Well, 0% fee pools pay you more than "not 0%" fee pools.

Typically, pools that don't make you wait have fees or require donations in order to get "instant pay" benefits.  But it's not the fact that you have to wait or not wait that matters.  If the fact that you aren't paying a 3% fee (or whatever).  So you'll get to keep that 3% of your earnings in exchange for being patient.

When a miner (a solo miner or a pool) finds a block, they get 50 BTC, but according to the rules of the bitcoin protocol, that 50 BTC can't be spent until it has 100 confirmations.  The standard client imposes an additional 20 required confirmations for a total of 120 required confirmations to spend the money gained from finding a block.

These required waiting periods are designed to ensure that you don't spend BTC until everyone is sure that the block isn't going to end up orphaned/invalid.

Some pools, make you wait for those 120 confirmations before they will pay you your portion.  Other pools ("instant pay" pools) don't make you wait, but they are in essence paying you your portion out of their own pocket with the expectation that they will get reimbursed in 120 confirmations.  However since some blocks do end up orphaned/invalid, "instant pay" pools usually charge higher fees to cover the fact that sometimes they will pay you and end up not getting the BTC they were expecting.

Edit to add:  A third category of pool is pools like Eligius, BitPenny and I believe P2Pool.  These pools don't pay you out of their own wallets, they directly split up the new 50 BTC in the found blocks so that those coins end up in the wallets of the pool participants.  If you mine at one of these pools, you'll see "generated x.xxx" entries in your bitcoin client and you will have to wait 120 confirmations in order to spend those coins (and sometimes they will become orphaned).

You appear to have missed this update:

He's aware (based on IRC chat).  ddos seems to be over, but they are still trying to get the hosting company to reenable the network communications to the servers (they were disabled when the ddos started to protect the resources of the hosting company).

Saint Eligius is the patron saint of goldsmiths, other metalworkers, and coin collectors.

I suppose if he shut down today, he's be a rich man.  Well, not rich given the current exchange rates, but you know what I mean.

But until he shuts down, that buffer is available to come back to us miners if we become unlucky in the future.

The pool is not broke.  it does have a huge stash of BTC in a wallet.  But the automatic payment systems don't use that stash.  They only pay out with generation transactions which are limited to 50 BTC per block.  When the queue gets painfully long (3-4+ days in the past), Luke does a manual payment using the pool's wallet to clean up the backlog.  Normally that doesn't happen.  Normally we are lucky relatively quickly after we are unlucky and the queue fixes itself automatically (because when we are lucky, a round awards less than 50 BTC but can still pay out the full 50 BTC so it "catches up" the queue a little bit).

Edit: You can see how much BTC is in the pool's wallet by looking at the Pool Buffer column of this page: http://eligius.st/~artefact2/blocks/

One other tip in reading the queue page.

If you look at the top of the queue, first skip passed all the people who have been waiting a long time.  The people who have been waiting 3+ days all probably just recently finally passed the minimum payment and jumped to the top of the queue because they have been working so long at building their balance.  You eventually notice a few people with balances of 2-3+ BTC that have been waiting for a bit over 2 days.  

That 2 days is basically the frequency of how often people will get paid assuming they have enough hashpower to build their balance passed the minimum quickly.  If you had a 100 GH/s of hashpower and started mining right now, you'd surpass the minimum payment quickly but would not get paid for 2 days.  

That is of course if luck hypothetically is neutral going forward.  If we are lucky, that number drops.  If we continue to be unlucky, that number increases.

So, until we are lucky, don't expect to get paid more often than once every 2 days.  Of course you'll get bigger payments, so it will be a wash.

There is no mystery.  Look at the blocks found in the last 36 hours.  The average number of shares per block was approx 2.5 million shares.  The difficulty is a bit less than 1.5 million.  That's 36 hours of blocks taking 60% longer than normal on average.  A long string of bad luck means repeated blocks awarding more than 50 BTC into people's balances.  But because each block can only actually pay 50 BTC, we end up with a growing backlog of due payments (the payout queue).  Yes, there were a couple quick rounds but they were not short enough to make up for the preceding long rounds in terms of backlog.

Add in that the current round has been going for 15 hours, and you can see that actually most people haven't gotten paid today.

Nothing is wrong.  We have just been unlucky in the recent past and the queue won't catch up until we have an equivalent lucky streak.

The only hashes that a miner "wastes time on" are those that stale because a new block has been found elsewhere on the network (and the miner does not know about it yet).  They are wasted because if they do find a block, the block will very likely become orphaned. 

As teukon said, all other hashing is not wasted because every single hash you calculate is effectively you "starting over" in your search for a valid block.  No matter how many hashes you have already checked, the very next hash you check might has the exact same probability to be valid or invalid. 

No matter how many times you have flipped a coin and had it come up "heads", the next time you flip it it still has exactly 50% chance to be "heads".

No.  Firstbits makes it easier for you to memorize an address by translating it to something very short instead of something long.  Nothing more.

I assume you are getting this when you run the bitcoind command.  If so, it means you do not have the right version 0.5rc of bitcoin.

You can leave your existing bitcoin client alone.  Copy the wallet.dat to another machine with bitcoin client 0.5, do the signature, then destroy the copy of the wallet.dat.

Or if you don't have a separate machine/VM, then just backup your current bitcoin data directory and bitcoin installation and restore it after you finish messing with bitcoin 0.5.

On the page that asks for your signature, it tells you what bitcoind command to run to get it.

In particular, PoolServerJ doesn't support X-Roll-NTime and so miners will go idle when they don't get a super prompt response from the pool for a new work unit.  With X-Roll-NTime, miners are able to keep mining while waiting for getwork responses (by continuing to increment the ntime header).

Best advice for now is to point your miner at server 2 which is less loaded and will response more promptly (at least until someone adds ntime rolling to PSJ).

Absolutely.  No problem from me.  It was just a misunderstanding on my part about when the fee was subtracted.  I wasn't paying close attention.

Nevermind.  The difference was the 3% fee.  Didn't realize it was taken at payment time vs as things are earned.

I have 2 dedicated mining rigs.  The first has two 6970 GPUs.  The second has two 5970 GPUs and 1 6850 GPU.  I also mine on my Mac Pro (which has a 5870 in it) when it is idle.

I pay $0.097 per kWh.

There is an entire subforum dedicated to mining hardware.  Not sure if you can see it prior to getting released from Newbie status.