It seems that the US government has no problem issuing conversion mandates with hard deadlines, when it businesses and government stand to profit at the expense of consumers. Obviously, there is the political will to force the American public to convert their television sets. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/11/03/national/w165755S23.DTL
My comments:
(1) The government may be issuing mandates here, but they have horrendously slowed down the introduction of HDTV for two decades. Not a good model for metrication. See
http://www.cato.org/tech/tk/020805-tk.html
(2) The federal government does have regulatory control over telecommunications, dating back to the early 1900s when the airwaves were considered "scarce." Of course, modern technology has pretty much removed the scarcity, but the chance of telecommunications (wired or wireless) being deregulated are slim.
(3) You folks continue to converse as if the federal government could simply mandate metrication. It can in some areas (e.g., drugs) but has no regulatory control over much of the economy. In other words, the US Federal Government, even if it found the legislative majority to do so, could not simply mandate the whole country and economy metricate. It would be thrown out by the courts.
Jim Elwell
Electrical Engineer
Industrial manufacturing manager
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
www.qsicorp.com
