and even then says it applies to transactions without a fee - ie, begger transactions.
I have to say that I've never heard of the term "begger transactions". If all miners cared about was maximizing profits, we'd probably have mostly empty blocks.
Yep, fortunately it's not the only thing we worry about, which is why Eligius still uses the largest block size of any pool to date (most others limit to some arbitrarily low number), mines transactions with a reduced fee schedule from the reference client, mines some non-standard transactions, and other things helpful to the network as a whole that most other pools don't care to put any effort towards which have nothing to do with miner profits.
I'm not sure why your partner would refer to transactions with no fee (or even with a fee less than 0.1 "TBC", as I understand it) as "begger transactions" then.
By the way, how is someone supposed to submit a low-fee transaction to Eligius? I believe the direct submission form was taken down.
http://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/pushtxn.php always gives me "Sorry, function disabled. Contact wizkid057 directly if you need a transaction mined."
wizkid057: I need a transaction mined! (Well, not right now, but I often would like to send a small, low priority transaction for less than $0.20 in fees, and unfortunately the default client treats a $0.01 fee the same as no fee at all.)