The basic issue is ignorance, which one would think could be cured via education. In Mississippi, where I live, some folks think license is plural. Example: “I ain’t got my license; the judge took *them* away from me.” As it turns out, stupidity, that is, ignorance coupled with an unwillingness to be educated, cannot be cured.

A few years ago at work, a document was published wherein MB was defined as “millions of bytes.” Thinking I was doing everyone a great favor, and being eager to establish my credibility (since I was the new kid on the block); I painstakingly constructed a document which carefully described why the definition was wrong. I explained that the prefix, M, did sometimes mean 10^6, as in MHz, but that when used with bytes it meant, 2^20, as in 20MB. I used several examples and sprinkled my diatribe with just enough satire to motive the folks who messed things up into fixing them. The net result of all this is that I was accused of nit-picking (that’s the nice version). The final rationalization for their continuing stupidity was two-fold; 1) “disk drive sales folks use millions of bytes so we should too,” and 2) “it’s close enough.” It was quite aggravating. Let me paraphrase the first justification, “Billy is being stupid, so I’ll be stupid too.” As to the second justification, I tried using that at the bank when they charged my wife $30 to cover her 13-cent overdraft (it *did not* work – the banking world has this silly insistence on accuracy). As stated earlier, stupidity cannot be cured.

The moral of all this is that your engineering instinct and desire for accuracy in describing units of measure (in ALL venues) are not likely to make much of an impact on the farmers, politicians, sales folk, courtiers, and businessmen who make decisions about what gets published; essentially, you are a wart. I do laud your courage for trying. Please forward me a copy of the email that AMD sends when they acknowledge their ignorance and thank you for the education. Neither of us should hold our breath while waiting.