This lettter goes to the webmaster of the French Maporama website, Han Sir, I just joined your site with a password and e-mail address. Then I loaded a route between Den Helder and Maastricht in the Dutch language. I was shocked and revolted when I saw that the distances were not given in meters and kilometers as I expect on a mainland European website, but in British/American yards and miles! I tried several other languages, but they always defaulted to yard and mile trash! Since when do Europeans need these units while working out an itinerary in mainland Europe? I saw that there is a metric option but that is not the point. I expect a French website to use metric units only. I have to tell you, I feel betrayed and I am furious. Why do the itineraries in *all languages* default to UK/USA units of measurement? (Here comes a copy of the Dutch language itinerary A map of the Netherlands with a scale saying 100 miles is the default. Then comes the Dutch language itinerary in yards and miles. I am not going to inflict this on the list members. It is too disgusting. It burns my eyes out.) I will give you my opinion about such things. You have been approached by British and Americans who go all the way to European websites in order to be offended by the metric system and then they demand the inclusion of their units. You have met them allright, not by 100%, but by 200% by making their outdated, non-standard, irrational measuring units default of your site! What are we, Europeans with dignity and self respect or abject slaves, crawling in the mud before our Anglo-Saxon masters, always doing their bidding? Their so-called 'system' of weights and measures is a pile of garbage. It is NOT a global standard; metric is. 96% of the world population use the latter system. Most English-speaking nations have adopted the metric system. The last holdouts are the UK and the USA.You are French people and you should have more self respect. Kow-towing to the intransigent and the arrogant is a disgrace. You should have refused to include their units, politely and firmly. Those Americans and British who demand the inclusion of their units on European sites, are a small, but vociferous section among both peoples; they are stupid, intransigent and arrogant. They refuse to accept anything from other peoples, they refuse to learn anything new, and at the same time they insist that all other peoples on the globe accomodate their whims. What they really want is global adoption of their units. Such people should not be rewarded for their antics, they should be opposed wherever possible! I think that members of anti-metric organizations like the British Weights and Measures Association (BWMA), Americans for Customary Weights and Measures and the US-based Freedom 2 Measure movement are scouring the net for metric websites and then trying to get these sites corrupted; in this case they really succeeded! Why should such people be rewarded for their intransigence? Why should everybody else have to make the change to the defaults themselves? I am absolutely sure, that there are many Americans and British who do not appreciate what you are doing. They are open to other peoples and cultures. Many of them are fighting to metricate their country, and are being stabbed in the back by sites like this one. Others, who are not yet ready for metric, are willing to do the conversion themselves. I invite you to go to the following websites: http://www.metric.org (United States Metric Association); http://www.metric1.org (another US pro-metric site) and a British site http://www.metric.org.uk (United Kingdom Metric Association). They have background information about the metric question and the problem of units. Last, but not least, http://www.bipm.fr (The Bureau Internationale des Poids et Mesures, where the US and the UK have been participants since the last quarter of the 19th century). Most of the people who made that demand will not come to France anyway. Those who do will be confronted with the metric system at every turn. Others, wo may assume that France used miles and yards because you accomodated them might drive 30, 50, 80 and 120 mph on roads where the speed limits are 30, 50, 80 and 120 km/h. They may crash or be caught by the police. It could mean deaths. I request that you delete all Anglo-Saxon units from your site. If that is impossible, a simple converter between miles and km on the same page of the currency converter should be good enough. Let THEM search for the converter and use it if they want their medieval measuring units. They have no right at all to demand that people who live in metric countries use their measuring units! The time is decades overdue to fight back against the Anglo-Saxon steamroller! We will only shoot ourselves in the foot if we continue to fall on our knees before those stubborn and arrogant people who want to crush us with it. It will happen if we do not change our state of mind radically! There are many people in the Anglo-Saxon world who do NOT want this to happen, but they rightly expect us to make a stand and to fight when necessary. Please, stop betraying them and us! I would have written to you in French, but my knowledge of that language is too defective to do it; therefore I have used English, which is a Germanic language like my own Dutch one. English is destined to be the global language of communication; it is too late to stop this development. We must keep our own languages while using English as an international language. Their units, however, should not become the world standard of measurement. They must go to the dustbin and until they end up there, they should be contained within their last holdouts. This means: NO US AND UK UNITS ON CONTINENTAL EUROPEAN WEBSITES! Yours sincerely, Han Maenen The Netherlands [EMAIL PROTECTED]
