evilnight

Mobile is extremely important. A lot of low-income families have no other way to access the internet - they can't afford computers or tablets. Finding a way to get Reading Rainbow onto low end mobile devices should be on your list for the same reasons you intend to subsidize low-income schools. It'll be tricky, those devices don't give you much to work with in terms of phone features, storage space, and screen real-estate. It'll be your hardest implementation target.

I hope you're planning some kind of on-the-go model for the data. Burning up minutes with a live connection to RR gets expensive for people on cheap plans. If someone can just cache a couple of books or videos for later when they are near a wifi hotspot it'll reduce their cost to access considerably.

I'd also like to make another suggestion - encourage kids to write their own stories and share them through your service. It would be pretty awesome for some kid in France to be reading a story written by another kid in Brazil.

I find that this wonderful short story elucidates all of those concepts in a much more meaningful way than the technical talks and usual singularity nerd circlejerking.

That was the problem a decade ago, however it has been solved. Hastelloy-N for the pipes and a more careful regulation of the salt mixtures brings the corrosion down to negligible levels.

In a nutshell, the only barriers to thorium-based power are politics, red tape, and the inertia of the current nuclear power industry. There are no engineering barriers left. NONE. We just need to find the will to build them.

Then they are wrong. In fact, the wikipedia article most of them were citing got a thorough cleanup and debunking. The papers cited for that section tell you everything you need to know. I seem to remember that there were a lot of armchair physicists saying there were too many problems with the design, but whenever a nuclear engineer weighed in on the subject they were highly optimistic.

Bottom line, there are no showstoppers. There is also no way to make further progress without building them - we're done with the drawing board. These need to be built, operated, and studied so we can identify the optimal design elements and identify what has been overlooked so far. Luckily there are several companies building pilots right now.

You might enjoy After Life. It's longer, and a bit of a slow starter that doesn't really get going until around part ten. That said, it's a fun and very creative story.

There's also They're Made Out Of Meat! Short, funny, but a little depressing. :P