The speed of your disk and CPU have absolutely no bearing on mining capability. You need AMD graphics cards.

Not even close.

You will most likely damage laptops if you mine on them anyway. None of them are designed to cool their cards particularly efficiently.

Doesn't look like an issue with Stratum itself. All Stratum does is create a connection to the remote server, and present an interface for your older client to connect to. If you're pointing your miner to the correct port (and it looks like you are), then that's most likely not the issue.

From a quick Google, there's a reliant thread on GitHub with similar errors. Something to do with the way OSX handles Endianness and OpenCL.

https://github.com/luke-jr/bfgminer/issues/195

I'd caution you against mining on a MacBook anyway, those 8600M GPUs are extremely heat sensitive. I went through piles of them during Apple's free replacement program.

More likely than not, it's not personal. Either the person that owned your address before you was doing something unpleasant, or you have some malware on your computer doing unpleasant things on your behalf. Restarting your modem should take care of the first one in most cases.

You can enable full disk encryption in System Preferences (it is called FileVault 2), which is more than enough if you are worried about your computer being stolen.

If you are thinking of using a Virtual Machine as an isolated environment, bear in mind that any malware running on your Mac would also be able to see into the VM. You would probably be safe enough storing large amounts in a paper wallet, and using Electrum or Bitcoin-QT for general spending money.