It would be great if there was a single standard so unique drivers don't have to be built from scratch for every new bitcoin mining ASIC that's developed.
A few days after they posted they were considering it, they said they decided not to and will be continuing operations to US citizens with an added disclaimer.
The accounts seized were for Mutum Sigillum, their US subsidiary. The claim is that MS transferred funds from Mt Gox's Dwalla account to Mt. Gox's overseas account, which fits under the definition of a MSB in the US.
The title was accurate. Blocks are being found at a rate of 1 every 5 minutes. There's no way the next difficulty jump will be enough to bring the speed to 10 minutes since it takes the average time over the last 2016 blocks. It's likely in a couple weeks the time to find blocks will be even lower than it is now if the growth rate continues like this.
I like the calculator at http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ better. Using the defaults for network and all that it seems to give around $23,000 profit for the year.
What amazed me about that: Within 9 months, your profit drops below $1k/m. Barely three more months later and you're down to $250/m. So after a year, you're fast approaching the point at which the energy you put into the device costs more than the bitcoin money you get out of it.
Play with the knobs some more and you realize: If you purchase the 400 GH/s August device in December, you will never make back the 7.5k that the thing costs. Wait "only" until November and you barely get a 60% ROI.
The chip technology is an older process using 110nm technology. There are already several companies working on 40nm technology which will be more power efficient and be significantly faster per chip.
110nm is old news. Butterfly labs do 65 nm and KnC does 28 nm. I guess 110 was a test run really, or they lacked access to plants that could do smaller chips.
