I live in Wisconsin, and we tend to do a lot of "Second Run" Re purposing, I makes sense, Its already there, so why not?

I know the freeway salters already use a thick slurry salt mix that not only speeds the melting process, but also stays put alot better on bridges and such. I don't know what is exactly in the mix, but i seem to recall the mix is just as safe as pure salt.

Other than cost savings though, I wouldn't call it a eco benefit. It's still going to wash away into the ground and local water, I remember a article in the Milwaukee journal a few years back that some of the smaller ponds and lakes in the Madison area were starting to show a dangerous salinity level for the local wildlife. (they tend to over salt the roads a bit according to the article)

I live in the Northwoods, and what the county does here is salt right after the snow ends, and after that it's sand. a bit more economical, they just send a street sweeper out early spring and collect what hasnt washed away and reuse it

no, on gravel you have friction, and inertia doesn't bite you in the ass (friction of the other rocks, your tires etc.) Snow, on the other hand, packs and acts like teflon.

In my area, we got a couple inches, and it makes going to work interesting to say the least. Heck, Turning out of the alley my garage is in makes me fish tail at 5mph in my truck. Leaving work, I have to engage 4wd just to climb the hill behind employee parking.

Whereas gravel i can intentionally do a power-slide at 30mph and not fear for my life.

My mom had this dodge omni when i was in high school, and once she parked in a iced over parking lot, when she got back from her shopping, she got in the car, and closing the door was enough to start her sliding sideways 40 feet into a snow hill and embed her 1/4. took a city plow truck to pull her out.

Obviously you haven't looked under a car before. Most gas tanks are mounted under the rear seat and VERY exposed, having only a couple straps and..... a piece of sheet metal (for a heat and debris shield) to protect it. (tanks nowadays are mostly made of plastic as well, so the casing on a battery is probably stronger. the plastic is soft, and flexes, so that helps)

Did anyone else hear the fox football analyst in their heads while reading this?

so PalmOS, BackBerry, Windows CE or Symbian don't count as smartphone OS's?

Ram is considered volatile memory, meaning it loses its info when power is turned off. the whole point of the ssd on hard drive is to take the most used things you store and send them out quickly. ram cache would help during use, but is almost useless during long reads that aren't known already. Starting up a system is a prime example, Solid state will already have it in storage when you begin (Ideally) and be able to send it out before the hard drive even has to spin up.

ram would (and does in any normal system) have to wait for the disk to spin up, and feed it data. Every time you turn off/on the system.
A unique case would mabe be a VM, but i don't really want to break that down.

What your probably wanting is a "Ram Drive", where you dedicate a portion of system memory for a Virtual hard drive that disapears when you shut down and is recreated on startup. handy things, great for temp files and anything you don't want your system to keep once your done with it. (I cache my torrents to one and copy the final file to the hard drive once done, keeps my disk from thrashing to badly)

That being said, I would love having a hard drive come out with a laptop ram slot. "we ship our drives with 32mb cache, but a user can put in up to a 4GB Upgrade"
heck, I'd buy it :)

I recently worked on a Laptop for a friend that I had to create a new user and copy all the prefs and files over.

it kinda amazed me that all there was to move was the bookmarks. no photos, no documents, not even anything in the downloads folder! this laptop was about a year and a half old and basically stock.

The only thing she really did was print recipes and joke email.

So the only thing I would say is that the Printing support in ChromeOS is crappy by design.
"Buy a cloud printer" doesnt really do it for me.

Other than that, Sure

Actually, Asus is very good about Updates. My old TF101 (original transformer tablet) got updates to 4.0 before asus said it would stop (cyanogen has a build for 4.2.0, but i traded it in for the tf701, Sweet machine)

Bah, not even that. I just tried out the android-x86 4.2.2 ISO just a few days ago, and I'd be happy if it just saw the NTFS partition on the HD. (plus Printing support, there's a app for my printer, but it sucks bad)

VLC works fine, mozilla was snappy, and the play store knew what apps would work!

I think that android would be awesome as a primary OS option, I don't even miss minimizing stuff, they have a task switcher that works fast enough.

So are they going to ditch the PS3 support with this one? i still have my PS2 sitting in my living room for that reason.

I can think of several. Search for Firestone and Ford to see the recall of the tires that had a issue with the tread separating. More Personally, My co-worker had her parents brakes fail as she was parking the car AT THE PLACE SHE WORKED. went through the window and hit the atm. (we work at a BP station)

while a good idea in theory, I would suggest 3 levels of power. 5v, 12v, and 24v. 5v would work just fine off USB and could simply use a mini-b connector. I have alot of car audio toys that draw 12v and they get HOT. (xm, HD Radio)

12v for printers and routers, net-books... things that need more draw, but still not too demanding.

I have 24v in there because I have yet to see a full size laptop that draws less than 16v.

you know i think it's funny, I bought a $60 Radio shack outdoor antenna, and it works alright, but if i take a $9 rabbit ear from wall-mart (RCA if you care) I can recive digital from grand rapids michigan. considering I set this up in my mom's house on the west side of Milwaukee, I thought it was pretty cool. (on a side note, where she sits, we can get about 7 analog channels, but we get somewhere around 20 digital)