You might find this lecture interesting:

    http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

This passage in particular presents a different way at looking at the correlations in the Kane and Mertz study:

"Creativity may be another example of gender difference in motivation rather than ability. The evidence presents a seeming paradox, because the tests of creativity generally show men and women scoring about the same, yet through history some men have been much more creative than women. An explanation that fits this pattern is that men and women have the same creative ability but different motivations.
                        I am a musician, and I’ve long wondered about this difference. We know from the classical music scene that women can play instruments beautifully, superbly, proficiently — essentially just as well as men. They can and many do. Yet in jazz, where the performer has to be creative while playing, there is a stunning imbalance: hardly any women improvise. Why? The ability is there but perhaps the motivation is less. They don’t feel driven to do it.
                        I suppose the stock explanation for any such difference is that women were not encouraged, or were not appreciated, or were discouraged from being creative. But I don’t think this stock explanation fits the facts very well. In the 19th century in America, middle-class girls and women played piano far more than men. Yet all that piano playing failed to result in any creative output. There were no great women composers, no new directions in style of music or how to play, or anything like that. All those female pianists entertained their families and their dinner guests but did not seem motivated to create anything new.
Meanwhile, at about the same time, black men in America created blues and then jazz, both of which changed the way the world experiences music. By any measure, those black men, mostly just emerging from slavery, were far more disadvantaged than the middle-class white women. Even getting their hands on a musical instrument must have been considerably harder. And remember, I’m saying that the creative abilities are probably about equal. But somehow the men were driven to create something new, more than the women."

There's a talk from 1986 by Richard Hamming at Bellcore, about how to do great research, but it also ends up in a short discussion about the conditions there that led to UNIX:

http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

The whole talk is really excellent, and there's this theme in it that the really great things come from some unexpected places, by the compounding of seemingly unrelated character traits, work habits and organization dynamics.

At the end in the Q&A, Hamming gets into a short discussion with the host Alan Chynoweth about the origins of UNIX, evincing from Alan a favorite quote:

"UNIX was never a deliverable!"

expanded:

"Hamming: First let me respond to Alan Chynoweth about computing. I [was in charge of] computing in research and for 10 years I kept telling my management, ``Get that !&@#% machine out of research. We are being forced to run problems all the time. We can't do research because we're too busy operating and running the computing machines.'' Finally the message got through. They were going to move computing out of research to someplace else. I was persona non grata to say the least and I was surprised that people didn't kick my shins because everybody was having their toy taken away from them. I went in to Ed David's office and said, ``Look Ed, you've got to give your researchers a machine. If you give them a great big machine, we'll be back in the same trouble we were before, so busy keeping it going we can't think. Give them the smallest machine you can because they are very able people. They will learn how to do things on a small machine instead of mass computing.'' As far as I'm concerned, that's how UNIX arose. We gave them a moderately small machine and they decided to make it do great things. They had to come up with a system to do it on. It is called UNIX!

A. G. Chynoweth: I just have to pick up on that one. In our present environment, Dick, while we wrestle with some of the red tape attributed to, or required by, the regulators, there is one quote that one exasperated AVP came up with and I've used it over and over again. He growled that, ``UNIX was never a deliverable!''"

no amount of marketing money would make a name like GIMP gain wide acceptance.

So... you're saying I should reevaluate my KDE Ultimate Network Tool then?

1) Make selection
2) Open "Image" menu in main menubar
3) Click "Crop to Selection"

It's even easier than that these days:

1. Make selection using the Crop Tool.
2. Click the selection.

Done in two. I have no idea why OP is having such a difficult time.

At my local grocery store, they sell three different types of bananas: "standard" (49c/lb), organic (79c/lb) and fair trade (89c/lb). Without some form of labelling, the cashier cannot distinguish between the types.

Of course, the self-checkout lanes make this entire argument almost moot...

You know, I used to think it was solely an OpenOffice.org issue, and while the application certainly could be snappier and less bloated in some areas, I don't think it's nearly as bad as people make it out to be.

As the only Computer Science teacher at my high school, I often inherit lots of older hardware. The other day our local technician gave me three old Celeron 600MHz laptops that he was just going to throw in the trash. I decided to turn them into workstations for my students who did not have easy access to computers at home. As they were slow machines, I set them up with a basic Ubuntu install running IceWM -- it runs quite snappy, and is a bit more user-friendly than say DSL.

I considered installing AbiWord for a word processor, but chose OO.o mainly because we have it installed on the school servers anyway. The result? It takes about 6-7 seconds to load up, and responds quite well. As a point of comparison, the 2GHz Pentium 4 machines running XP and Word in our department office launch Word in approximately 5-6 seconds, so it's pretty much on par.

I know that OO.o is a beast sometimes, but my experiences have been fairly positive.

I know you were going for funny, but in reality Jeopardy never uses one(or two)-word answers.

They often do, but they're typically framed within a narrow, specific category. For example, the category might me "National Drinks" or some such thing. Typical Q/As might be Japan (Sake), Russia (Vodka), and so forth. Jeapoardy! also has a few other categories (anagrams, for example) that frequently use one or two words.

If you are sick on a Friday or Monday...

I frequently hear this argument, but it presupposes a truly "random" sick day. I suspect that the dates are indeed biased, with more people being "sick" on a Monday or Friday. I know that would certainly be my choice.

Somewhat related, it's like flipping a coin 999 times and coming up heads each time. What is the probability that it will come up heads again? If it was truly random, the probability would be 50%. More likely, however, the coin is weighted on one side and biased toward heads. Bias is definitely a factor.

A funny thing. When napster first came out, I downloaded a bunch of songs, which got me excited about music in general and several bands in particular. In the year before napster got shut down, I probably bought a dozen CDs. Then for quite a while I lost interest in music, or just played the music I had. Then I got broadband and an iPod and discovered eMule, and ended up buying another dozen or so CDs after a few years of not setting foot in a record store. The the RIAA started cracking down, and well, I just sort of lost interest in music again.

What a bunch of morons.