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Assuming you're an American, how would the US switching to the metric system enhance your life?

Most of the benefits would be economic and mostly indirect. There would be less overhead for commerce and less need to buy redundant tooling, gauges, etc. Engineers could spend time doing useful work instead of pointless unit conversions. There is a very real and measurable cost which is in the billions of dollars annually. The economy is global and the US is incurring a pointless and unnecessary cost by not using metric which hurts our global competitiveness.

How would I notice? I wouldn't have to buy needless tooling for my company or for myself. I wouldn't have to waste time doing pointless and costly unit conversions. Virtually all our raw materials my company buys are produced outside the US so I would have to waste a lot less time making our engineering and production systems compatible. I wouldn't have to have two sets of gauges on my car's speedometer. I wouldn't have to have a measuring cup with 12 different arbitrary units to measure liquid. I wouldn't have to pay extra to have Fahrenheit on my thermometers unless I really needed it. I wouldn't need lookup tables in my cookbooks for units. I wouldn't have to wonder if the price of fuel is high when I visit Canada and the gasoline is sold in liters.

There obviously would be substantial up front costs to the switch and indirect benefits are hard to sell to anyone in the US. But we are paying huge amounts of money to use a system that is poorly compatible with 95% of the world's population.

Cost per gram of fuel tells you absolutely nothing.

If anti-matter becomes a viable fuel source (very likely to not happen), the cost would probably be astronomical per gram.

1 gram of methanol gives you 5,420 calories/gram

1 gram of anti-matter gives you 2 × 10^13 calories/gram - and that's with a 50% energy loss! Just for kicks - that's enough to heat a cubic kilometer of water 21K. Or 1 cubic mile of water 5K.

That means that even if Methanol cost 1 cent per kg (5,420,000 calories/cent), anti-matter "only" needs to cost 39,600 dollars per gram to give you the same amount of energy/dollar. And considering the savings you'd get from not having to haul all that extra weight around (fuel tank, fuel, distribution of it etc), I wouldn't be too surprised if 400,000$/gram would be an acceptable cost.

Ask NASA what they'd consider an acceptable cost/gram if anti-matter was a viable fuel. I'm guessing they'd be willing to go for tens if not hundreds of millions per gram.

I don't know if this is still the case, but 10+ years ago California State University Stanislaus had a very well respected AI/NN program. Maybe look around their site or email them to get some suggestions?

I would liken it more to the chemical processes used to develop the film.

Take for example the simpler black and white processing method, since I have enough experience with it to speak about it knowledgably. D76 is a well-documented (but not obvious) recipe of chemicals, but Kodak also sells it. What Nikon is doing would be analogous to Kodak saying you must use only Kodak's branded D76 with your Kodak film taken in your Kodak camera, and protecting the recipe for the D76 with some sort of crazy law (not a patent) that makes it illegal to try to reproduce that very simple chemical recipe to develop the used roll of film into useful negatives.

Computer-related laws rarely make any sense when applied to anything else.

I gathered data on daily stock market returns on 5000 companies listed in Standard and Poor's listing of U.S. publicly traded companies.

I normalized then crunched the data through a fractal analysis tool that quantified the level of chaos (randomness) in the changes of each company's stock market value from one day to the next.

I understand the professors studied the data to determine any correlation between each company's chaos metric and the company's eventual bankruptcy.

Now, IANAM* and I have never read any of the resulting research papers, so I cannot tell you many details of the professors' findings.

However, I understand that the hypothesis was that changes in market value characterized by a high amount of chaos (randomness) would correlate to a robust, or healthy business model, just as the life sciences have found that a high degree of chaos correlates with a healthy system. As business managers' actions become constrained by the costs of bankruptcy, so the theory goes, the daily variation in stock market returns become less and less random.

I do recall that they did find a correlation between eventual bankruptcy and suppressed chaos. However, I seem to recall they also found a correlation between a successful turnaround and suppressed chaos.

I guess (IIRC) you could say that suppressed levels of chaos could be a predictor of future business distress, but not necessarily of future business failure.

A list of the research supported by the fractal study follows:

Lindsay, D.H. and A. Campbell. A Fractal Approach to Bankruptcy
Prediction. Business Research Yearbook: Global Business
Perspectives, (2), 1995, 13-17.

Lindsay, D.H. and A. Campbell. The Effect of Deregulation Upon
the Chaotic Properties of Stock Market Time Series Returns.
Business Research Yearbook: Global Business Perspectives, (3),
1996, 13-17.

Lindsay, D.H. and A. Campbell. A Chaos Approach to Bankruptcy
Prediction. Journal of Applied Business Research, (12)4, Fall,
1996, 1-9.

Lindsay, D.H. and Campbell, A. The Effect of Changes in
Proportional Institutional Ownership upon the Chaotic Properties
of Stock Market Time Series Returns. Business Research Yearbook:
Global Business Perspectives, (4), 1997, 267-271.

Lindsay, D.H. and Campbell, A. Beta and the Chaotic Properties of Time Series Returns. Business Research Yearbook: Global Business Perspective, (5), 1998, 7-11.

Lindsay, D.H. and Campbell, A. Public Pension Funds: The Effect of Negative Public Announcements on Chaotic Properties of Returns Business Research Yearbook: Global Business Perspective, (6), 1999,

Lindsay, D.H. and Campbell, A. Risk and Financial Distress: A New Approach, Business Research Yearbook: Global Business Perspective, (7), 2000,

*IANAM - I am not a mathematician. (I am an accountant. Accountants don't need math. We have tables.)

I gathered data on daily stock market returns on 5000 companies listed in Standard and Poor's listing of U.S. publicly traded companies.

I normalized then crunched the data through a fractal analysis tool that quantified the level of chaos (randomness) in the changes of each company's stock market value from one day to the next.

I understand the professors studied the data to determine any correlation between each company's chaos metric and the company's eventual bankruptcy.

Now, IANAM* and I have never read any of the resulting research papers, so I cannot tell you many details of the professors' findings.

However, I understand that the hypothesis was that changes in market value characterized by a high amount of chaos (randomness) would correlate to a robust, or healthy business model, just as the life sciences have found that a high degree of chaos correlates with a healthy system. As business managers' actions become constrained by the costs of bankruptcy, so the theory goes, the daily variation in stock market returns become less and less random.

I do recall that they did find a correlation between eventual bankruptcy and suppressed chaos. However, I seem to recall they also found a correlation between a successful turnaround and suppressed chaos.

I guess (IIRC) you could say that suppressed levels of chaos could be a predictor of future business distress, but not necessarily of future business failure.

A list of the research supported by the fractal study follows:

Lindsay, D.H. and A. Campbell. A Fractal Approach to Bankruptcy
Prediction. Business Research Yearbook: Global Business
Perspectives, (2), 1995, 13-17.

Lindsay, D.H. and A. Campbell. The Effect of Deregulation Upon
the Chaotic Properties of Stock Market Time Series Returns.
Business Research Yearbook: Global Business Perspectives, (3),
1996, 13-17.

Lindsay, D.H. and A. Campbell. A Chaos Approach to Bankruptcy
Prediction. Journal of Applied Business Research, (12)4, Fall,
1996, 1-9.

Lindsay, D.H. and Campbell, A. The Effect of Changes in
Proportional Institutional Ownership upon the Chaotic Properties
of Stock Market Time Series Returns. Business Research Yearbook:
Global Business Perspectives, (4), 1997, 267-271.

Lindsay, D.H. and Campbell, A. Beta and the Chaotic Properties of Time Series Returns. Business Research Yearbook: Global Business Perspective, (5), 1998, 7-11.

Lindsay, D.H. and Campbell, A. Public Pension Funds: The Effect of Negative Public Announcements on Chaotic Properties of Returns Business Research Yearbook: Global Business Perspective, (6), 1999,

Lindsay, D.H. and Campbell, A. Risk and Financial Distress: A New Approach, Business Research Yearbook: Global Business Perspective, (7), 2000,

*IANAM - I am not a mathematician. (I am an accountant. Accountants don't need math. We have tables.)

It also has been reported to work on Thinkpad T600. It does it well enough so that XMMS will resume playing were it was. I have not tried it yet because the battery is dead.

My general impression is that APM works well ACPI is buggy but fixable. ACPI reminds me of Winmodems. The bugs are in all systems, though you can disable them in Linux and have hardware that works. We shall see if having a vendor in the works makes things better. I bet it does. I've had at least one machine where all sorts of problems vanished with an ACPI bios upgrade.

Does a borate ion normally take the shape of a swastika???

Yes.

This is a well documented (not by IBM though) problem with the ThinkPad 600 series. I have two worthless batteries sitting in my closet. Also, I seem to remember reading that this model does not fare well when Linux is installed, i.e. the battery dies even quicker. Here are some links you should check out. here here, and here.

just picked one of these up the other day. got 2.4.20 w/ apm in kernel running on it. set up a script to monitor its power consumption, and just let it sit for most of a day. discharged normally from 96% to 37%, then dropped to 5% over the course of 1 minute and ticked down to 1% before i shut it down and recharged it. so, the first theory was, well, its a 6 cell pack, perhaps 2 of the cells are going bad (resulting in ~32% or 1/3 of the 'available' charge going away), but since then, i've used it 2 more times, where i've run it down quite a bit, and the 'big drop' point seems to be getting lower (aka last time i checked, it went from 34% to 5%, which isn't great, but if the trend continues, the battery will seem to 'recover').
time to karma whore:
Another Thinkpad 600 users' battery stories
excerpts from the linux mailing list about the problem
and another users overview of the battery problem on the thinkpad 600
apmiser which you can get with tpctl will help your batteries last longer while you're on the road (note: you'll need APM support in the kernel to use'em)
Tips for better life out of LiIon batteries

just picked one of these up the other day. got 2.4.20 w/ apm in kernel running on it. set up a script to monitor its power consumption, and just let it sit for most of a day. discharged normally from 96% to 37%, then dropped to 5% over the course of 1 minute and ticked down to 1% before i shut it down and recharged it. so, the first theory was, well, its a 6 cell pack, perhaps 2 of the cells are going bad (resulting in ~32% or 1/3 of the 'available' charge going away), but since then, i've used it 2 more times, where i've run it down quite a bit, and the 'big drop' point seems to be getting lower (aka last time i checked, it went from 34% to 5%, which isn't great, but if the trend continues, the battery will seem to 'recover').
time to karma whore:
Another Thinkpad 600 users' battery stories
excerpts from the linux mailing list about the problem
and another users overview of the battery problem on the thinkpad 600
apmiser which you can get with tpctl will help your batteries last longer while you're on the road (note: you'll need APM support in the kernel to use'em)
Tips for better life out of LiIon batteries

If you are talking analog tv-> The bandwidth it is broadcasted in is about 5 Megaherz which leads to 10mbit/seconds of data. In you calculation you just proved it is almost inpossible to capture any broadcast stream with standard pc hardware, which is just incorrect.

( how cable works)

To capture a 10 mbit stream and compress it without stutters is still hard, but not impossible. don't buy an usb solution for this!

Actually, I was watching something on Animal Planet (I think?) last night that featured the Grasshopper mouse, also known as the Scorpion mouse.

They primarily eat insects, particularly scorpions, and other small rodents, sometimes including each other... That's right... Cannibals.

Here's some links:
The Carnivorous Grasshopper Mouse
Tulare Grasshopper Mouse Profile

Note that this applies only to "serious" fanfiction. Parodies and documentaries don't dilute the IP in the same way.

Don't write off Lucas's attitude as simple greed. He likes to make movies without studio 3-piece idiots looking over his shoulder. Only way he can do that is to be the majority backer in his own projects. For that he needs a steady stream of tie-in income.

Still, I find this supposed protectiveness of Lucas's creativity to be a little hypocritical. It isn't just that the writing in the Star Wars movies has gotten more and more childish. If he wants to control the story, why doesn't Lucas pay closer attention to what the tie-in authors write? When The Empire Strikes Back came out, a friend of mine who was into Star Wars comics was pretty upset — DV being Luke's father invalidated more story lines than the return of Bobby Ewing.

Hey, it's just business!

here.

Of course they can count. However, as is common with collections of this type, they are presenting the episodes in the order in which they originally aired. See this chart for a table of the original air dates.

WHAT ARE CILIA AND FLAGELLA?

Cilia and flagella are whip-like appendages of many living cells that are used to move fluid or to propel the cells. Cilia beat with an oar-like motion and flagella have a snake-like motion as illustrated in Figure 1. The cilia in your lungs keep dirt and dust from clogging your breathing tubes (the bronchi) by moving a layer of sticky mucous along to clean out the airways. Sperm cells use a flagellum as a propeller to move the cell through the fluid of the oviduct to reach the egg. Thousands of animals and plants use cilia and flagella for swimming (example: paramecium), or feeding (example: clams and mussels) or mating (example: green algae). It is a curious fact that all of these cilia and flagella have a very similar internal arrangement of tubes (the outer doublets) and protein connectors (the nexin links and dynein arms) that suggest that there is something very special about this particular way of building a cell propeller. Figure 2 is a diagram of these internal parts of a cilium. Nature tends to keep designs that work well. Possibly if we can understand why this particular design works so well we might be able to design miniature devices that use the same principles of operation!

For every small company that can't make money writing GPL software, there are 500 that can make money by using it. It saves a lot of money at my work that I can use perl for my scripting, apache for my webserver, and php for additional web stuff.

Perl is under the artistic license, lately dual licensed with the GPL. Apache is under an extended BSD license. PHP is under an extended BSD license. 0.5 out of 3 isn't so bad (though the available artistic licensing of perl makes the GPL fairly irrelevant.)

I can get these items at no cost and I don't have to worry about them ever disappearing off the face of the earth, while MS can do what they please. So tell me again how this benefits MS and how this is killing companies?

I'm going to take these in opposite orders:

How does the availability of free, copylefted software kill companies?

There are two sides to this, both of which are results of economic changes. The first is that some types of software becomes available at close to zero cost along with the benefit of the ability do easy codechanges, outcompeting higher priced proprietary software. This is good; the workforce and capital of the companies are redirected to other places where they can contribute more to society.

Then there is the second, dark side: Copylefted software block economic models which give groups of end-users choice and tweaking for their needs. In a proprietary environment, a development company can do changes to source code as an investment, based on how many more people they expect to be buying the software based on the changes they do. For a copylefted product, the changes needs to be paid for by the first comer(s).

This is easier to see in a scenario description. There are two cases here: Market dominated by proprietary or BSDLed software, and market dominated by GPLed software. BSDLed/proprietary are fairly equal for this scenario; either the company has the maintained codebase available for proprietary use because it is being maintained due to market income, or it has the codebase it can use available due to open source maintenance. (Codebases can also be available with royalties due to commercial licensing; this gives similar cases with more complications.)

Let's set the cost of developing the codebase in the first place at $500,000,-. Let's further say that a particular new feature has a value of $100 for 1000 users, and that the cost of developing the feature is $10,000,-.

In a proprietary or BSDLed environment, this means that the company can develop the feature and sell it for anywhere below $100,000,-, while still both giving value to each customer. $90,000,- is available as cost/benefit difference, and up to this amount can be taken out as profit by the comapny while still adding value to society. This is enough available profit that it is reasonable to take the intial risk. Thus, the customers get their feature and the company get profit and everybody is better off (likely also the open source codebase, due to the distiction between strategic and tactical changes[1].)

Now for the GPLed case. There isn't a codebase available for the company to do properiary changes to, ao it has to develop that before going on to the profit side. Whoops, there was a $500,000,- cut of their $90,000,- potential profit - that's a $410,000,- loss. No way they are going to give those users the feature.

Well, what about the users themselves? Can't they just pay for the change to be incorporated into the GPLed codebase?

For each individual user, this is a loss. Paying directly to have the feature incorporated is a 100x cost increase compared to the benefit gotten back - not interesting.

Paying as a group is theoretically possible, but fraught with problems[2]. First, you need to get hold of the people in the group and get them to agree about what they need, and agree to pay for something they haven't seen, and which they will get no matter if *they as single entities* pay or not. Second, the cost of development will likely be higher. The developer in the proprietary example gets his profit from a fairly large benefit margin and can thus absorb risk directly; when working on the open source codebase, the risk adjusted cost of development will be higher, perhaps $15,000,-. Add $5,000,- in solicitation costs, and you're up to $20,000,- - still a lot less than the benefit marigin, but it needs a lot of contributors to get going.

[1] Development projects will usually include both strategic changes (those changes done to get revenue from customers by sales) and tactial changes (changes done to support the strategic changes, but without direct value in and of themselves.) Giving tactical changes back to the open source project one is branched off makes commercial sense; it decreases merge costs when updating from the free codebase, and increase employee happiness.

[2] Yes, I know about the Free Software Bazar, (no offers since august; no offers claimed since september 1999), SourceXchange (does not do pooling; seems to work for company-sponsored offers) and CoSource (does pooling; has transcated a total of $17252 since august 1999, with $9678 going to a single project. This is about two months of paid developer time at consultancy rates, total.)

How does this benefit MS?

MS has a number of codebases they are effectively guaranteed revenue from. Their market share is larger than the competitors in most areas. They've already sunk the development costs incurred so far. With GPLed software driving prices for alternatives towards zero, it gets harder for proprietary competitors to make a profit, and MS can stand the price war WRT development quite a bit longer than them (due to having a large number of copies to spread the development costs on.)

This is likely to effectively squeeze competitors out of the market, until you get to a point where you're only left with two forces: Open Source alternatives and MS. If the Open Source alternative is GPLed, MS can raise the prise almost as far as they want for those that don't get the features they need from the Open Source codebase - creating a new proprietary competitor will be too expensive.

I'm not certain this is going to happen, but the possibility is distinctly there.

Eivind (in most cases in favour of the BSD license, if that wasn't clear ;)

• cosource
• source exchange
• the free software bazaar

theres a few more that I can't think of.

Plus, if you want more ideas, I bet I can think of one every 15 minutes for an entire night. I'll meet you at the local watering hole. You buy.

Click here for $50!

Installation of Linux on IBM ThinkPad is pretty painless. IBM is well known for his support to Linux community, and it reflects on every model of its ThinkPad.

There are ThinkPad Configuration tools if you are interested

Above all, ThinkPad is reliable. You can see from the fact that second hand ThinkPad sell at pretty good price at Ebay.

Disclaimer: I'm an ex-employee of IBM and I really hate IBM but I still think ThinkPad is a great product.

In contrast, it is not a "contribution" to buy a copy of Civ:CTP, however nice the folks at Loki are.

The thing that is most irritating about the whole "commercial games" thing is that there are so many middlecritters in between you and the producer of the game. If you pay $40 for a game, it is unlikely that Loki sees much more than $10, which makes this a pretty inefficient way of getting funding to them.

I've bought games (well, one game) from them, so it would be pretty hypocritical to argue that it's dramatically evil to spend your money that way.

It's just a bit silly to regard this as a "contribution" when it's largely likely to be a contribution to the bottom line of the retailer rather than the producers...

Advogato has a good discussion on this. One of the good links from this was Bazaar, in the sense of the cathedral and the bazaar, where there is a list of other peoples itches.

I guess the one major hurdle is getting a understanding of the code, because one program where I found an annoying bug, I downloaded the source, and there wasn't a single comment in the code relating to what was being done. I couldn't for the life of me figure out where to look for this bug, so I couldn't do anything about it. It doesn't matter it bugs are shallow if the water is muddy. See ESR's cathedral and the bazaar to put the last comment in context (yes, I just read it fully again).

ThinkPad configuration tools for Linux

www.sourcexchange.com
www.cosource.com
The Free Software Bazaar

Let me know if you see any more. This could soon be my only source of income.

For those who want a tool enough to pay something for it, there are a couple of sites where you can propose a project and make an offer for it: Cosource.com and The Free Software Bazaar.

------

Hmm, let's see, I'm running RH6.2/Xfree86 4.0/E 16.4 on my 770Z and it works perfectly. The sound isn't painless, but it can be gotten to work. No problems with the PCMCIA ethernet devices or serial, and I've never had a docking station. The bios is not really secret, only different from the standard AMI/Phoenix style bios. They won't have to port the configurator because it's already been ported, check out the tpctl homepage. I've used several different brands of laptops over the years and I've found that brand doesn't necessarilly matter, though specific models may, or even small batches of a single model may exhibit certain problems. Your circumstances may very well be unique.

Another option is something like Axel Boldt's Free Software Bazaar, although that concept has a few well-discussed problems of its own.

Debian is certainly a worthy cause, as mentioned, but they don't take donations--rather, they relegate them to Software in the Public Interest.

The hardware idea is certainly a good one.

I, too, am a proud owner of a ThinkPad 770 (no E/ED/X/Z) 9549-1AU. It does have the MWave modem, but I don't use it (using LinkSys CardBus 10/100 card).

Most of the items on your wish list are already availible. My 770 runs practically flawlessly. I have accelerated X (which works pretty well with a slightly modified XF86_SVGA server; more on that in a minute), fully functioning APM (suspend and even hibernate to disk), PCMCIA and CardBus, and sound.

I don't know which XF86 you're using (I'm on an older one, 3.3.3 I think; I'm not at the laptop right now), but I had trouble getting the SVGA server to run accelerated, even though it claimed that the Cyber9397 was supported (I'm using the first release to claim support for acceleration on the 9397). I did a little research, and found this post on comp.windows.x.i386unix which describes how to modify the Trident server source code to enable full acceleration. My understanding is that later versions of XFree86 do not require this modification, but I'm not sure since I haven't had to upgrade mine for a while, and so I consequently haven't bothered. Also, read the rest of the messages on that thread; after making these modifications, you will need to add the options "tgui_pci_read_on" and "tgui_pci_write_on" to your XF86Config otherwise the server will hang.

Also, I used to have problems with X and APM, such as when closing the lid or suspending the machine while in X, the screen would get really funky when waking it up. For some odd reason, these problems cleared up after I built myself a kernel with the VESA framebuffer console driver and then started using the console at 1024x768x16bit. Now X gives me no problems, but only as long as I'm using the VESA console. Perhaps the VESA console drivers do something to initialize the graphics chipset that the SVGA server fails to do? I don't know. Using the VESA console also fixed another problem I was having with the accelerated server: before using the VESA console driver, I was having trouble playing back sound (MP3) in the background while I was working on something else. The music would skip if I so much as moved a window. After doing some research I concluded that the Trident driver must have the "pci_retry" option permanently on by default. I could find no way to disable it. Strangely enough, the VESA console solved this problem too!

And finally, you might want to check out tpctl for Linux, which is a program similar to the PS2 program for DOS that comes preloaded on ThinkPads. It allows you to control various things in the ThinkPads with a SMAPI BIOS. And the latest version even comes with a patch to hdparm that allows one to hotswap their IDE devices in the UltraBay! I haven't had a chance to check it out yet myself, so I can't tell you how well it works, but I thought you might like to know. :-)

Feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions.

Thus, for people to bounce in $10 here and there after the software is available is effectively the wrong time for this to happen.

There may be some nice people that will contribute $10 after the fact, but it is more appropriate, to my mind, to use things like CoSource, or the Free Software Bazaar, pledging payment before the fact, so that the funds are contributed towards commissioning production of free software works.

FSB, CoSource, and SourceXchange are all taking somewhat different approaches to this...

The recipient pays for shipping, otherwise no money changes hands. You can also give away literature or Linux CDs there.

--

The Free Software Bazaar also is open to developers from all nationalities, so please check it out.

Axel

--

How is this different from The Free Software Bazaar ? I mean, aside from the pretty graphics :-)

The Free Software Bazzar&nbsp Where free software is bought and sold. Not really. It's the work that's bought and sold. The software is usually GPL'd, so it's not bought, sold, OR free. Set up for posting of offers of money for someone to complete a free SW project or patch and to praise those that pay off and embarass those that don't.

--
Anonoumous (except to people with money to pay off the legal profession)

Check out the Free Software Bazaar They pretty much do this. In case the link doesn't translate, go here: http://visar.csustan.edu/bazaar/bazaar.html

Check out the Free Software Bazaar They pretty much do this. In case the link doesn't translate, go here: http://visar.csustan.edu/bazaar/bazaar.html

Obviously it needs better publicity (which would be to the advantage of all concerned: bigger audience equals bigger pool of programmers and bigger pool of money, which equals more/better free software for all of us. Add a link today! :-)

The bazaar is a mechanism for promising and organizing pledges. It is not actually involved in the transfer of funds or other compensation; you need to handle that offline. That's a good thing, because it allows you to specify your interest before you actually pay out your money. It also removes the worry that the bazaar is doing mischief.

The bazaar tracks deadbeats, so abuses to the honor system do not go unnoticed. If you promise money for a specific goal, and don't pay out when that goal is accomplished, your name goes onto a publicly available list of unreliable pledgers. That's also a good thing.

The nature of the goal to which a pledge is applied is to be specified by the pledger, not by the bazaar. It is the pledger's responsibility to make the goal specific enough to be meaningful.

Pledgers may tack their pledges onto existing goals. This means that the reward for achieving a goal is not fundamentally bounded, and is proportional to marketplace demand.

I think these points should answer all the concerns about creeping communism. The Free Software Bazaar is just about perfect from a free-market standpoint. Its only problem is its relative obscurity.

Maybe somebody should pledge money for advertising.

(BTW, "kzinti" is plural. Maybe you want "kzin"?)

An attempt at something like this is
already in place. See the
Free Software Bazaar.