spirit of the cryptocurrency concept. My first payment came straight from being generated and not from some wallet, that had a cool factor for me (yes, still a silly noob, go ahead and make fun). The guys who run this fixed a problem in no time yesterday, I was impressed. The people who believe that a one time 16 hour block is a tragedy, should look at the stats, Eligius has a fairly large piece of the pie out there in terms of blocks found. All in all I think this is a cool community and I think I'll stay and support it, at least until my wife decides that she does not want to pay our ever growing electric bill anymore. I know it will never make me rich, I just don't know how to run 16 Antminers out of my closet like dmwardjr - not that even that will ever make me rich (sorry dmwardjr, love your setup) - my electric panel will just blow up, I can't even run an electric heater without tripping circuit breakers. But I know this will change the world and I'm happy I'm part of it.