What's even funnier is that these metric superiority trolls will do a quick 180 (see, gasp, a non-metric unit again!) when it comes time for them to argue over whether customers are getting full value when marketing uses a Metric Gigabyte (1GB=1,000,000,000 bytes) instead of a "Real Gigabyte" (1Gibibyte=1,073,741,824 bytes) when stating the capacity of storage media.
I am starting with a huge handicap. I am a metric troll. And from that country which is associated with it. And an aspiring scientist. Anyway, on that specific matter, I have to add something.
I recommend perusing ISO/IEC 80000-13:2008 “Quantities and Units --- Part 13: Information Science and Technology.” It is clear in the sense that 1kB=10^3B, and 1kiB is 2^10B.
It pained me to accept this, but I have to admit it does make sense, and that's what standards are for. We're talking about exchanging measurements in the most straightforward way, taking the currently most commonly accepted metric to do so.
That said, though, I have to admit that the alien argument has some sort of validity in my eye in the sense that being compatible with several measurement systems, it may be easier to add one more to the relevant pieces of software.
As long as it's a relation that can be described in simple mathematical terms (powers, logarithms,...).
Oh, wait...