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Economic is the singular, economics is a plural

Twaddle. Have you ever studied an economic?

Economic is an adjective: the Honda Civic is economic to run.

Generally names of academic disciplines & subjects are uncountable nouns.

Yeah that will help.... /sarc

That will so help the family who uses food stamps as a way to pay for food. That will so help the family who friends and family encourage you to not bother with high school. That will so help the family whos father is a crack head. That will so help the family whos father is not around. That will so help the family who domestic violence is a way of life. That will so help the family whos children have to go thru metal detectors every day to go to school. That will so help the family whos only hope of getting out of it is to have one of the kids hit the lottery ticket of the NBA/NFL. That will so help the family who has the brother hooked on heroin who hawked the computer to pay for his habit.

Now that I have said that it might help some. But the real core issues is a lack of jobs and a tax system that encourages poor behaviors and discourages good behavior. We have done more to harm the poor than help them with hand out programs. We have created whole generations of people who will not bother to do better. Who yearn and hope for the luck of the draw to lift them out of poverty. Either by 'i can sue someone' or 'win the lottery' or 'my kid got into college on a sweet scholarship so he can go onto the NFL'. Instead of giving people the tools to do better. The rich can deign upon the chosen few some riches and feel special they are helping.

Perhaps you could use the Internet to learn how to use English properly?

Not a troll. Perhaps somewhat pedantic, but not a troll.
Whose != whos (which is not a word, unless we're talking Dr. Seuss) != who's != who.
Where's the troll there? Proper usage makes for easier reading and better arguments. Excuse me for trying to help.

Yeah that will help.... /sarc

That will so help the family who uses food stamps as a way to pay for food. That will so help the family who friends and family encourage you to not bother with high school. That will so help the family whos father is a crack head. That will so help the family whos father is not around. That will so help the family who domestic violence is a way of life. That will so help the family whos children have to go thru metal detectors every day to go to school. That will so help the family whos only hope of getting out of it is to have one of the kids hit the lottery ticket of the NBA/NFL. That will so help the family who has the brother hooked on heroin who hawked the computer to pay for his habit.

Now that I have said that it might help some. But the real core issues is a lack of jobs and a tax system that encourages poor behaviors and discourages good behavior. We have done more to harm the poor than help them with hand out programs. We have created whole generations of people who will not bother to do better. Who yearn and hope for the luck of the draw to lift them out of poverty. Either by 'i can sue someone' or 'win the lottery' or 'my kid got into college on a sweet scholarship so he can go onto the NFL'. Instead of giving people the tools to do better. The rich can deign upon the chosen few some riches and feel special they are helping.

Perhaps you could use the Internet to learn how to use English properly?

http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/activepassive.html

First, as the AC correctly surmised, the argument was about 'can' and 'could'.

And as I accurately stated, 'can' and 'could' are merely different modes of the same word.

Secondly, 'will' has two meanings. I was referring to the one which was relevant to the context it was used in, an argument of future/present tenses, where it is used as a future 'modifier' on verbs.

Actually, it has 5 meanings, which you would know if you had followed the link I provided. However, the number of meanings is non sequitur, as they don't change the fact that 'will' has a completely different meaning than 'can.' Period. Look it up.

Consider if replacing 'will' with "going to" makes sense. If so, then it means it is the "simple future" tense, and has nothing to do with a desire or need to do something. See http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/simplefuture.html

Doesn't change the fact that they mean different things; 'will' is compulsory, i.e. must happen, whereas 'can' implies an ability but not necessarily a compulsion to do so. Period. Look it up in a dictionary, not some random website with the word "English" in the name.

The 'will' you reference in your link to is a noun in the context of "He has a strong will and stubborn personality." However, both of your sentence examples show are the simple future, not the one you link to.

Just checked it, there are no less than 8 different verbal modes for the word 'will,' most of which, save the abstract, define a compulsory action.

Consider:

Just because you can have sex with a man, doesn't mean you will.

Just because you can have sex with a man, doesn't mean you are going to.

See what I did there?

Nothing notable; let me show you what you did wrong:

Just because you have the ability to have sex with a man, doesn't mean you are compelled to

There is more to English than being able to form parse-able sentences.

Yes, there is, but if a person can't (can not) or won't (will not) understand the basics of the language, there's no point in going any deeper.

See what I did there?

First, as the AC correctly surmised, the argument was about 'can' and 'could'.

Secondly, 'will' has two meanings. I was referring to the one which was relevant to the context it was used in, an argument of future/present tenses, where it is used as a future 'modifier' on verbs. Consider if replacing 'will' with "going to" makes sense. If so, then it means it is the "simple future" tense, and has nothing to do with a desire or need to do something. See http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/simplefuture.html

The 'will' you reference in your link to is a noun in the context of "He has a strong will and stubborn personality." However, both of your sentence examples show are the simple future, not the one you link to.

Consider:

Just because you can have sex with a man, doesn't mean you will.

Just because you can have sex with a man, doesn't mean you are going to.

See what I did there?
There is more to English than being able to form parse-able sentences.

If you were being sarcastic, I apologise. =)

English on the other hand is a nightmare to learn to speak and to read/write. The spelling system is screwed up. There's 600,000 to 1,000,000 million words depending on who you ask. There's a dozen or more dialects, each with their own exclusive set of idioms. The south africans are almost unintelligible. We have crazy grammar rules. We have 273 irregular verbs. (only latin and italian have more iirc) And native speakers abuse the language like you wouldn't believe. Even our grandparents often use different idioms and pronunciations than we do. I'd hate to have to learn english as a second language.

Yes and no. English is a nightmare to learn to speak or write as well as a native speaker. It's not necessarily that hard to understand, though, so long as communication is limited to the core vocabulary. As a nonnative speaker, you might have a hard time getting some of the tenses right or remembering some of the irregular variations in spelling, but that doesn't necessarily hamper recognizing those variations when you see them. For example, one of the most frequent things I see nonnative speakers getting wrong is the difference between countable and uncountable terms. You can have some sugar, and you have many bicycles, but you cannot have many sugar, and you should not have some bicycles, though that is one of the places where native speakers are often a little sloppy. Either way, as long as the person understands that both of those have the same basic meaning, when someone asks them, "do you want some sugar", they won't be confused even though they might have trouble constructing that sentence.

And idioms exist in pretty much every language (including Chinese). Although common in conversation, one of the first things they teach you when writing for the general public is to avoid using them. They'll be a problem no matter what language you pick as your standard language.

BTW, there are way more than 273 irregular verbs in English. EnglishPage.com lists over 470 if you include archaic and antiquated forms. Most of them are either not in common use or are minor variants of other irregular verbs (e.g. "backslide" forms its tenses in the same way as "slide"), though. Also, most of the verbs that form their tenses "irregularly" do so in a handful of fairly similar ways (changing an ending "de" to "d" or replacing the last couple of letters with a "t" to form various past tenses). And there would usually be very little confusion if you mis-conjugated them as regular verbs. It would be wrong, but still understandable.

In spite of the large number of irregular verbs, English has one advantage that somewhat makes up for it. There are many, many fewer verb forms than in many European languages. Future tense is "will" or "shall" plus the present tense. With the exception of the verb "to be", the same verb form is used regardless of the subject with the exception of third-person singular, which typically just adds an "s" or "es". This makes English conjugation for regular verbs trivial by comparison with many other languages (French, for example).

http://developer.symbian.org/
http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/presentcontinuous.html

Are you still confused now?

PS. And please, don't give us that "I don't like it, therefore it's irrelevant" BS. Fact is, Symbian is the most used OS in mobile phones (at least in those where OS is of any concern to end-users). It will be migrating towards the segment currently occupied by S40. It will use Qt API (happy now?). Open sourcing it is very notable.

I was looking for the origin, actually... :-/

http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/usedto.html

"Used to" expresses the idea that something was an old habit that stopped in the past. It indicates that something was often repeated in the past, but it is not usually done now.

I wonder how you could ever tell a semantic search engine that you wanted the history of the idiom itself. Google picked it right up though, just had to search for "used to" quoted.

Semantic intelligence in the form of incoming links is pretty damned powerful, anyway.

Free

Perhaps this would be a good place for you to start. The proper tense in this case includes "was" and "were"

What you don't realize is that they're still speaking in the present tense and implying that [other colleges] are biting off of Dartmouth and implementing 802.11b at their campuses.

What you don't realize is that the sentence fragment "schools are deploying" is technically a present contiuous construction that reasonably could be interpreted to signify a long-term activity still ongoing. I would guess all these colleges continue to develop their networks regardless of when each began. No?

Should I change my nick to grammarnazi now?