More Than a Billion Chinese but So Few Coffins

What do you guys think about American billions (thousand million, 10**9) vs. English billions (million million, 10**12)?

do they really still do taht in britain? should go to greek prefixes for uniformity

http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/7/7-451.html

Finally, some respondents noted that there is now an ISO recommendation
that would avoid the ambiguous terms by using prefixes for the powers of
1000 as follows: Kilo-, Mega-, Giga-, Tera-, Peta-, Exa-. While some of
these are entering ordinary usage (e.g. salaries expressed in K, for kilo-,
for thousands of currency units), I don't know if this system will replace
the existing ones in ordinary usage. It also has the disadvantage that you
have to think up a new relatively arbitrary term each time you want to
extend the system, though maybe this isn't a real practical problem for
ordinary usage, and I have no intuitions about what the Latinate prefixes
would be between "decillion" and "centillion".

Of course, those are ambiguous too.