"So don't freaking patronize us."

I'll patronize you when it is called for. It is called for in this case. 3" of wintry mix is a mild inconvenience, not a shut the whole city down natural disaster. Oh yeah, slush/sleet DOES plow out of the way with no problems. Drive slow is the right response to such conditions. As to the whole needing momentum to go up hill on ice; yeah, not so much. Proper throttle modulation to avoid tire spin works better since you'll be in control. Then again, I drive through worse conditions every year, so I wouldn't know how to handle such things...

We get wintry mix worse than what hit Atlanta several times a year here in MN. Usually in October & November, and then from March-May.

Perhaps you southerners should heed NWS warnings. When there is a watch, it's about 50/50 if it'll happen. If it is a warning, take the warning as gospel.

"Try iTunes on OS X.
It's much harder, better, faster and stronger that the Windows version."

No kidding. I'm rolling with almost a half-TB library and it just screams.

Winter is my favorite season.

Snowmobiling. Enough said.

"A station wagon is what moms wanted to drive. Whenever somebody says "Americans want SUVs". They're wrong. The SUV is a legal hack to get around fuel economy standards. See? If we build a station wagon with a center of gravity so high that it tips over in the parking lot, it's legally defined as a truck and we don't have to meet the same standards.

Sorry to get into this, but it's one of my pet peeves. Whenever I hear, "Americans want SUVs" it just grates on my nerves. No we didn't. We wanted station wagons. Mom didn't want to tip the kids over and throw them, her, and the groceries into a ditch. Shortsighted regulators left a loophole in CAFE, and they literally drove a truck through it.

Now all these kids don't even know what a station wagon is. Sounds about right. It's the vehicle that the mom down the block had. I distinctly remember us piling in there with the neighbor kids on more than one occasion, and she smoked like a chimney. Shotgun! I get to ride up front with Mrs. Potter and yeah, it smells up here but we didn't know nothin'. We didn't wear seatbelts and... well... I know this is survivorship bias talking but... we survived!

In other words, get your damned SUV off my lawn."

This American wants his SUV, not a station wagon.
I have an SUV instead of a station wagon. Not because I'm a mom (I'm not), and not for grocery getting, but because I live in a place with 4 real seasons and big 4x4 SUVs are handy for getting around for the 2 days it takes the DOT to clear roads after a winter storm. Besides, a car won't pull my snowmobile trailer or the boat.

That said, I don't use the SUV for daily driving. It's 17 years old and unlike the vast majority of SUVs, is muddy as often as not since it also does go off road. As a 2nd vehicle, it is great. Mine is nowhere near as big as a Suburban (2 door full size Yukon GT), and I sure as hell wouldn't want to load it up with micro SD cards; each one may be tiny, but enough to fill the thing up would have it so grossly overloaded it wouldn't be funny.

I'll try to keep my SUV off your lawn.

Quite unlikely to go from Panther to Mountain Lion, seeing as Panther was PPC only and Mountain Lion is Intel only...

Magic 8-ball says "Outlook not so good".

Just sayin'...

"Now then, if you want imaging, Magnepan."

All hail Magnepan!

Even if they're on the complete opposite end of the efficiency spectrum from the horn speakers.

I feed my little MMGs 400Wpc (@ 4 Ohms), and back them up with a pair of HSU TN1220HO subs, but my little MMG/HSU setup is sonic bliss. Some day, when I've acquired more amplification, I'll be grabbing some bigger maggies and moving the MMGs to surround duty.

"Personally, I'm still looking for speakers that excel at reproducing music (modern as well as classical) but also do a good job in a home theater setup. I settled on a pair of Acoustic Research Status S-50 floor standers, good but still a bit of a compromise. Hearing good things about the LinkWitz Orion but I still have to find a pair I can listen to, to decide whether all that extra cabling and equipment is worth the effort."

Magnepan MMG. Order them direct from Magnepan, by phone, for a shade over $600/pair. They're made in the USA and sold in China. Be warned, you'll want an honest 200Wpc at 4 Ohms to dive them (I use 400 per channel), you'll need good subwoofers, plural, and good bass management in your processor/preamp. Seriously, there is no receiver that'll drive them as their efficiency is low. But man, the sound is incredible. I've listened to many a high-end box speaker and they all sound like the sound is coming from a box. Not so with dipoles, be they Planar Magnetic or Electrostatic. I've also not heard the Orion setup, but I can appreciate what it has to offer (no box!).

Planar-Magnetic dipoles and electrostatic dipoles are awesome. When you fall in love, you can move up to the bigger Maggies, where your speaker prices are still reasonable and have better bass, but they dominate a room and will have your amp begging for mercy.

"Yeah , right.

That attitude is why american "sports" cars like the corvette , camaro or mustang use huge gas guzzling V8 engines because its cheaper to just chuck in something off the shelf than spend time optimising it and ending up with something more efficient and powefull."

Uh, first off, the Corvette is the only car you listed there that is actually a sports car. Second, the Corvette gets better mileage than almost any other sports car on the market; certainly better than anything that has performance anywhere near the Vette. Thirdly, GMs entire small block development program starts with making more power for less weight and in smaller external dimensions for use in the Corvette. The engines are beat upon in Vettes, and then given wimpy cams, anemic intakes & exhausts, and have their displacement lowered to be rolled out to the masses (to be fair the Camaro usually gets the un-gimped motor); the pickups & SUVs tend to get the gimped motors...

FWIW, the 5.7L LS6 small block engine in my '02 Z06 makes >405HP, gets me ~28MPG highway (~24MPG mixed driving), and weighs about 400lb complete in a car that weighs about 3000lbs and corners at >1G. The motor in my Vette has smaller external dimensions, less weight, less complexity, more power, vastly more torque at usable RPM, and costs less than most much smaller displacement, heavier, less efficient, larger external dimensioned, lower torque producing engines with turbos, multiple cams, and other high-tech trickery. Sometimes K.I.S.S. is the right way to go...

"Please show me the ultrabook that gets 10 hours of battery life. Hell show me the laptop with an intel (not atom) chip that gets 10 hours. The only laptops I have seen that give that kind of life all have to use an extended battery that ruins their form factor and adds quite a bit of weight." Exhibit A: MacBook Air 13", mid-2011 model. With the keyboard backlight off, and screen brightness at around 25%, I can get 10 hours of use out of it web-surfing and other light tasks. More typical use for me results in about 8 hours (keyboard backlight on, screen at 50% brightness). That's with an i7 CPU, 4GB of RAM, and 256GB of SSD space. I also do get over 10hrs out of my 3rd gen iPad using it to control my telescope. To be fair, that is with the screen brightness all of the way down, but never in sleep mode, and playing music the whole time. Apple, unlike EVERY OTHER manufacturer will usually exceed their ratings on battery life in real use.

Try iTunes on a Mac.

Try using the right weapon weapon; no, an SMG is not the right weapon to use against the super-mutants.

Use the right tool for the job. To kill super-mutants, you want a long rifle of some sort (hunting rifle, sniper rifle, etc.), or energy weapons (Plasma/LASER), or a gatling gun. Missile launchers and mini-nukes also work well. Me, I just went to the plasma rifles and turned the muties into piles of goo with 1 or 2 headshots, VASTS or not.

"On my mac, accessing anything not docked is a pain...Unity/gnome 3 suck on a large screen. "

Apparently, you've not mastered the use of spotlight on your Mac. CMD-Space and type a letter or two of the application name. This has worked since at least Tiger (I switched just after Apple went to Intel).

PPC macs do not run Snow Leopard. SL requires an Intel processor.

Were I going to spend that sort of cash, it would be on some Magnepan 20.1s. No need for subs there either; though I'll never be without good subwoofers (note the plural).

Sadly, I have budgetary and room issues that preclude me from going to that extreme; I'm not so far gone down the rabbit-hole that I need or want to spend anywhere near $10k per pair for speakers. I might consider some Maggie 1.7's, but that is the limit to what I could fit in my dedicated room; I'm far more likely to just get another pair of MMGs and a used CC3 to round out the speakers for HT duty. As you know, these types of speakers require a fair bit of breathing room, and my room is not big enough for any of the big-dog ESL/planar magnetics.

I prefer the maggie presentation, others prefer their ESLs. Both sound great, but each sounds different. You can't really go wrong with either, to be honest.