If you are asking this question, this product is probably not for you.
It’s for the non-technical prepper type, the guy who has 10,000 rounds of ammo and dried food for 10 years but still uses AOL.
The idea is just get this thing, plug it into a solar power bank, and then you can get information you might need to survive which wouldn’t be available online if there is no more internet. You could absolutely put the same thing together yourself without a problem. If you have the skill and the wherewithal to do that, you don’t need this. If you don’t have that skill, then you are the target market of this product.

Oh absolutely. Without a doubt. Broadcom / VMware have lost trust for good

Tons of alternatives from other NAS vendors, but I’m not sure anyone makes a Synology type box that is a generic x86 to run your own OS. Plenty of tower server type things but I’m not aware of any little toaster type boxes.

Oh tons of alternatives for sure. Where I’m at, at this point if I go somewhere else I’m going to want open source most likely.

Yeah exactly. I’m on vacation, if I wanted to do chores I would have stayed home. Plenty of choice to do right here.

Broadcom released a free VMware again, Synology is locking down their products,… Did Synology just hire some brain dead Broadcom executive?

This is seriously ‘how to kill your brand and customer good will in one easy step’ type nonsense.
Synology does not have the respect in Enterprise that someone like Dell or HPE does. They exist in Enterprise because of admins who use it at home and then bring the knowledge to work.

All this does is make sure nobody will buy one for the home anymore. There are too many other good options. And various open source NAS OS choices becoming more mature by the day.

If I was an OEM like Beelink or Servermicro I would be rushing to make an unbranded storage box, five or six 3.5 in SATA hot swap bays in front, 2-4 NVMe ports on the bottom, decent low power CPU, and an SODIMM socket or two. They’d sell a ton of them.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if a Synology ‘jailbreak’ to load a third party OS comes out.

This 100%.
AirBnB used to be cheaper than a hotel. Then it got so easy to tack on fees and ridiculous requirements that you’re basically paying more than a hotel to housekeep your own room. Mix in lots of shady hosts and most of the time I’d rather just stay at the Hilton for the same price.

It can still be useful as a novelty, like book a party house somewhere or as easily cheaper way to house an awful lot of people. But for the most part, I’ll pass.

It’s a matter of implementation versus invention.

If I asked you to build a hundred story skyscraper, that would be difficult, but we already have all of the technical components. All the component problems are already solved- we know how to make high quality steel, we know how to design the frame of such a building, we know how to anchor it into the ground, etc. You just need to put those technologies together in a functional design.

If I asked you to build me a spacecraft that goes faster than light, you couldn’t, because that sort of propulsion system has never been built. And while we have theories on how one might build it, we don’t currently have the capability to build any of those theoretical drive systems even as test articles (mainly because they need things in space larger than we have the capability to launch or will have the capability to launch anytime soon).

But if I asked you to build a thorium reactor, all of the component problems have been solved. We have a lot of coatings that resist corrosion, and so making valves and pipes out of them (and more importantly, designing the system of valves and pipes) takes work but we know how to do it. We understand how to make and process thorium fuel, even if we don’t have much experience doing it.

As for your grid, I don’t want my grade either powered by text that isn’t safe reliable and productive, but the fact is we don’t have that right now. A lot of power still comes from coal and similar shitty sources. So I will absolutely take less shitty.

Yeah I use the word if a lot, but that has a level of probability associated with it. I can say if we figure out a way to generate power from magic pixie dust tomorrow our energy problems will be solved but there’s no probability of that. Here there is a technology that has been known to work since the 1900s, that we have built research reactors on, and that is now being actively developed. The “if” here has a high degree of probability.

Uranium reactors are for the most part very safe, and I personally think we should consider building more of them. The problem with them is when something goes wrong, it can go very very wrong contaminating a huge area. Now granted more modern reactor designs make that sort of issue much less likely, but the worst case scenario of a uranium reactor, no matter how unlikely, is still a lot worse than the worst case scenario of a thorium reactor.

For anyone not familiar with thorium…

Thorium is a great nuclear fuel. Much much safer than the uranium we currently use, because the reaction works best only within a narrow temperature band. Unlike uranium which can run away, a thorium reactor would become less efficient as it overheats possibly preventing a huge problem. That means the fuel must be melted into liquid to achieve the right temperature. That also provides a safety mechanism, you simply put a melt plug in the bottom of the reactor so if the reactor overheats the plug melts and all the fuel pours out into some safe containment system. This makes a Chernobyl / Fukushima style meltdown essentially impossible.

There are other benefits to this. The molten fuel can contain other elements as well, meaning a thorium reactor can actually consume nuclear waste from a uranium reactor as part of its fuel mix. The resulting waste from a thorium reactor is radioactive for dozens or hundreds of years not tens of thousands of years so you don’t need a giant Yucca Mountain style disposal site.
And thorium is easy to find. Currently it is an undesirable waste product of mining other things, we have enough of it in waste piles to run our whole civilization for like 100 years. And there’s plenty more to dig up.

There are challenges though. The molten uranium is usually contained in a molten salt solution, which is corrosive. This creates issues for pipes, pumps, valves, etc. The fuel also needs frequent reprocessing, meaning a truly viable thorium plant would most likely have a fuel processing facility as part of the plant.

The problems however are not unsolvable, Even with current technology. We actually had some research reactors running on thorium in the mid-1900s but uranium got the official endorsement, perhaps because you can’t use a thorium reactor to build bombs. So we basically abandoned the technology.

China has been heavily investing in thorium for a while. This appears to be one of the results of that investment. Now this is a tiny baby reactor, basically a lab toy, a proof of concept. Don’t expect this to power anybody’s house. The point is though, it works. You have a 2 megawatt working reactor today, next you build a 20 megawatt demonstrator, then you start building out 200 megawatt units to attach to the power grid.

Obviously I have no crystal ball. But if this technology works, this is the start of something very big. I am sure China will continue developing this tech full throttle. If they make it work at scale, China becomes the first country in the world that essentially has unlimited energy. And then the rest of the world is buying their thorium reactors from China.

Okay so you saved $60 million by canceling the grant. Did anybody bother to consider that building the train would overall save taxpayers a good bit more than that? In the form of fuel, wasted time sitting in traffic, extra road maintenance, parking, etc?

The problem is conceptual.

There are two types of tracker devices.

AirTags, and similar devices in the Google ecosystem, are short-range Bluetooth beacons. They don’t actually have GPS receivers of their own. They rely on the swarm of other Apple / Android phones in the world that have their Bluetooth radios active. One of those phones picks up the beacon, and sends a report up to Apple / Google with its current location and the beacon signal strength. That is how you can find your stuff, because some random person’s phone called in a sighting. Because these things are very simple, just a very low power Bluetooth transmitter and nothing else, they can run for a year on a coin cell battery.

The other is an actual GPS tracker. This device has a GPS receiver to determine its own location, and a cellular radio to transmit that location elsewhere, often just by sending a text message with its ID and location to some server. This however is physically larger because you need a battery, GPS antenna, cellular antenna, and a cell phone style radio chip. That all uses a lot more power. Most of the ones designed to last for months have a power brick holding 4-8 D-cell batteries, or a large lithium pack. Obviously that is not some tiny thing you lose in a pocket. Those are usually magnetically attached to the bottom of cars. Or, in the case of fleet telemetry, it will be hardwired into the vehicle. But this sort of thing necessarily requires a subscription fee because it has a cellular radio. That cellular thing needs an account with a carrier.

Exactly. The protocol was written by somebody with no medical training. So the first drug knocks the person out, the second drug paralyzes them, and the third drug stops the heart. Problem is, the third drug if given to a conscious person is incredibly painful. This created situations where the first drug was dosed wrong, so the person woke up but was unable to move.

Lethal injection could be much better done with a single drug system, like a massive overdose of barbiturates, but I think there is an unspoken desire to avoid any death that might be considered 'pleasant". Which to be honest is completely barbaric in my opinion.

I think this applies more widely than just doctors. As a pilot, I could design an execution protocol using nitrogen that would be dirt cheap and totally painless. Any other pilot could write the same one. But I wouldn’t do it, not if you paid me a million dollars. There are too many cases of innocent people getting executed, so I want nothing to do with any of it. Our judicial system is good, but it is not good enough to be relied on for taking life. So I would do nothing to help justify or condone or make tolerable the act of executing prisoners.

Also, this execution is a perfect example. Three bullets to the heart should kill someone dead in seconds. But the article mentions him crying out and flexing for the better part of a minute. That makes me think all three executioners missed the heart, perhaps on purpose.

Makes sense, after all she was a DEI hire.

JUST because he’s black?
He would be harshly investigated by internal affairs and severely punished with a 30-day paid suspension. Not saying it’s like that everywhere, but it seems to happen like that an awful lot :-(

Yeah I’m also struggling to see the logic in this.
The dude is already sort of a folk hero. If you kill him you will absolutely be creating a martyr. It’s going to be one of those things that might not make a big impact right away, but the worse shit gets for rank and file Americans the more they will remember Luigi. And that’s when you get copycats…

Exactly! So we throw him in a for-profit prison, where he is essentially a caged animal made to fight with the other caged animals. After a decade or two we put him out on parole with no marketable skills and a felony conviction to ensure nobody will hire him.

Then we act confused about why recidivism rates are high.

Oh for sure I agree.
I was just trying to point out the hypocrisy of jailing the gangbanger or letting him go versus throwing the book at Luigi and trying to execute him.

So riddle me this. Inner City, poor area, 2:00 a.m.
One gang member approaches another rival gang member, pulls out an illegally modified full auto pistol, dumps an entire 30 round magazine into him.
Does he get the death penalty?