For USB flash drives, Toshiba calculated that a 10,000 write cycle endurance would enable customers to completely write and erase the entire contents once per day for 27 years, well beyond the life of the hardware. Heh, good to know that Toshiba's engineers can divide by 365. Sad that Kingston seemingly had to ask them to.
As a HS junior I was told basically the same thing. That was ~3 years ago, and I'm now two years into a CS degree. I sure hope they were wrong. :-)