Why doesn't the US use the metric system like the rest of the world?

Don't be haten'!

I ain't hatin'!! It cost NASA ergo the American Taxpayer (YOU) $200 million when the 2001 Mars probe failed due to Top scientists not converting European Standard Metric calculations into US Imperial figures. If the US insists on being stubborn then they could at least make sure they get things right!

I remember reading about that. Didn't it have something to do with somebody not writing their units down and somebody read it as metric when it should have been something else?

Scientific calculations around the world are calculated in Metric Units as an industry standard (SI) so when the European Space Agencies provided their work for the probe it was done in Metric. The American Scientists failed to convert these figures when implementing them in the hardware of the probe. School boy error.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_units

Liberia, Myanmar and the United States are the only countries not to have adopted SI.

Thank you for telling me, I was wondering what the others were. :)

No worries ;)

Perhaps change isn't good in all scenarios but, in this case, once we got used to it it'd be much more friendly for everyone. Why use an outdated system when we shouldn't need too?

I hope you know I was being sarcastic. . . I know, it is hard to translate that across the internet.