Quote from: flame1012 on March 05, 2015, 10:24:13 PM

Some dude called FriedCat has been announced as the escape goat.

If I wasn't cognizant of people's propensity to appropriate common verbiage into their misguided modern lexicon, I'd be wondering if maybe somebody tried to translate another name from Chinese.
You're looking for scapegoat.

Quote from: JasherEnoch on March 05, 2015, 10:23:00 PM

I also do not understand why it is so hard to see much ROI and to see companies succeed in something that should (in my opinion) be so simple. I mean where are all the IT (computer geek) genius's at....they should be able to figure this whole bitcoin thing out much better than what we have seen lately.

Computer geeks do not engineers make.
Computer geeks and engineers do not business managers make.
Computer geeks and engineers and business managers do not a successful company make.

In this case, having knowledge of how Bitcoin works and being able to do all the software, protocol, etc. side of things - doesn't mean you know how electronics work and how to build a miner.
Knowing how electronics work and knowing how to build a miner doesn't mean you know how the thing you just put together is going to translate into an actual item for commerce. As an example: you see this a lot with crowdfunded projects, especially ones that raise a lot more money than they had aimed for, but then realize they lose more of that money in having to buy up space for stock, paying people for packaging and shipping, etc. than they would have if they'd put a hard limit on things.
Knowing how to manage a business doesn't mean that you know how to make a successful company out of things, especially if 'market forces' weigh heavily on the success of the company. In Rockminer's case, there's just not much demand for the mining equipment they made - and that demand is at the whim of many factors.

At least they tried.

Quote from: JasherEnoch on March 05, 2015, 10:29:57 PM

And here is a novel idea that I don't know why USA companies are NOT doing. Whatever happened to the idea of making hundreds of solar panels and using wind (windmill) power things to generate the necessary electricity demands to run a successful mining farm and NOT have to pay an electric company millions of dollars just to mine bitcoin.

How many windmills / solar panels would you need for your operation? Where do you build the required wind / solar farm? What are the restrictions to building a wind / solar farm in the locale? How much is that (land+licenses+construction+maintenance) going to cost you? What are their efficiency for the given locale? Will you ever see that money back? If you didn't use them for mining and instead sold the electricity to local companies and/or to the utilities, would you actually be making more money than you would trying to mine with it?
The answers to those questions tend not to be favorable. Most cost effective to set up shop somewhere that already has cheap energy - even if it's not free - or just negotiate a better price with the utility companies in the first place.