Not really unless you set up a task to kill and restart GUIminer every 30 minutes to an hour so you don't lose that much mining time.  It's probably better to not set clocks to unknown levels unless you can let it run and watch it for a few hours.  Usually if you go too high it'll crash right away or within an hour or so.

Also, just a thought.  Totally overclocking your cards to the extremes for a few extra MH isn't really worth it in the long run.  Say you can squeeze another 20 MH out of it, that equates to a whopping .32 BTC / month at the current difficulty.  While it may seem good, if you have to replace the card after 4-6 months, is it really worth the 1-2 extra BTC?

666. I'm going to release a new Bitcoin fork

Perhaps OptimalBitcoin would like to reply with how the machine specs available at $1.50/hour compare to the equivalent provided by Amazon in terms other than Bitcoin mining performance ...

"Cluster GPU Quadruple Extra Large 22 GB memory, 33.5 EC2 Compute Units, 2 x NVIDIA Tesla “Fermi” M2050 GPUs, 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform, 10 Gigabit Ethernet"

I'm not in favor of using bitcoin to back the currency.

Here is what I propose instead.

1) every send is taxed at a 0.1% rate (the tax is rounded up) + (an extra tax fee for sends with low confirmations) + (a user-specified voluntary tax to motivate inclusion in a block)

2) mining occurs through the mixed coin - hashing system I described above where you escrow coins in the blockchain whenever you find a block (and thus need coins to mine)

3) miners receive 50% of the send tax revenue. An additional 50% of the tax revenue and coin generation equal to 50% of the tax revenue is put in an escrow account.

4) What happens to the escrowed money depends on monthly voting rounds. There are two possible voting outcomes (these are hard-coded):
                      a) money generation via lottery -> all tax revenue is sent via a random dividend to some lucky address.
                                                                      Probability of being selection in the random draw is proportional to coin account size (one coin = one draw.
                                                                     the lottery occurs once per block
                      b) money destruction -> all tax revenue is disposed of (for example sent to a nonexistent address)  

5) Voting rounds last for one month worth of blocks. Votes are cast whenever a block is mined. However, only one vote is counted every month. The counted vote is the one that included the largest number of escrowed coins (not coin-confirmations) in a block mined over the past month. This single vote decides whether the next month follows outcome 4a or outcome 4b.

To the extent that currency use grew over time, money generated via the lottery would enrich all holders of the currency in proportion to their initial holdings (early adopters are rewarded). To the extent that the currency failed, the volume of currency available would contract with every block sent until none remained. If this occurred slowly enough, the price could remain stable during the contraction.

Rich voters decide between currency creation and currency destruction. If they are risk-neutral, they will be indifferent between destroying currency and generating it. I think they would try to manage the currency price in a sensible way to help it succeed and thus maximize returns on their investment. I believe that they would try to keep USD or EUR exchange rates stable, but it is up to them. Also, there is a market for control. If anyone decides that they can manage creation/destruction more successfully, they can seize control of voting through a massive investment in the coin.

When or if bitcoin becomes relatively weak to sum of alternative networks, then I think Gavin would have to change protocol so it will adjust difficulty much more frequent.

Nefario, aren't you changing the rules while we're playing ?

SIN is in danger of being delisted.

I have emailed tawsix at the begining of the week, and just sent him a PM.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=37414.0

14 hours remain for the SINs details to be updated before being delisted.

Nefario.

Whenever there is an offer for "remote GPU use contract" that is greater than ~$0.46/hr, it makes more sense to stop the mining and have them work on the "remote GPU use contract".

They have probably lost any profits on the short positions by now and will start to lose money as gold goes higher from here or sometime soon.

Psychological barrier to entry is simply this: Few people are going to be willing to buy a single bitcoin for $1,000.  It's a psychological thing.  Having $1,000 in your bank account just "feels" a lot better than having 1 bitcoin, even if they're both worth the same amount and both have the same purchasing power.  To a lot of people, buying a handful of bitcoins for a lot more than a handful of dollars feels like they are getting ripped off.  Unless the virtual currency can have rough parity with the dollar, it will not ever be fully accepted by the general public.

Well, yes, they aren't mutually exclusive, but there is a limit on how many payment systems a user can reasonably support

As for drugs, where I live, people were paying for drugs a-oky via prepaid cards and Webmoney with no small amount of success, though BTC does make some things easier, while making other things harder (every transaction is completely public, so "jurisdictional veils" do not apply)

We'll be fixing all the existing machines, just not buying new ones.

With bit-pay.com, our merchants can set prices in USD (and soon other currencies) and receive payout in USD...if they elect to receive payout in BTC, they receive whatever price they set minus a flat 2.99% (which is substantially lower than the total fees they would likely incur with credit cards and no chargebacks to boot).  They are not exposed at all to the volatility of bitcoin (however we would certainly prefer more merchants to accept bitcoin payout instead of USD).

As distasteful as it is to have to set prices in some other currency, I think it's a necessity in the near term given the volatility of bitcoin.  Perhaps we need mechanisms to set prices in gold or silver terms for those that find fiat currencies distasteful.

Have you looked at http://bidbitcoins.com and http://www.biddingpond.com ?

I agree with all your examples. But I would add the possibility that even without help, bitcoin will find a niche. Speculation has become an unintended center of the bitcoin economy. But maybe that is just going to happen. It does make a mean currency for arbitrage, for example.
Perhaps this will lead to wider adoption by those who see it's core benefits as "the money of the Internet"?

Update:

Our first customer received service and was happy with the service.  Their contract has ended.  I currently have 5 computers available for rental and am looking for new customers.  Please send me a PM if you are interested!

I've said this before, but I think it's worth repeating.  Growing the bitcoin economy is very simple.  Dedicate a portion of your earnings to buying bitcoin every week (however small that may be doesn't matter).  And never sell bitcoins on an exchange if you can possibly help it.  Instead, use those bitcoins to buy stuff (or pay people).  I think if everyone tried to do this, it would be the most effect way to grow bitcoin usage.  Trying to explicitly market bitcoin to people that may not know or care about it can backfire (but countering anti-bitcoin propaganda is important).