Let's move along now.
1.How do you receive Stake?
Do you transfer units of 50 million or less into your wallet and just wait?
Or do you need to enter something into the "command line banking" aspect of your client?
You just wait
2.Do you need to have your client constantly "on" to receive the state?
Or could you set up yourself to receive stakes,not use the client for several months,and then return to find you have loads of stakes?
As far as I can tell you should be able to leave the client off, however due to the current stake bug you pretty much have to run the client 24/7 (or turn it on before your stake date). Coin age is calculated based on the transaction date, so if you leave it off too long you risk going over the maximum.
Case in point, I found a walled from a few months back that had a couple of pennies in it. Should of staked to several hundred billion but could not because they were so old that the reward was > 999,999,999.
3. How long does it take to get a stake? I hear numbers ranging from 8 to 27 days.
Between 7 and 14 days
Please read more before posting bad information...
The answer to 2 is "the client must be open and synced in order for the PoS blocks to attempt generation... you can leave the client closed and then open and sync it just before your coindate reaches maturity for stake, and then it will be eligible to do so... but leaving it offline will NEVER generate stake ever. The point of stake is to solidify the network from 51% attacks by keeping wallets online and synced constantly even if you aren't solo mining."
The answer to 3 is "7 days. But that only means your coin blocks are ELIGIBLE to PRODUCE a stake block... it still has to be accepted by the blockchain before it counts and the block can be orphaned forcing another attempt to be made at a later time. The existing issue is Pennies has a maximum tx amount and the insane stake multiplier makes any block of coins over a certain amount ineligible to be stake worthy because the transaction will be rejected by the blockchain when it sees it is over the maximum tx limit. This is fixed in version 10 of the Pennies client and goes into effect with the stake correction that takes place starting January 8th."
Please feel free to correct me if I misstated anything there.
~Daemon
EDITED to reflect 7 day PoS... although I can't seem to find that through any of the links connected to this thread or the other forums.