On the internet at 80

My father is 85 and has made his own webpage on which he posts about Indian philosophy. My mother has a session browsing through You Tube every afternoon ... she is 75. There is this blog I follow by an 84 year old lady who holidays regularly at Florida and enjoys life.
I then have students who do not use the internet and the rest who do, use it only for orkut/facebook (I asked them).
I told my students to make better use of the net and to look for tutorials on any given topic, check that it is from a known university and read it.
However, one boy told me he uses only Google scholar for search. I would have been impressed, but it was so obviously spurious. He is a person who believes that he should do minimum work and get by using his intelligence to impress people who he considers easily manipulated.
This is an example of a debate that has gone on in my life that was also the point of one of the links in Abi's post.
http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/staying-away-from-the-grindstone/
This boy is intelligent, but takes absolutely no interest in regular academic work. Suddenly when he feels like, he attends a class and gives quite intelligent inputs to the class....not a genius, mind you, but really bright.....but what a waste! I have observed taht students like him are not going anywhere unless they drastically change their attitude to work.
A culture of hard work is essential. I learnt it the hard way.
During my college days, I too believed that the truly brilliant people were cool....to slog and achieve was uncool.
Of course, I did not do that well in the university exams where plain solid mugging is necessary, but did well enough to hold on to my scholarship. That only served to reinforce my belief (mugging was not for me) .....So did the fact that almost effortlessly, I cleared two prestigious entrance exams. I also met a few brilliant students who had similar beliefs.
Some of them ended up nowhere due this belief.
Recently, one of my students had this horrifying experience of getting into a top research Instt for an integrated PhD after his BSc only to discover he had failed his BSc final year exams-- totally due to lack of hard work... so, now he is working at a call center. It really pained me. He is, temperamentally, a scientist in the child-like sense of being awe-inspired by the workings of nature.
The bulk of science moves inch by inch on the hard, diligent work of the good-but-not-genius scientists. We get a Planck very, very rarely.