Couple of things.

1)  There are 8 decimal points in bitcoins, and I've read that they could add more in the future if needed.  Any currency total debates need to focus on this key fact, since most are used to a 2 decimal point currency they don't realize the impact on totals.   21 million total bitcoins only means that if it's reached and more need to be used their value will increase and people will take advantage of the extra divisibility to effectively "create" more coins passed the set limit.

2) In any emerging market there will always be huge advantages for early adopters IF(and its a big if) the market becomes successful.   Now if you're still living in a world where "that's not fair" has meaning, then you've got some growing up to do.  However if you've come to the conclusion that life isn't fair by design, you'll understand that people who are early adopters are also taking huge amounts of risk to be the first players in this market.   There is still a chance that bitcoins could become illegal in some areas and effectively useless for some of those who've invested alot of time and money, but that's just the risk you take to give yourself a chance at enjoying the potential advantages of being a early adopter.

Thanks for the heads up, it seems Jacob needs to learn to articulate himself a bit better in his tweets if he wants to get a accurate message out.  Of course, he might of purposely kept his tweets vague to cause doubt in the currency for a excellent buying opportunity.  It's hard to argue that BTC's @10 USD last night weren't a steal.

Always hate when these articles neglect to mention the very important fact that bitcoins are divisible by up to 8 decimal points.  It makes a drastic difference when discussing the potential total of units of currency available at the cap.  You then get a large portion of people who have a completely inaccurate assumption on bitcoins based largely on a huge omission.  Whether it's intentional or done just due to the stupidity of the author we'll never know.

I'm a newbie as well so I don't have too much info for you, I will say however from reading about some other rig set ups you may come across issues trying to fit 4 vid cards inside a typical cpu case.  If you've already taken this into account and yours will fit then never mind and GL!   

if you have 50 BTC you aren't that poor.  At least, not so poor that you can't buy a couple vid cards to start a mining operation.

I can't believe there are people who can't even look into this enough to see the minimum reqs for making a profit before trying.

If you have a poor GPU you won't make money, if you wont put money into your system to make money mining isn't for you.

It appears this thread/discussion ended(5-08) when the value for BTC were around 3-4 USD each, and today's mt-gox listing currently at 16.3.    Interesting to see if the difficulty increase has been proportionate with the BTC value increase to make mining still a worthwhile endeavor.  Still new to the site and working through all the great info here.

Also of course investing is always better IF BTC prices continue to rise, but if you don't want to invest in the coins themselves(for whatever reason) it's pretty irrelevant to the "is mining profitable" discussion even though it took up the majority of this otherwise helpful thread.