Perhaps because of the whole decades of history related to rotating bulk storage? Without increases in spindle speed (and, thus, price), larger storage has always been faster.

Don't you remember the Quantum Bigfoot?

Get off of my lawn!

Wow - immediately censored into oblivion for a harmless anecdote. I wonder where Dell sources their slashdot moderators.

So, the next big thing never requires senior level coursework?

Coursework is free or very affordable for those who want to pursue it on their own time. I met a lot of self-starters in college who had enough passion to spend their free time a little bit more productively than myself (and most of the other students). These people often cruised through classes without buying the text and, often, dropped out to pursue opportunities that came to them as a result of their curiosity-based knowledge and skills.

For example, I didn't learn proper relational database design until my junior year in college. But I know plenty of people who picked this up in high school (often by discovering all of the wrong ways to do something, which appears to be a very good method for obtaining mastery of a subject).

These dropouts dropped out because they were wildly successful. They didn't become wildly successful by dropping out.

Right. When I talk to people who are going down the Computer Science route, I tell them to stick with it and use the acquired skills to develop that next big thing.

"If you graduate, then you have failed."

Failed at making the next big thing. But, in doing so, have a wonderful plan b.

Unfortunately sometimes you can't just talk one-on-one to everyone and you will have to present information to a large group. Your options for presenting information to a crowd:
--vocal: just talking for an hour, which is popular in many religions, and we all remember what the sermon was about last Sunday, right?
--visual text: just endless paragraphs so they can read along which, as far as I can tell, no one does
--multimedia: pictures, audio and video that attempts to explain in a manner easily digestible, hence Powerpoint

The delicious irony of explaining the situation with what might as well be a powerpoint slide. Nice bullet points. A+++ would buy again.

We can ditch the cableco and finally get ala carte programming.

The patent office will rubber-stamp anything obvious if it is done on a computer. The one-click patent is a wonderful example: for decades, bartenders have been taking a patron's credit card and setting it aside. This allows the patron to simply "run a tab" and order a beer with just one click of the finger. This can't be patented because it is obvious to everyone.

But, if you do it on a computer, you can patent it for some reason. The mind boggles.

As long as you're interested in what you program, you can easily do it full work days.

I think that you are missing the lower level question:

How many hours per day will your brain allow you to be functional at a given task?

When I did lots of SQL-based web development, I would toil away for 12-16 hours on some days only to have the answer in my head after a good night's rest. This happened a lot (and was a little frustrating to do in 10 minutes what could not be done in 10 hours the day before). Maybe I just suck at SQL-based web development but the whole concept of a mental limit is interesting to me.

Here in the US, we don't have democracy now. We have a two party, democratic REPUBLIC. The politicians can pretty much do whatever they want after they have been elected because the media has conditioned us to believe that we have only two parties from which to choose (i.e. - "bipartisan").

Ban the party system. At this point, the legislative vending machine that we call "government" will fall apart and we'll have something much closer to "democracy".