[trafficlight]

With the proliferation of ASICs over the last 6 months, the mining difficulty rate has shot up exponentially.

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

I picked up a $30 Sapphire miner about a month ago. It's one of the better hashes-per-watt miners available. At this point, breakeven for the hardware cost is about 4 months out. And that's only going to get worse as the difficulty increases, which has been happening every 2 weeks or so.