I'm not sure what kind of economics faculty you were dealing with but the one I went to LaTeX was in widespread use owing to the amount of equations we had to write.
In fact 'its' isn't the only possessive without an apostrophe+s. My, thy, her, his, our, your, their; mine, thine, hers (and his again), ours, yours and theirs also do not have apostrophes ("her's", "our's" etc. are never correct).
The cat's ball.
Its ball.
His/Her ball.
That ball is the cat's.
That ball is its.
That ball is hers/his.
The odd one out is actually "one's" which is always correct even though by rights it ought to be "ones". So the entire possessive forming process is rather mixed up - but the way to think of it is to substitute 'his' for 'its' in your mind for a moment and that should help you get it right ('his' is better than 'her/hers' because 'his' is uniformly consistent in use to 'its').
Our whole numeric system is based on 10's (except for computers), everybody learns to count in 10's, why is it so hard to measure in 10's?
It's not hard but it sure is impractical, especially if you have to divide by 3. Base twelve (where twelve is written 10 and ten and eleven have their own symbols) and a measuring system based on it would solve this problem.
That *just* works until someone asks two and especially three or more questions that require substantive answers (I've seen this happen). From that point on top-posting becomes a major encumbrance to effective communication - I have even seen people copy the questions into a wordprocessor, bold or italicise or somehow distinguish the original and proceed to answer them 'net style before attaching the resulting file to their email. Talk about insane.
I have to use GroupWise at work and can't stand this. What's infuriating is that they nearly got it right too -
>>> Bradley 12/07/04 11:05PM >>>
could have been
> Bradley 12/07/04 11:05PM >
>
and all would have been well.
Looking at any email exchange between GroupWise and Outlook can get pretty funny though...
I also dislike how the email address is hidden in the client itself. On the other hand, at least GroupWise doesn't choke on OpenPGP signatures and even recognises them as signatures even if it can't verify them.
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I'm not sure what kind of economics faculty you were dealing with but the one I went to LaTeX was in widespread use owing to the amount of equations we had to write.
The cat's ball.
Its ball.
His/Her ball.
That ball is the cat's.
That ball is its.
That ball is hers/his.
The odd one out is actually "one's" which is always correct even though by rights it ought to be "ones". So the entire possessive forming process is rather mixed up - but the way to think of it is to substitute 'his' for 'its' in your mind for a moment and that should help you get it right ('his' is better than 'her/hers' because 'his' is uniformly consistent in use to 'its').
It's not hard but it sure is impractical, especially if you have to divide by 3. Base twelve (where twelve is written 10 and ten and eleven have their own symbols) and a measuring system based on it would solve this problem.
That *just* works until someone asks two and especially three or more questions that require substantive answers (I've seen this happen). From that point on top-posting becomes a major encumbrance to effective communication - I have even seen people copy the questions into a wordprocessor, bold or italicise or somehow distinguish the original and proceed to answer them 'net style before attaching the resulting file to their email. Talk about insane.
I have to use GroupWise at work and can't stand this. What's infuriating is that they nearly got it right too - >>> Bradley 12/07/04 11:05PM >>> could have been > Bradley 12/07/04 11:05PM > > and all would have been well. Looking at any email exchange between GroupWise and Outlook can get pretty funny though... I also dislike how the email address is hidden in the client itself. On the other hand, at least GroupWise doesn't choke on OpenPGP signatures and even recognises them as signatures even if it can't verify them.