1. Yes. As it was said in today's post, payments were paused for safety reasons. You can just leave autopayment enabled and most of your coins will be paid automatically when I'll enable the payments today. Note that autopaymen only pays down to 0.01 BTC.
2. Yes, pool is working, but our total hashrate is low.
3. Yes.
It is very very good news!!! Can you roughly say when (about Asics)? May be the first quarter of 2014?
P.S. I tryed to withdraw coins from last friday.