I can tell it's truly News for Nerds because I can barely understand what it's saying and it drops causal references to advanced mathematics--the stuff I only wish I'd had the fortitude to study in college.
You more than likely did study this in college. This involves linear algebra, specifically the inversion of matrices and/or solving linear system. Ax=b, where A is an mxn matrix, and x and b are nx1 and mx1 vectors respectively. What we'd like to do is solve for x using x=A^-1 b, where A^-1 is an inverse matrix of some kind. But getting the inverse is a notoriously difficult problem.
In fact, a large reason digital computers were invented at all was so that "large" matrices could be inverted. And by large, I mean 12x12 matrices (keep in mind this was the 1950s). Computer games, mp3 players, spreadsheets and the internet are all quite incidental byproducts of humanities quest to invert ever larger matrices, in less time. Though just about any half way sophisticated piece of software will invert a matrix at some point.
The reason for this is as follows: When human beings want to solve any difficult problem, they approximate it with a linear model and solve the associated linear system. Hence the ability to solve linear systems quickly and accurately is of fundamental importance. This goes double in the modern world as we increasingly rely on the ability of computers to handle ever larger linear system--that is, to invert ever larger matrices.
The biggest problem with matrices, say nxn matrices, is that the time taken for solving them by Gauss elimination goes up as 0(n^3). So while your desktop could probably invert a 1000x1000 matrix in a few seconds, it would take a year invert a million x million matrix, and would take around a million years to invert a billion x billion matrix. (Not that it could store either in memory). While Gauss elimination is a pretty poor algorithm efficiency-wise, this issues are unavoidable for general matrices.
However, most matrices we actually want to invert in practice are "sparse" or "diagonally dominant". The first property means that most of the elements are zero. So in a billion x billion matrix, instead of storing 10^18 numbers, you'd only have to store a few billion. Diagonally dominant means that largest entries are along the diagonal. Both of these mean you can take a lot of--often hueristic--shortcuts in your inversion algorithims to cut down on time.
These researchers claim O(s*log(s)^2) complexity for such systems. I suspect there are probably a lot of O(s^2*log(s)) system or the like anyway, but even still this is a nice improvement. I doubt it's as big a breakthrough--I suspect this is hyped anyway--but if it is an improvement you can kind of compare this to something like the Fast Fourier Transform speedup. Again, I doubt it's that large of an improvement.
I'll finish by mentioning that this all falls under the umbrella of Linear Algebra, which is an absolutely essential skill of higher mathematics, and computational mathematics. Any geeks who prides themselves on their mathematical ability, but doesn't know their linear algebra (linear systems, the four fundamental subspaces, eigenvectors/values, rotation/transformation matrices, etc) shouldn't be holding their skills in such high regard. If you don't know your LA, or have forgotten, one of the best places to start is to watch Gilbert Strang's online lecture series provided by MIT. These lectures are indispensable to anyone working with linear systems. After this, those who need in depth analysis of matrix algorithms should turn to something like "Matrix Algorithms" by G. W. Stewart which goes into more detail and shows the more canonical algorithms. A little knowledge of linear algebra goes a long way in mathematics.
...Or failing all that, you could just open up MATLAB... or Octave. I recommend the educational route first though.
Whatever. The post box will be overflowing with flyers from consumer electronics sites, DVD/Game rentals, fast food deliveries, and geeky merchandising outfits long before the first porn leaflet gets a look in.
People seem to have this weird idea that there's some sort of China, Inc. that just sits over there on the other side of the Pacific building plastic widgets to cram down our throats via Walmart.
Which isn't to contradict the rest of the points in your post. But it's important to realise that you're not doing business within individual Chinese companies or even industrial sectors. You're doing business with the single largest mega-conglomerate in the history of the world, and quite possibly most science-fiction. What is needed is not so much a change in foreign policy, as a change in economic thought to deal with or at least understand this entirely new socio-economic entity.
Looks like someone needs to update their dictionary. The OPs statement is contemporarily correct
terrorism-noun (tu'ur'ism) 1. the use of violence to to kill, maim, or upset fine Americans or people fine Americans like. 2. the property of being muslim. 3. the act of doing something I don't approve of. 3. the act of being something I don't approve of.
Oh, also the kid is exerting increasingly firm control over the South China Sea, but I'm not sure how to work that into the analogy.;-)
The kid has now hired muscle and is charging people to feed the ducks at the local park. To be fair, he wasn't the first kid to try this--just the wealthiest. Also, you do have to admit that he did work his way up from the bottom.
Still though, he's become a pretty vindictive bastard ever since he went into loan sharking. I hear that Uncle Sam up the road owes him a fortune and now the kid wants it back. I guess the Sam's shouldn't have bought that pool, their boat and that new 4 wheel drive.
That can't be true!!! I have the right to swing my fists about wildly within millimeters of anyones face as long as I don't hit them!! If that right is taken away, especially when used in the midst of a truculent crowd, then whither liberty!?!
At least Zuckerberg knows whether what he is saying is the truth or not. All the people here who post definitively that he was only in it to make money are just giving their gut feeling and they cannot possibly be basing it on fact.
The facts we know are that Zuckerberg has made his fortune on selling Facebook users up the marketing river. That speaks to his character, and many people will conclude from his actions--not without some justification--that he lacks credibility in matters of truth.
I realise it may come as a shock to some, but just because you've done nothing legally wrong doesn't mean people will be inclined to think you're very trustworthy. PR will only take you so (very) far before people start connecting the dots.
Yes, and this is done by denying people their rights. It's much cheaper to pay a rent-a-judge to deliver the verdict you'd prefer; I'm not disputing that. But my position is that this is an illegitimate system, and is essentially lawlessness in a pinstriped suit.
Also please note that the KBR case is a bit of an oddity.
It was the purest form of arbitration. The whole rotten system was laid bare for the world to see just how corrupt it really was, and exactly what its true purpose is. There are numerous examples of companies having people signaway their rights with smallprint mines in contracts. It's fraud, and the financial system once again leads the way, with credit card contracts being rife with these crooked mandatory binding arbitration clauses.
The problem was that there was (and really is) no Iraqi justice system to go to.
So where there is no law, we must rely on private industry to make its own. No. Never. Better no law at all than a corporate one--and that's not hyperbole!
Arbitration is essentially a system of parallel, private courts run by corporations, for corporations and for the express purpose of denying justice and avoiding the laws of the land. It's an absolutely corrupt system and should not be allowed to exist in any form whatsoever. Allowing seemingly innocuous instances of this practice has lead to private companies forcing rape victims to give up their rights. Corporation employees can abuse people in any way they please and can rely on their own private courts to avoid any reprecussions. Judges support this creeping privatisation of the judiciary as they are rewarded with handsome salaries as the private magistrates of these twisted courts.
Around the time of the Jamie Leigh Jones rape arbitration scandal, I remember speaking with someone in management about arbitration--I live in Ireland. He claimed that the trend in business--magazines, conferences and so on--was pushing arbitration heavily. As the "modern" way of doing business. The conversation sent a chill down my spine. The laws of my country and the people in it were being put in dire jeopardy, our legal protections being replaced right under our noses by this latest innovation in American savagery. At least I live in the EU; I can only imagine what must be occurring in Latin America or indeed the US itself.
Arbitration is lawlessness. It is rule by the powerful over the weak. It's not even a form of order, as arbitration courts have no strict rules, no obligation to consider precedent, no means of appeal, and are not even obliged to publish their rulings, let alone have an open court. The North Koreans have a more enlightened legal system--and again that is not hyperbole. Any society that accepts the rule of such courts has abandoned all pretence of justice and equality and has turned the clock back a thousand years before even the Magna Carta. And no other society should follow them down the path to ruin.
The best way to combat terrorism, is to not react with terror.
Terror? The United States threw a petulant fit in response to the attacks on Septermber 11th 2001 and even ten years later continues to become piqued at even the slightest suggestion that maybe, just maybe, the entire country completely overreacted to a single event.
Terrorism has nothing to do with it. The 9/11 hijackers were mass psychologists and they quite literally changed the entire world in a single day. What terrifies me is not what modern terrorists can actually do physically, but rather what kind sociological and cultural aftershocks their actions will cause in the age of 24-hour, digital hysteria.
However, these were documents that put a large number of other American and Australian (and probably British and other nationalities) peoples in danger.
Perhaps; but to no greater degree than the civilian casulatilites which are factored into most of the Pentagon's daily operations. If NATO can't take the heat of a few leaks, they should get out of the kitchen.
The Monty Hall problem and its delinquent cousin the Tuesday Boy problem are genuinely difficult because the answer is highly dependent on the way that the question is posed.
0.9999...=1 is not genuinely difficult because at the end of the day it's a very informal statement about adding an infinite number of decimals, and the only real controversy about the statement exists among 4chan trolls and Wikipedia users. Most who don't understand don't care and most who do understand also don't care.
The only people with a problem are the people who don't understand but still care, but then that's the problem with most topics these days.
Handheld calculators have consistently disappointed me. Those that graph do so poorly. Those with complex functions make them all but impossible to use. Apart from statistics, there is not the slightest whiff of anything resembling a special function of any kind, and anything more advanced that acosh is basically nonexistant. Is it too much to ask for a bessel function to be built in somewhere?
Some machines have matrix support, but it's generally shockingly poor sometimes restricted to 3x3 matrices and generally lacking anything above an inversion operation--if that. A lot waste resources on pie chart/spreadsheet software which is wasted on business and accounting students who are just going to end up using excel anyway; The addition of image support on some recent models simply adds insult to injury on this front.
I could go on for hours, but I'll just add the one item that bothers me the most.
Complex Numbers.
It's 2010. People have mp3 players with more computing power that the Cray-1. Is it too much to ask that scientific calculators support complex numbers natively? There are still some models with over 500 functions and no complex number support! Even those models which do generally make i all but inaccessible; necessitating at best a second function shift and at worst a mode change to input or sometimes even view this most elementary of entities. Is it really so much to ask--in the 21st century--that when I input sqrt(-1) into my calculator that I get something other than MATH ERROR. There's no math error or even a maths error. There's a calculator error for having put in a square root function without considering complex numbers!!
Going back to the main story: Curved keyboard designs are appalling and Casio need to get with the program and make a better "=/ANS" button make their bracket buttons larger a la Sharp and TI. In conclusion I'd like to buy at least one calculator before I die that was a substantial improvement on the one I purchased in 1997.
The fact that the intrinsic worth of content has gone down to almost zero.
Sure, you can argue about how hard people have to work to produce content, etc, etc. But sooner or later the whole world is going to have to wake up to the fact that the complete works of William Shakespeare take up less than 2MB, and this is only going to get worse. Sooner or later, a complete list of all Paramount pictures will fit in a single portable hard drive and will be transmittable over a home internet connection in less than a day. It doesn't matter what legal, ethical, commerical or social system you put in place against this. Eventually, your system will buckle under the sheer weight of what the new digital reality has done to the distribution of content.
This isn't an argument for or against piracy or bloggers freeloading off news. It's an argument for why content such as news is increasingly becoming something people don't see it worth paying for. And I understand the paradox here: it now costs more to make content--even something as cheap as news--than it does to distribute it to the entire world.
Advertising can pay for the distribution no problem, but there is probably no existing commercial model left which can pay for the content. If you can't profit on something that you're distributing to the entire world, the game is up.
Society has spoken; it's not willing to pay for commercial news, either directly or through advertising. We could switch to a subsidized or public service model of news, or have no news at all. But commercial news services are about to become increasingly scant (not that they weren't becoming so anyway). People are not going to pay for a newspaper that has less data than one of their friends facebook pictures. People might not like to hear this, but this is where the almost zero cost of data has taken us.
If you have enough lawyers and a weak enough legal system, you can stop anyone doing just about anything. From here, it's a short step to actually getting anyone to do whatever you want.
, and X-2 was a joke (please stop making intrepid adventurers act like tween girls, it's insulting to everyone except tween girls)
FFX-2 was not made for tween-girls. It was made for people who like to look at girls in revealing dresses. And for the record, this did not change the fact that it was probably one of the most fun and enjoyable RPGs to be released in years--and not because of the revealing dresses either. Once you get over the farcical setting, it's a great game.
I'm not going to pretend that the FF series hasn't launched some beached whales over the years (FFVIII I'm looking at you), but in general they've usually delivered an enjoyable 50+ hour adventure. Though I've noticed a secular trend towards younger and younger characters and ever more angsty or shallower storylines; or maybe I'm just getting old. It would be nice to get an RPG built for an older demographic every now and again--and no, playing a walking camera in a prescripted world of D20 stats does not count. I want a video game, not a game on a computer.
As an academic, I can tell you that there is almost nothing serious to be found on the Internet whatsoever. At best, you get pop science pages and at worst the pureed bedlam of a wiki trip. Real learning simply cannot take place online. Sometimes you will come across the odd page, usually written by a geeky expert, but in general the internet is a vast intellectual wasteland devoid of substantial content.
The internet is for communication, not for learning.
Slashdot Mirror
You more than likely did study this in college. This involves linear algebra, specifically the inversion of matrices and/or solving linear system. Ax=b, where A is an mxn matrix, and x and b are nx1 and mx1 vectors respectively. What we'd like to do is solve for x using x=A^-1 b, where A^-1 is an inverse matrix of some kind. But getting the inverse is a notoriously difficult problem.
In fact, a large reason digital computers were invented at all was so that "large" matrices could be inverted. And by large, I mean 12x12 matrices (keep in mind this was the 1950s). Computer games, mp3 players, spreadsheets and the internet are all quite incidental byproducts of humanities quest to invert ever larger matrices, in less time. Though just about any half way sophisticated piece of software will invert a matrix at some point.
The reason for this is as follows: When human beings want to solve any difficult problem, they approximate it with a linear model and solve the associated linear system. Hence the ability to solve linear systems quickly and accurately is of fundamental importance. This goes double in the modern world as we increasingly rely on the ability of computers to handle ever larger linear system--that is, to invert ever larger matrices.
The biggest problem with matrices, say nxn matrices, is that the time taken for solving them by Gauss elimination goes up as 0(n^3). So while your desktop could probably invert a 1000x1000 matrix in a few seconds, it would take a year invert a million x million matrix, and would take around a million years to invert a billion x billion matrix. (Not that it could store either in memory). While Gauss elimination is a pretty poor algorithm efficiency-wise, this issues are unavoidable for general matrices.
However, most matrices we actually want to invert in practice are "sparse" or "diagonally dominant". The first property means that most of the elements are zero. So in a billion x billion matrix, instead of storing 10^18 numbers, you'd only have to store a few billion. Diagonally dominant means that largest entries are along the diagonal. Both of these mean you can take a lot of--often hueristic--shortcuts in your inversion algorithims to cut down on time.
These researchers claim O(s*log(s)^2) complexity for such systems. I suspect there are probably a lot of O(s^2*log(s)) system or the like anyway, but even still this is a nice improvement. I doubt it's as big a breakthrough--I suspect this is hyped anyway--but if it is an improvement you can kind of compare this to something like the Fast Fourier Transform speedup. Again, I doubt it's that large of an improvement.
I'll finish by mentioning that this all falls under the umbrella of Linear Algebra, which is an absolutely essential skill of higher mathematics, and computational mathematics. Any geeks who prides themselves on their mathematical ability, but doesn't know their linear algebra (linear systems, the four fundamental subspaces, eigenvectors/values, rotation/transformation matrices, etc) shouldn't be holding their skills in such high regard. If you don't know your LA, or have forgotten, one of the best places to start is to watch Gilbert Strang's online lecture series provided by MIT. These lectures are indispensable to anyone working with linear systems. After this, those who need in depth analysis of matrix algorithms should turn to something like "Matrix Algorithms" by G. W. Stewart which goes into more detail and shows the more canonical algorithms. A little knowledge of linear algebra goes a long way in mathematics.
...Or failing all that, you could just open up MATLAB... or Octave. I recommend the educational route first though.
Whatever. The post box will be overflowing with flyers from consumer electronics sites, DVD/Game rentals, fast food deliveries, and geeky merchandising outfits long before the first porn leaflet gets a look in.
It's not a weird idea. It's the truth.
"China can best be understood as a large, well-run business" - Google CEO, Eric Schmidt.
Which isn't to contradict the rest of the points in your post. But it's important to realise that you're not doing business within individual Chinese companies or even industrial sectors. You're doing business with the single largest mega-conglomerate in the history of the world, and quite possibly most science-fiction. What is needed is not so much a change in foreign policy, as a change in economic thought to deal with or at least understand this entirely new socio-economic entity.
Looks like someone needs to update their dictionary. The OPs statement is contemporarily correct
terrorism-noun (tu'ur'ism)
1. the use of violence to to kill, maim, or upset fine Americans or people fine Americans like.
2. the property of being muslim.
3. the act of doing something I don't approve of.
3. the act of being something I don't approve of.
The kid has now hired muscle and is charging people to feed the ducks at the local park. To be fair, he wasn't the first kid to try this--just the wealthiest. Also, you do have to admit that he did work his way up from the bottom.
Still though, he's become a pretty vindictive bastard ever since he went into loan sharking. I hear that Uncle Sam up the road owes him a fortune and now the kid wants it back. I guess the Sam's shouldn't have bought that pool, their boat and that new 4 wheel drive.
That can't be true!!! I have the right to swing my fists about wildly within millimeters of anyones face as long as I don't hit them!! If that right is taken away, especially when used in the midst of a truculent crowd, then whither liberty!?!
Help, Help! We're being repressed!
Unless you're from Wall Street.
The facts we know are that Zuckerberg has made his fortune on selling Facebook users up the marketing river. That speaks to his character, and many people will conclude from his actions--not without some justification--that he lacks credibility in matters of truth.
I realise it may come as a shock to some, but just because you've done nothing legally wrong doesn't mean people will be inclined to think you're very trustworthy. PR will only take you so (very) far before people start connecting the dots.
And now, at long last, the Year of the Linux Desktop is at hand.
Yes, and this is done by denying people their rights. It's much cheaper to pay a rent-a-judge to deliver the verdict you'd prefer; I'm not disputing that. But my position is that this is an illegitimate system, and is essentially lawlessness in a pinstriped suit.
It was the purest form of arbitration. The whole rotten system was laid bare for the world to see just how corrupt it really was, and exactly what its true purpose is. There are numerous examples of companies having people signaway their rights with smallprint mines in contracts. It's fraud, and the financial system once again leads the way, with credit card contracts being rife with these crooked mandatory binding arbitration clauses.
So where there is no law, we must rely on private industry to make its own. No. Never. Better no law at all than a corporate one--and that's not hyperbole!
So is any con game. Victims are willingly tricked into deals designed to hurt them. But that's not enough to make it legal, let alone ethical.
Arbitration is essentially a system of parallel, private courts run by corporations, for corporations and for the express purpose of denying justice and avoiding the laws of the land. It's an absolutely corrupt system and should not be allowed to exist in any form whatsoever. Allowing seemingly innocuous instances of this practice has lead to private companies forcing rape victims to give up their rights. Corporation employees can abuse people in any way they please and can rely on their own private courts to avoid any reprecussions. Judges support this creeping privatisation of the judiciary as they are rewarded with handsome salaries as the private magistrates of these twisted courts.
Around the time of the Jamie Leigh Jones rape arbitration scandal, I remember speaking with someone in management about arbitration--I live in Ireland. He claimed that the trend in business--magazines, conferences and so on--was pushing arbitration heavily. As the "modern" way of doing business. The conversation sent a chill down my spine. The laws of my country and the people in it were being put in dire jeopardy, our legal protections being replaced right under our noses by this latest innovation in American savagery. At least I live in the EU; I can only imagine what must be occurring in Latin America or indeed the US itself.
Arbitration is lawlessness. It is rule by the powerful over the weak. It's not even a form of order, as arbitration courts have no strict rules, no obligation to consider precedent, no means of appeal, and are not even obliged to publish their rulings, let alone have an open court. The North Koreans have a more enlightened legal system--and again that is not hyperbole. Any society that accepts the rule of such courts has abandoned all pretence of justice and equality and has turned the clock back a thousand years before even the Magna Carta. And no other society should follow them down the path to ruin.
Terror? The United States threw a petulant fit in response to the attacks on Septermber 11th 2001 and even ten years later continues to become piqued at even the slightest suggestion that maybe, just maybe, the entire country completely overreacted to a single event.
Terrorism has nothing to do with it. The 9/11 hijackers were mass psychologists and they quite literally changed the entire world in a single day. What terrifies me is not what modern terrorists can actually do physically, but rather what kind sociological and cultural aftershocks their actions will cause in the age of 24-hour, digital hysteria.
Perhaps; but to no greater degree than the civilian casulatilites which are factored into most of the Pentagon's daily operations. If NATO can't take the heat of a few leaks, they should get out of the kitchen.
The Monty Hall problem and its delinquent cousin the Tuesday Boy problem are genuinely difficult because the answer is highly dependent on the way that the question is posed.
0.9999...=1 is not genuinely difficult because at the end of the day it's a very informal statement about adding an infinite number of decimals, and the only real controversy about the statement exists among 4chan trolls and Wikipedia users. Most who don't understand don't care and most who do understand also don't care.
The only people with a problem are the people who don't understand but still care, but then that's the problem with most topics these days.
Because they never hire lawyers to exercise them.
Handheld calculators have consistently disappointed me. Those that graph do so poorly. Those with complex functions make them all but impossible to use. Apart from statistics, there is not the slightest whiff of anything resembling a special function of any kind, and anything more advanced that acosh is basically nonexistant. Is it too much to ask for a bessel function to be built in somewhere?
Some machines have matrix support, but it's generally shockingly poor sometimes restricted to 3x3 matrices and generally lacking anything above an inversion operation--if that. A lot waste resources on pie chart/spreadsheet software which is wasted on business and accounting students who are just going to end up using excel anyway; The addition of image support on some recent models simply adds insult to injury on this front.
I could go on for hours, but I'll just add the one item that bothers me the most.
Complex Numbers.
It's 2010. People have mp3 players with more computing power that the Cray-1. Is it too much to ask that scientific calculators support complex numbers natively? There are still some models with over 500 functions and no complex number support! Even those models which do generally make i all but inaccessible; necessitating at best a second function shift and at worst a mode change to input or sometimes even view this most elementary of entities. Is it really so much to ask--in the 21st century--that when I input sqrt(-1) into my calculator that I get something other than MATH ERROR. There's no math error or even a maths error. There's a calculator error for having put in a square root function without considering complex numbers!!
Going back to the main story: Curved keyboard designs are appalling and Casio need to get with the program and make a better "=/ANS" button make their bracket buttons larger a la Sharp and TI. In conclusion I'd like to buy at least one calculator before I die that was a substantial improvement on the one I purchased in 1997.
That great space frontier novel has already been written.
And nothing will protect any of them from the server logs.
The fact that the intrinsic worth of content has gone down to almost zero.
Sure, you can argue about how hard people have to work to produce content, etc, etc. But sooner or later the whole world is going to have to wake up to the fact that the complete works of William Shakespeare take up less than 2MB, and this is only going to get worse. Sooner or later, a complete list of all Paramount pictures will fit in a single portable hard drive and will be transmittable over a home internet connection in less than a day. It doesn't matter what legal, ethical, commerical or social system you put in place against this. Eventually, your system will buckle under the sheer weight of what the new digital reality has done to the distribution of content.
This isn't an argument for or against piracy or bloggers freeloading off news. It's an argument for why content such as news is increasingly becoming something people don't see it worth paying for. And I understand the paradox here: it now costs more to make content--even something as cheap as news--than it does to distribute it to the entire world.
Advertising can pay for the distribution no problem, but there is probably no existing commercial model left which can pay for the content. If you can't profit on something that you're distributing to the entire world, the game is up.
Society has spoken; it's not willing to pay for commercial news, either directly or through advertising. We could switch to a subsidized or public service model of news, or have no news at all. But commercial news services are about to become increasingly scant (not that they weren't becoming so anyway). People are not going to pay for a newspaper that has less data than one of their friends facebook pictures. People might not like to hear this, but this is where the almost zero cost of data has taken us.
And nothing of value is lost.
Or they'll just use it to remove rude gestures, nose rings and nipples, in a visual analogue to profanity bleeps. Welcome to the world of tomorrow.
If you have enough lawyers and a weak enough legal system, you can stop anyone doing just about anything. From here, it's a short step to actually getting anyone to do whatever you want.
FFX-2 was not made for tween-girls. It was made for people who like to look at girls in revealing dresses. And for the record, this did not change the fact that it was probably one of the most fun and enjoyable RPGs to be released in years--and not because of the revealing dresses either. Once you get over the farcical setting, it's a great game.
I'm not going to pretend that the FF series hasn't launched some beached whales over the years (FFVIII I'm looking at you), but in general they've usually delivered an enjoyable 50+ hour adventure. Though I've noticed a secular trend towards younger and younger characters and ever more angsty or shallower storylines; or maybe I'm just getting old. It would be nice to get an RPG built for an older demographic every now and again--and no, playing a walking camera in a prescripted world of D20 stats does not count. I want a video game, not a game on a computer.
As an academic, I can tell you that there is almost nothing serious to be found on the Internet whatsoever. At best, you get pop science pages and at worst the pureed bedlam of a wiki trip. Real learning simply cannot take place online. Sometimes you will come across the odd page, usually written by a geeky expert, but in general the internet is a vast intellectual wasteland devoid of substantial content.
The internet is for communication, not for learning.