Granted they actually might not have incentive to lower their price when people don't realize they will not get 0.74 BTC out of these things. Difficulty has been increasing ~10-20% every 12 days.
If difficulty stopped increasing now it would take over 50 days to get your BTC back but when it rises 20% every 12 days you are screwed to the nth degree...

I don't see how. If anything a 16.8% difficulty adjustment every 2 weeks (the default on the coinish calculator currently) is reasonable, or somewhat on the low side. And given that any purchase made now would be in batch 2 (which is supposed to ship on 7/20) it could easily slip to the end of the month before receiving the units (which is on the other side of the next difficulty increase).

What I come up with (after buying a decent power supply for $150; yeah I can go cheaper, but PSU's are not a good place to scrimp) is no break even point. The loss after 12 months is $74.

With over clocking to 1 THs for two units the loss after a year is $25. Tantalizingly close, but not really there...

Of course this assumes that Bitcoin prices stay the same, which is unlikely. Hopefully a year from now we all hope Bitcoin is up from where it is now.

At this stage, I'm probably better off sitting on my Bitcoin and watching my existing Scrypt ASIC rigs ride into the sunset. I have free power, so these will never get unprofitable. They will just get really boring ;-)

The difficulty jumps every 12 days not two weeks, two weeks or 14 days would be a stand still for difficulty. Basically every time the 2016th block is solved difficulty is re-assessed. When we complete 2016 blocks before the 14 days we get smacked hard with a new higher difficulty.

Don't forget the fun of RMA'ing these back to china or wherever for repair. All of my miners had or have some die failure out of the box, this stuff isn't easy folks and I'm afraid to say if you haven't made your profit in BTC by now you won't do it by mining. Your new window of opportunity is buying BTC directly, but you don't have to take my word for it!!

Well now we have really jumped the shark.  Unless we calculate LUCK the math is unreliable?
ugh.

The guys at bitminter just went over 24hrs without a block, where is that in your calculations. The pool returns are diminishing and always have been, but we are at a tipping point where the drops are nearing an exponential loss for the public if the manufacturers don't back off the network and get the gear distributed to public miners.

Maybe BTC Guild is actually running at 101.1% and 1 of every 10 blocks goes straight to the Owner.

Who know.

Maybe you guys are joking and my sarcasm radar is out of tune but if you are serious I think that's a pretty wild accusation.  If Guild, or any pool for that matter, was posting results that didn't jive with what was in the blockchain don't you think someone would figure it out?  BTC has a lot of really smart, dedicated people and if that isn't enough it also has people with tens of thousands of dollars invested who pay attention to stuff like that.
JMHO.

ig

I am in the same boat. I have a bunch of those too. However, since there are no longer screw terminals, I do not know how I will connect them to the S3. How do you plan on doing it?

I am curious: is the cover made out of plastic or metal? It should save on the cost of a case (which is one reason I have been a little reluctant to get an S1 (still haven't payed off my old blade either). Cases block EMI, which helps prevent interference with Over-the-air television.

I was thinking these things just need a 500W power supply: I suspect (but have not tested) that you can plug the 4Pin CPU connectors into the spare ports for an extra safety margin. Edit: bad idea (as in flames shooting out of one of your expensive components if you manage to force it).