Salary
Average Salary: $102,190
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $4,266,000
Computer scientists are researchers almost by definition, so they often work at Universities where all they have to do to get at least minimum funding for their research is teach a few classes now and then (source). In years past many worked as sort of self-employed independents, which can be a pretty hard trick to pull off. When dealing with major computing, it can be a bit cost prohibitive. Others work in laboratories and government think tanks.
Many work for the Who's Who of the computing world like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, IBM, HP, etc. Still others have government jobs working for various 3-letter agencies. What you earn depends on what you do and whom you do it for, but the average is about $88,000 (source).
There's a pretty long precedent for computer scientists creating game changing developments that have lead to some pretty nice paychecks. Gary Kildall supposedly created the original DOS operating system, which was the backbone of the first Windows platforms. His invention led to some fairly awesome paychecks for Mr. Gates, although for reasons still speculated about, Kildall didn't see any of it.
Other developers have deliberately passed on major payouts, too. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson created UNIX, the importance of which can't be exaggerated (it's the backbone of all your nifty Apple products not to mention most of the major servers throughout the Internet), but they made it open-source, meaning free to everyone.
How phenomenally (idiotic) generous of them, don't you think? But back to money, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Ph.D students when they created Google, which has worked out fairly well for them we hear. So really, salary-wise, the sky's the limit.