Anything except YYYY-MM-DD makes little to no sense, so if you wanna use MM/YY/DD or what not, they are all equally good, really. Just about everything is sorted biggest first... there are 24 hours in a day, not 42... biggest digit first. Time is not 59:59:23 just before midnight, etc.

07-08-09 was almost two years ago... bit late too complain about it, tbh. The slash format is a catastrophy in all it forms, so everyone celebrate your own date and enjoy. :)

In fact, NASA already have that problem. Fact is... US switched to the metric system like most other countries. General science are on board, ofcourse, since it the imperial system makes no sense and is therefor not very useful in science, and especially in international reports. The military are easy to convince (SIR! YES, SIR! METRIC IT IS, SIR!) and NASA comes from both military and science, so they are with the program also.

Not so with the general public, which sometimes caused problems with NASA getting parts made in some stupid imperial sizes instead of real units, so if anything, that's less likely to happen if half the things in the join program is from Europe (which is not a country).

Personally, I think we certainly do need more competition in this field. The features that Bing seems to bring to the table seems more like bling than actually useful features, but none the less, it might get Google to actually improve their service.
My main gripe today is that with any search engine you will find 2000000 hits, or none. Not often something in between. Why? Because first thing the search engine does after you feed it your query, is ignore most of the important parts and spew nonsense result at you as a result. So you add more words to limit the query, probably picking the other word for the same thing (ie not the one the author of the page you're looking for used) and so you miss the pages you want.

An example... put "Get(Set(go))" nicely quoted into Google, and it will happy mash it down to "get" "set" "go", ignoring everything that was important (caps and parenthesis) to make the query specific and useful.

Imagine something like "near" (within 20 words, maybe), "exact" that actually took into account caps and non-alphabetic characters, or dream of all dreams "regexp" to search with:
("X" near "Y") and (regexp "z+" near (exact "/." or "Slashdot")) and fuzzy "brauser setings" and synonym "save"

What if you could drop something like that into Google? You would actually be able to find what you needed! I'm not saying this should be a default search mode. Natural language parsing would be a nicer default one. But even the simplest thing like "search for this exact string (caps, strange characters and all)" isn't available today, even in advanced mode!

Now I know there are search engines out there that actually have/had parts of these features (like one which I found that could do regexp, but used it only to broaden the search, not limit it, making it useless). But I have yet to find one that actually works well. Feel free to point me at one if you know one.