I bought a couple of the cheaper USB miners earlier this year just to play around with...have spent quite a bit of time since then mining alts. Bitcoin mining is absolutely a fool's game at this point. The hardware vendors have a terrible track record (cf. the recent FTC raid on BFL), and there is a slim margin wherein a few people somehow manage to earn more than they spent on the devices -- the rest of the time a purchase results in a substantial loss due to hardware obsolescence and exponentially increasing difficulty. At some point I figure the technology will stabilize and the prices will make mining a reasonable option again, but for the moment you are far better off just buying some coins.
Things were much nicer when GPU mining was the market leader. Bitcoin mining was usually profitable for a few weeks during/after a major price jump, and your main cost was power. Once the profitability window ended, just turn off your mining hardware.
Now that we have ASICs and scammy companies with months of lead time making them, things are way more volatile. Power is cheap, but the hardware is thousands of dollars, and the preorder/crowdfunding scheme is pretty reprehensible.
Would scrypt with harder parameters make a better ASIC-resistant hash?
