>Repeat until you have some useful output.
Do you really think that's how useful work is accomplished?
The point of TFA is that there aren't as many problems in need of brute forcing as we'd like to believe. In truth, most important problems require intelligent and skillful analysis. Where computing power is truly the bound, it tends to be applied pretty quickly.
$10 gets you ~ 1000 hours on an EC2 Micro spot-instances. !!!!
Big data is a minefield of opportunity. Do go walk in it.