If there was a single best coin to mine, everyone would be mining it all the time.
Depends on your situation and what's available around you.

You could have said the same thing at any point of time since 2009.
Price reflects the Bitcoin's value. Timing the market and hoping for a drop is absurd.

Cable ties I suppose.
Not sure how your current setup looks like.

What power supply are you using?

Telling the name of who you think is behind this should be enough for the police to find an exchange.
Depending on where you live, most exchanges apply know your customer laws.

There's also the possibility that the robber never actually sold them on an exchange.

You posted the wrong one.
iaskeno had it right it's 1860599

Nothing you can do unfortunately.
You have to wait for the other party to respond.

Always verify your transaction before signing it.

A streak like this (7 blocks in a row by the same pool with 25% of the global hashrate) statistically happens on average every 500 hours.
So roughly every month.

This statement would make a better point if interest didn't exist.
Investing your money (bonds, stocks, anything that could bear interest) as opposed to keeping it in cash is a pretty good method to avoid inflation.

You'll probably be paying a premium for the automatic switching service.

I'm not sure you want your payouts to be separated into a bunch of useless coins.

If that's the case, having the payout in a single coin implies a premium too.

Does this mean I won't get legendary until I get 1000 merit?
I was going over 1030 activity next week (still hero at 1022 before the merit system).

It really depends on your specific situation.
A few questions to ask yourself:
1. What's your risk tolerance?
2. What does the rest of your investment portfolio look like?
3. Is 1 500$ a lot of money?
4. What is your age?

I personally wouldn't do much with it.

From a forum feature perspective, you are now able to use an avatar and a more complex (unlimited length and color is allowed) signature.

Have you been using your old PC since?
There's always a chance if you didn't. Back then there wasn't many wallets so you can try to recover an Electrum, Multibit or Bitcoin Core wallet format.

Depends on the context.
Posts get reported and I'm fairly certain mods delete them without looking too much at them (wrongly or rightfully).
Especially if you're a signature spammer.

As long as the pool is reputed and the payout structure makes sense, you shouldn't worry about that.

What's the scoring hashrate on the pool side? This will be lower than what you stated here and it's what truly used to calculate a payout.
Another problem could be that the difficulty now is different than the difficulty used for your estimations.

Manufacturer recommends between 0 and 40 Celcius.
Doubt you'll run into any problems.

You need the private keys (not the public keys) to restore your wallet.
The seed from Multibit has that information.

Don't think you can simply import the seed from Multibit into Electrum since they don't use the same format.

After importing your keys, you should sweep your funds into a new wallet since your current one seems to be compromised.

That or you simply forgot your password.

This isn't a problem with Bitcoin itself but rather with the vendor you are dealing with.
All customer support requests should be directed to them.
Since they own the address you sent the coins to and the transaction has confirmed, they have control over the funds now.

They should be able to help you out if they aren't shady.