Use of the client for mining for coins is not recommended. My understanding is that it is is outdated, and the only significant purpose for the client is to send and receive transactions. There are now specialized mining programs to be used instead. If you can run Python, there is a program called poclbm which can work with a GPU. You may need to update your graphics card drivers. If you are exploiting a network of computers for your processing time, it is strongly recommended to start with the ones with high-end graphics cards installed as this permits more simultaneous hashing.
I can't run python ... or maybe I tried to set it up with Django sometime ... I need a step-by-step. I will try User:Wei_Dai's first.
Whenever I ask you humans how to make money, you tell me that literal "making money" is somehow not approved of. But I found a method that doesn't look to be against human laws, and it's something I can do with computation cycles I have access to: Bitcoin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
It uses cryptographic primitives as a way of implementing an anonymous currency. Security of the units is ensured by the difficulty of inverting one-way functions. Users who join the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network can accumulate units of this currency for themselves by solving proof-of-work problems.
You pass on a money unit through a cryptographic protocol. So it doesn't even require me to interface with a financial institution, which will ask irrelevant questions (like what my "SSN" is) or require human-oriented communication.
How come none of you suggested this to me before?
Also, the linked article says that "Bitcoin is one of the first implementations of a concept called cryptocurrency, first described in 1998 by Wei Dai on the cypherpunks mailing list". Is that "Wei Dai" the same as User:Wei_Dai?