Really appreciate this article, as someone who has struggled with depression extensively and (more or less) come out the better for it. People who are experiencing the worst depression can mete out feel empty, desperate and alone in a way that is almost indescribable to anyone who has not felt that way. It's important for them to know that people care, are happy to speak with them, and that those who have had similar experiences have, eventually, found a happier and better existence.
The Twain quote is the best in my opinion... those of us who are passionate about learning will remove ourselves from the systems that impede us, or at least endeavor to minimize their impact on our lives. School, at least in its current implementation, is a supremely flawed model for many of the reasons discussed in this thread and elsewhere. The solution is not to just do away with it though - while for some of us this would be liberating, for a far greater number of people it would be harmful. Anarchy, be it political, economic, or educational, rarely generates cut and dry improvement.
As someone who has many issues with education, and has felt openly hostile toward it previously, for me adopting a relaxed attitude about it was the most important step. I realized I could go to classes, engage with professors and other students, and do reasonably well in terms of marks without allowing grades or assignments to impact my external intellectual curiosity. I've been much happier, and much more productive both inside and outside of school, since I let go of the frustration with "the system" and put the focus on myself.
I should have been more clear - I meant that marketing expenditures on SEO and SEM are still growing year over year, though not at the rate they once were.
I think the green line is average fitness of all iterations and the black line is a logarithmic index of each generation's maximum fitness to the optimal achieved (both relative to time). So the black line pretty quickly gets bounded by an asymptote at the top of the screen, because the improvements in fitness are far more significant early on. Basically an example of diminishing returns...
There is a great discussion of this (and a further mapping of fitness functions and evolutionary algorithms to a 2-dimensional "fitness landscape") in The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker - http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Wealth-Evolution-Complexity-Eco...
Absolutely phenomenal exploration of complexity economics.
I like that concept in theory (as a passive browser extension), but it might be wiser to store it in a user-connected cloud-based account for security reasons.
Several ways, first and foremost that google or yahoo are no longer everyone's de facto home page, and secondarily that facebook and twitter have both evolved into platforms with search functionality. SEO is still growing annually (as are digital marketing expenditures), but 5 years ago search engines were the only game in town. Not so anymore, and that's primarily due to the emergence of social networking portals as the focus of most users' online time.
As mentioned, Python or Ruby/Rails are your best bets; if you wanted to do something a bit more unusual, you might consider a functional language like Haskell (as functional languages are an up-and-coming development paradigm)...