Reading your question I didn't see anything to say what your interests and talents are. Despite modesty, you show some writing talent. Your output will improve with practice. The responses mostly assumed a typical /. profile of procedural coding and systems, but that may not be you. Some of the basics apply no matter, online is harder because of competition unless you have an advantage.

Think through your education and interests. Decide whether the marketing, accounting, bureaucracy, and risk of your own business is worth some multiplier on your pay. Talk to people around you about what might work, and ask relevant businesses (newspapers, ad agencies, etc,) about possibilities.

Good luck!

The motive is (IMHO) most likely to express and increase their power over the people affected rather than the stated one. Eliminate something that gives those people power, and show them how weak they are against their new rulers.

I expect it was really an issue of rare and pricy hardware, not software at all. Circa 1965 I used a CRT attached to an IBM 9094 that wrote on 35mm film with a software library for FORTRAN II to produce slides for presentations. Part of the job was making 8x10 prints of the slides in the frat house darkroom fo my boss to review. My boss had a good budget and could pay the rediculously high per-second prices for use of the equipment.

Once graphic displays became cheap, taking pictures of them was probably a cheap hack to avoid buying a plotter that could draw full sized overheads. CRT cameras had been built for decades by then.

It is not a system that can be suppressed by local authorities or infrastructure disruption. It works with only 2 people, a little equipment out of the attic, and a few watts of electricity. In many earthquakes, hurricanes and foreign revolutions it was the primary way news got out.

I have been surprised buy the lack of news attention ham reports get lately, but perhaps people on both ends had been spoiled by how well the Internet works.

I expect that you will find a PhD program at an Ivy league school to be incompatible with your current job unless the head of your lab was hired by the department with your intended degree. Unless a lot has changed, those programs are more about apprenticeship than education. They are full time jobs in themselves, and you pay tuition on top of that. Grants, scholarships, and loans may make it possible if you are good enough and were not born into the 1%.

That said, Mathematical Biology or Biostatistics departments might be your best choice. They are likely to have people that can teach you something without looking down on you too much for your history. In the dark ages, I worked for Dr. Carol Newton, in Chicago, trying to teach programming to biologists. Talk about teaching pigs to sing, the thought modes were completely incompatible. Musicians make much better programmers.

Recently, the big money in statistics was going to physicists as Wall Street tried to use statistical models. Those PhDs unfortunately don't include a lot of the practical knowledge a statistician needs when the assumptions are uncertain. The results may have made for some good openings for biostatistics folks.

The op is right, such things are easy to design, but the per copy cost for software controls is near zero while a controller box will cost you a minimum of $100 or so including labor with no upper bound depending on complexity and materials.

However, you will have no piracy issues or weird DRM code to irritate your customers. Also a lot of folks are more willing to pay big bucks for tangible objects. Even when not in use it might be a nice status symbol to have on a desk or in a doctor's office. I see more medical equipment than I want to, and most of it consists of a small computer in a big fancy box with maybe a custom sensor or two.

Bu leaving out the Verizon iPhone 4, the chart makes Apple look much better than it is. Verizon never really upgraded its iPhone until IOS 5 came out. It provided security patches only.

That particularly bugged me since there were a couple of features I had really wanted.

Apparently, they didn't bother with the feature upgrades until the code that forked for CDMA got merged in 5.

It's easy for a company to get locked into an architecture when using home grown or proprietary software. I would bet that there are a bunch out there that really need an upgrade, and this will allow them to postpone an expensive and business threatening change for a few more years.

Oracle is extending the life of it's investment in Sun, but I don't see evidence that it is really developing it.