Re: billions and billions of stars.... was: Re: Another easter egg in gnome-something...
Daniele Becchi wrote:
> and this is what I found on my italian dictionary
> bilione (billion)
> 10^9 in Italy, France and USA (and S.I.: thounand million)
> 10^12 in UK and Germany
(I haven't really been following this thread so maybe this has been said
already.)
The UK adopted the "American" system (billion=10^9) a long long time ago
(late 70s?). For example my (British English) dictionary says:
billion
1 000 000 000, or Br dated 1 000 000 000 000
The UK Government and the BBC both use billion=10^9, which means pretty
much everyone must.
--
Jim Farrand, ML Group, mailto:farrand@cs.bris.ac.uk
Department of Computer Science, http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~farrand
University of Bristol, tel: +44-(0)117-954-5254
Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1UB, UK
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