> I'm so sick of people using freedom of choice to excuse doing stupid things. Freedom of choice doesn't mean "do whatever you want any time you want." There have to be set standards and rules or there would be chaos. This measuring system thing is exactly the same as having a national language. Say you sold ice cream, and by law all ice cream containers were to have nutritional information on them. It would hardly be right for the government to allow these nutritional facts to be written in Chinese, because a very small part of the population knows Chinese, and the point of the nutritional information is to inform the public. You can make up all the crazy measuring systems you want, but you can't use them expecting anyone else to understand what you're talking about. By moving to make the metric system a national measuring system, the governments are just trying to make things more universal.

So, presumably you believe that in Britain, where the vast majority of the population understands imperial units far better than metric ones, it would make more sense for products to be described using the imperial system.

If the British people choose to use the imperial system, but have the metric system forced upon them by politicians looking to win brownie points with Brussels, this can only lead to confusion and ambiguity.

> Actually, it is harder to use. If I were to ask you to tell me how many inches there are in 2.5 miles, you'd have to think for quite a while. If I were to ask you how many milimeters there were in 2.5 kilometers, you'd know the answer pretty much immediately.

1760 yards per mile x 36 inches per yard = 63,360 inches per mile. 2.5 miles = 158,400 inches.

This took me less than a minute to work out, using nothing more than the Windoze calaulator. It would have taken me perhaps slightly less time to calculate the metric version.

winter"Imperial works for me"mute