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The Cult of the NDA:

To all those entrepreneurs with innovative, unique business ideas who want to capitalize on them before someone else does, I have one piece of advice: Get over it.

Written 10 years ago; still just a relevant today.

for last 5 years same shit gets posted over and over again - Cheap solar panals
5 years later - in some cases panels went up in price

Whine whine whine. It's been going on for much longer than 5 years. When I was in 5th grade, I did a report on PV electricity, and I read numerous reports that PV panels could be much cheaper soon.

Truth is, all those funky predictions were right. Solar power HAS been dropping very steadily and very predictably all along in its own version of Moore's law - PV prices drop about 6% per year per watt, cutting in half every 10.5 years. It's not dropping like a stone, but it's very predictable and very steady.

What's been going on the last 5 years? Simple: supply and demand. For many reasons, people have become wary of using fossil fuels and are willing to invest more into solar, causing a sudden, worldwide deficiency in production capacity. Low-cost production companies like Nano-Solar are ramping up production literally as fast as they are physically able.

For example, Nano-Solar has, for all intents and purposes, unlimited funding, and has already sold out several years worth of production, even that which is not actually happening yet. They are buying huge rafts of warehouse space in the Bay Area, in what used to be automotive manufacturing areas.

So the laws of supply and demand are working their magic, even though the response isn't instant. Your children will bask in a society powered by cheap solar electricity that you are funding right now, just as you benefit from the electrical power infrastructure built by your parents.

Maybe you should take a look at these graphs: http://www.frozennorth.org/C197109377/E20080427143258/index.html

Interesting graph, that little hook back up starting around 2003 suggests that the drastic increase in oil prices over the last 5 years or so which 'magically' made solar more competitive was enough to actually reduce the rate of efficiency improvements.

I would like to see a graph that also included price per watt for oil too, although I doubt that information (versus watts from the generic "grid" which includes non-oil sources) is easy to get.

We've seen this with so many things, including solar cells - Constant assurance that they are getting cheaper easier to make, more efficient, etc; people ranting about how it is finally feasible and will be seen in mass quantities soon... yet we still don't.

Maybe you should take a look at these graphs: http://www.frozennorth.org/C197109377/E20080427143258/index.html and http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2008/12/387-world-photovoltaic-pv-production.html

Photovoltaics have followed a Moore's Law-like trend. It's just that instead of prices halving every 18 months, they halve every 11 years. See http://www.frozennorth.org/C197109377/E20080427143258/index.html for a graph. While the trend is exponential, it's just a slower exponential.

Wikipedia isn't immune from mistakes. Then again, neither is Encyclopedia Brittancia.

• .."why should I trust Wikipedia, it's written by random people"?
• .."there's been a successful experiment of inserting false information..."
• "the neutral point of view doesn't work"
• "it's just an encyclopedia .."

Please read this:

Wikipedia has now hit another quantitative milestone (we reached 500,000 articles in the same year). It is now clear that volunteers can build a free, structured information resource which rivals all such proprietary resources. This is an accomplishment of immense importance, but it is not the end goal.

Article review

Wikipedia is not perfect yet. But from day one, we've been thinking about and tinkering with quality control mechanisms. The one which is currently in active use is the Featured Article Candidates nomination process as well as the Votes for deletion negative equivalent. There's also a peer review page which is in active use.

These are just trial balloons. They're not the end product, the peer review process which we need. There's a WikiProject Fact and Reference Check formed to explore a review system centered around individual factual statements in an article. I have also proposed such a system. There's also an article rating system that is currently in the CVS version of MediaWiki, our free wiki software.

We are all aware of the problem, and we all know that we have to fix this problem before Wikipedia can be a trusted authority. Doing this kind of systematic quality review will require the same level of dedication and effort as creating the encyclopedia in the first place. But we will do it, and not too far from now you will read "1000 reviewed articles", "10000 reviewed articles" announcements, and so on. And this review will be more in-depth than the review process of any traditional encyclopedia, because it will be done by thousands of volunteers from all political and religious persuasions.

There will always be an unstable edition of Wikipedia where you can go to read the latest information, with a big caveat lector sign on the front door. But we will also build a stable edition which we will distribute to the entire planet.

Neutrality

The Neutral Point of View is our guiding principle. However, that does not mean that it is the only way to write articles. Because Wikipedia's content is free, you can take it and start a fork that is written using a different methodology.

There's Wikinfo, which presents a "sympathetic point of view" on the main article, and critical views on separate pages. There's Disinfopedia and dKosopedia, which makes use of some of our content and develop it from a political/progressive perspective.

We will support dynamic cross-project transclusion of our content so that it will be easy to set up a project fork with a different policy. Wikipedia will always be the largest knowledge repository, but if you want the "truth" from a particular point of view, you will be able to consult a resource that is written by people who share that point of view. You can start such a fork right now if you want to - just download the database and get going.

It's more than an encyclopedia

The Wikimedia Foundation currently operates Wikip

Wikipedia is not what many casual Web surfers think it is.

It's not the online version of an established, well-researched traditional encyclopedia. Instead, Wikipedia is a do-it-yourself encyclopedia, without any credentials. The Wikipedia is not an authoritative source. It even states this in their disclaimer on their Web site.

It's fairly easy toinsert misleading and false information into Wiki. Don't use it like as a replacement for an encyclopedia, or a properly vetted secondary source, unless you're an idiot.

Just a small question then what will stop people from disasembling the code and figuring it out anyway? Also take a gander at this artical nda. It sums up what you are currently putting us through.

Also many eyes make bugs shallow. Dont you guys want that? It would save you LOADS of money. Also you need to remind the people you signed the nda with that people WILL figure it out any if it is usefull enough. They are only protecting an interface. An open interface helps everyone and closed ones lead to drivers that do not work in the next version. Ask yourself this question there are hundreds of network drivers out there (open source), is ours reaaaaaaaaly that unique?