The ignorant masses was a joke. I still use inches, pounds gallons and fahrenheit for every day uses just like the rest of you...

I beleve the NASA screwup was the other way around. NASA had contracted with Lockheed (an american company) for the thrusters on the probe. Lockheed reported the thrust in pounds, but NASA assumed it was in newtons, hence there was actualy a factor of two discrepency.

The "number" of units makes no difference whatsoever. the only thing which makes the metric system better is the fact of how easy it is to convert everything. you could just as easily say 10^-12 inches ans 10^-12 m. just because there isn't a name for the imperial version is no reason not to use it. you could afterall call it a picoinch to paralell the picometer...

To all metric haters:

The metric system is just plain easier to use and calculate with, all metric measurements are based on one unit (one metre, one gram, one volt, one farad, one byte, whatever) with standard prefixes for one thousand (kilo), one million (mega), one hundreth (centi), one one thousanth (sp?) (mili), one millionth (micro) and so on. It just makes things easier, and you can do calculations and stuff without worrying if your units match up properly. On the other hand, in imperial, you have a load of different measurments for every quantity all in seemingly unrelated proportions to one another, for instance, simply for distance and area in imperial you have miles, furlongs, leagues, inches, feet, hands, acres, hectares, perches, roods, links and chains, all of which are most peculiarilly linked to each other. Wheras in metric we have metres for distance and metres square for areas.

Now tell me that dosent make more sense.

It doesn't. It's not that much harder to divide by 12 (or what have you) instead of 10. Plus outside of science there is little need to readily convert units around all the time. I don't need to know how many feet I traveled if I went 15.2 miles, and if I did I could easily divide by the correct number. That's why we invented calculators. Besides, English units are generally bigger, and we all know that bigger = better, especially in America!

a googol of ram would be nice

Interesting how this turned out. I think most people would agree that the metric system is better. It was designed for ease of use whereas a foot was simply a measurement of a foot and so on. Personally, the reason I use the imperial system is because that is what everything 'common' here is measured in. Really someone in the US who didn't know it would be somewhat helpless on some things. And I agree about it being because of what you learn when you are young. I think metric will eventually win out, but prolly not until the US works on its crappy schools.

Read me sig and learn who I am; then you'll relize my disposistion with learning the Metric System.

Being 15; my mind is full of Mapping, and sex.

wait till you get older, bladder control moves up that list considerably.

*looks over at large pile of diapers*