That list is of countries not officially standardized on the metric system. In reality, it's far more detailed than that. England, for example, sells petrol by the litre, but has speed limits in miles per hour, not kilometers. People there still use stone & pound for their body mass, not the kilogram.

The US is not officially on the metric system, but it is too far there already to hold out much longer. Electricity is measured & billed in kilowatts. Bottled water/soda pop is metric, often being sold in 500 mL or 1,2, and 3 L bottles. So is most mouthwash now, Listerine & even the generic brands are in 250 mL, 500 mL, and 1 L sizes. My dental floss is 50 meters in length (with 54 yards in parens next to it on the packaging). Wine is sold in metric, 750 mL for a standard bottle, 375 mL for ice wine. (On the flip side of that, it's still very easy to find 20 ounces of soda or 40 ounces of beer.)

Much of what you do see in the US, however, is soft-metric, i.e. rounded metric units that are converted back to awkward US customary. A tin of Altoids mints is 50 grams, but they put 1.76 ounces in front of it.

It's a very weird mishmash of units here. My German car has Italian-made wheels that are exactly 457.2 mm, which means they are actually 18 inches. However, the bolt pattern on those wheels (distance between each bolt) is 5x112, meaning 5 bolts per wheel, 112 mm between each one. My car's fuel tank is 62 L exactly, but the car's manual says it's 16.4 US gallons, obviously rounded off from 16.378. The nightly news here actually shows the temperature in both Celsius & Fahrenheit, but that's far from common. Drugs are prescribed entirely in metric, i.e. 250 mg tablets, except for liquid doses that are sometimes still given in customary tea/tablespoon quantities instead of mL. Cough syrup often gives dosing in tsp.

All of the cited traditional units have some foundation in a theoretical human being's body, which makes them far from ideal for any real world usage, particularly as the human form can be drastically different sizes. For instance, I have long, slender fingers, my thumb is not an inch wide. One mouthful of liquor for me is not the same as mouthful of liquor for a larger man, but I'm sure far more than a petite woman. These are all arbitrary scales and have no real place left in a world that demands precision.

In reality, you wind up with fractions quite often using Imperial/US Customary units, as anyone who does wood working will tell you. Particularly as you deal with goods made elsewhere in the world to metric standards, you see the limitations of the Imperial system. For example, a millimeter is much easier to deal with than almost 4/100ths of an inch, which means if you design products using a metric scale, you never wind up with fractions or decimals at some point in the system. It can all come back to whole numbers as you shift the decimal point. (We've been using the base 10 decimal system with our money in the US ever since the introduction of the dollar over two hundred years ago, with 100 pennies to the dollar.)

Furthermore, just look at the absolutely insane number of units in your post! 13 units of different and unrelated names just to measure liquid volume? 9 just for distance? (And you left out link, pole, and perch...) That is not only asinine but also utterly pointless, and it means that a person has to remember not only the names of all of those units, but how to convert between them. Quickly, what's 61.5 inches in fathoms? How about a 3.25 hogsheads in cups? For comparison's sake, what's 61.5 cm in km? How about 16.75 liters in milliliters? Which one would be easier for the average person to remember/calculate? What about for a child? Even using the "common" US customary units can be difficult. Can most people explain the difference between a US dry and a US wet pint? What about the difference between a US & English pint?

Finally, let's not forget the convenient relation between volume density & mass that metric allows. A liter of water has a mass of 1 kilogram, which means 1 mL of water == 1 gram. (Of course, that assumes a constant water density.)

(Sorry for the double post, I don't know how my first copy wound up anon.)

Don't forget that the NBC is trying to make a US version of Top Gear with Adam F-ing Carolla as the host.

No. Just stop. I don't want Adam Carolla reviewing shitty American cars. I want Jeremy Clarkson reviewing Lambos, Bugattis, and Alfas.

Program preempting aside, my current favorite station to hate is BBC America. After years of begging and pleading, they finally decided to carry Top Gear in the US, starting in 2007.

In England, Top Gear is presented on BBC Two in an hour-long format, with no commercial breaks. The entire hour is filled from opening to ending credits, and each segment segues into the next. However, here in the US, it's presented into an hour-long block with commercials, which means that it's now pared down to roughly 39-41 minutes of content.

So for each episode, you lose the entire "News" segment they do in the middle (which usually segues into another bit), but that only makes up for about 8 minutes or so. Which means they also cut parts from car reviews, interactions with the audience, "the Cool Wall", and other bits & pieces (including chunks of power laps), plus they splice in these awful cut sequences made by BBCA. And if all of that weren't bad enough, the US airing is several seasons behind. The episodes they were airing in late 2007 I had seen back in the summer of 2005 while vacationing in Prague!

If TV stations don't want people turning to Bittorrent, then stop ruining our favorite programs! I'd forgo BBCA all together, if they simply offered the show on R1 DVDs uncut, but they don't do that either. So I download each & every episode instead, it's the only way I can stay current and discuss it with friends back in England. I'm literally sitting here, money in hand, ready to purchase box series of the show, and they won't offer them. Congrats, BBC, you made a downloader out of me.

Very true, it depends on the job role. :)

Mod parent up. My current setup at work, which consists of two desktop machines (one Vista, one Ubuntu) and one laptop (OS X), takes 20 minutes to get everything up & running from being shut off.

It takes a lot of time to get them booted, load the various pieces of development software, open the projects up, find the pieces of code I need to work on, etc. Furthermore, the Vista PC (brand new Dell XPS) has annoying problems with being put to sleep; for example, when you wake it up, the audio stops working. Only a reboot fixes it, which means even more downtime.

And then there's Automatic Updates from Microsoft, that like to reboot your computer without your say in the matter...except that the Vista box doesn't reboot properly afterward.

Honestly, I'd love to hibernate them properly, but it doesn't work, and shutting them off is not an option.

Thank you. Not only is this not "News For Nerds", it's not news, period.

If the presidential choice of MP3 player seriously matters to you, kill yourself. With all of the problems facing the US and indeed the entire planet, this is the most trivial of matters, and people reporting on it should be ashamed of themselves.

Next we'll be hearing about Obama getting a hangnail. Just shut up.

Don't forget that the whole reason we use corn byproducts as sweeteners is due to the fact that back in 1977 the US set up some rather bizarre sugar cane tariffs that make it far more expensive to use real sugar than to use corn syrup and other derivative sweeteners.

Just compare worldwide sugar prices to US sugar prices, we pay about $0.20 more per kilogram of sugar than the rest of the world.

That might not sound like much, certainly negligible when purchasing for yourself at the store, but in large quantities, those tariffs add up. Combine that with corn subsidies, and it becomes several times more expensive to use actual cane sugar.

The result is that almost everything you get these days has corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, or both, as a sweetener instead of real sugar. Sure, it's in all of the stuff you might expect, soft-drinks, ice cream, etc., but it's in a lot of stuff you might not expect either. Cereal, stuffing, instant potatoes, cough syrups, breads, salad dressings, steak sauces, soups, some brands of tomato paste, etc. It's to the point now that some brands pride themselves on not using it, like Boylan Sodas. And the obvious example, Coca-Cola from Mexico is made with sugar, not HFCS.