While I do not know whether or not Watson actually does this, the paper doesn't mention anything about parallelism -- I suspect that the exploitation of structured parallelism is another handy benefit to using Prolog on as many machines as Watson was using.
The Wired article (linked within under "can control the universe") seemed to suggest that he solved the problem by "channeling Jesus"...which seems to misrepresent that he was talking about his childhood training, rather than how he actually solved the conjecture.
"...couldn't really put his finger on what it was that he really wanted but couldn't just do."
As an amusing literal interpretation of your metaphor, IIRC Leonardo actually painted the shadows around the Mona Lisa's mouth using his finger, which enabled his style of sfumato shading. So I suppose he was putting his finger on it...
I speak for myself here, but I don't think something needs to be the "Future of the World" for it to be an immensely fulfilling way to lead one's life, degree or not.
While I agree that it can be unstable (inference can get stuck in local maxima), latent variable models like LDA can be used to rigorously evaluate textual categories (e.g. journal articles). We take for granted that the categories we set are "useful", in some sense, so it's interesting to see that quantitatively questioned.
Independent of the elegant typesetting it produces, TeX contains well-designed notation for mathematics, reflecting the algorithmic bent of its author, Don Knuth.
Mathematics doesn't change as frequently as desktop publishing, so it's a good bet that the TeX (e.g. $\int_0^1 \tau \, d\tau$) is going to be around as long as people talk math online.
That said, I think there are much easier-to-use and less error-prone desktop publishing tools (e.g. Scribus) for less math-heavy domains, like magazine layout.
"It is only when thermal energy is not equal to gravitational work that the cloud either expands and cools or contracts and warms, a process that continues until equilibrium is reached."
Biggest impact I've found which is not directly discussed in the OP: A great package repository (e.g. CPAN) can outweigh quirks in language design (e.g. Perl spaghetti code).
It seems to me that TeX did the best job of winning at both -- over three decades, at that!
At any rate, whatever people might tell you about your lack of credentials, you've already set your pitching skills apart by putting this out here in front of everyone. It's surprising just how much of presentation skill is about taking one's own ideas seriously.
I use the basic version of PayPal for subscriptions, but I've had issues with canceling customers' subscriptions without their explicit request, and the PayPal support is horrendous.
The fees are a little higher than some of the other services, but it integrates fine, so if you're okay with a clunky but easy to set up service, you might find it useful as well.
I think product sales is a game of incomplete information in which sellers don't know what each buyer wants and buyers don't necessarily know what they want either. It seems to me that advertising, which is effectively gambling on consumers' unknown desires, is the only way for either party to discover that hidden knowledge of what buyers want -- a commercial Monte Carlo simulation of sorts.
"If I had asked my customers what they wanted," Henry Ford once said, "they would have said a faster horse."
(For example: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1867.)