Serial-Attached-SCSI supports SATA. Meaning SATA is a subset of it - a subset of the current SCSI standard which consists of 'SCSI of the old' and SATA - SAS without SATA is not SAS, it's some crippled monstrosity.
USB Storage uses SCSI command set. What more should it use to satisfy you to define it as a SCSI device?
(E.g., the command for "write data at block #foo" is the same sequence of bytes in IDE and SCSI. This is roughly equivalent to building an editor that uses the vi commands for insertion and deletion, but the emacs commands for cursor movement and searching. Okay, not a great analogy, but it's short notice:).)
Nope, it's like writing an editor that is key-for-key, bug-for-bug vi-compatible only written in Python, or maybe in ARM assembly.
The same command set, the same functionality, different backend, different way of doing things but with the same outcome.
What's this new editor then? A port. It IS vi, only a vi written in Python, or vi running on ARM. The inner workings may be entirely different but the functionality is the same. And if the functionality differs partially but remains very similar, it will be called a clone, but it still will be a 'vi clone', 'a kind of vi'.
SCSI protocol ported to ATA still uses the same command set, it serves the same purpose. The inner workings are modified for the new platform it's running on, but what makes you say it's not SCSI anymore?
Not even close. USB mass storage is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike SCSI.
They support SCSI Primary Command (SPC) Set and SCSI Block Command (SBC) Set. That makes them very much compatible with SCSI...on certain abstraction layer. There's of course USB architecture below and the filesystem above, but right there what makes them mass storage and not, say, printers or webcams from the OS point of view, is SCSI. The OS sees them as "removable SCSI drives".
The SATA and SCSI protocols are similar
SAS is a next revision, extension of SCSI - THE new SCSI standard. And SAS supports SATA devices. Meaning that SATA, being a subset of SAS is a subset of nowadays SCSI. Even though SATA protocol is only -similar- to SCSI of the old, it is a part of -current- SCSI standard (SAS).
SCSI is faaaar from dead. Actually, SCSI is dominating the market currently, killing all the competition. Except it's done with weird parallel buses with 50 different incompatible connectors. And it changed the name, but it's still the same old SCSI protocol.
* ATAPI is SCSI over ATA - all non-SATA (or non-SCSI;) CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs use it. * SATA is SCSI over a special serial cable. Meaning - only obsolete PATA disks are non-SCSI. All CD drives are SCSI this or another way. * USB Storage (pendrives, external drives etc) are all SCSI.
Essentially mostly every mass storage device you connect to the computer is SCSI nowadays.
A hour a day minus weekends, holidays and days off, if you happen to work at loading them on the plane? Grab from storage, cart to the plane, load, repeat with next plane. Of course this is not the only weapon you'd load but essentially a hour seems like a good estimate.
It's not about absolute value of the radiation, but relative to what you're going to smuggle. 10 kilograms of depleted uranium scattered all around the pass should be quite enough to obscure radiation from 100 kilograms of the same depleted uranium smuggled in a shielded container.
As I wrote before: there's a PLENTY of depleted uranium shallow in the ground free to pick all over Iraq and Afghanistan. Spread it over a reasonable number of people and you become impossible to find amongst them.
But if they had to close down half or more of the crossings? Sure they'd smell -something- is about to happen, but they'd be pretty much powerless to find it, with not a -couple- of people in a day, but with more than half of the people coming through - easily achievable by contaminating road surface, see some post about radioactive frogs.
They would soon find out that scrutinizing every second car that comes through completely paralyses the pass, that once a section of the road has been decontaminated, it didn't last a week till a different section was 'hot' again, that sand in the area around the passes contains some uranium filings and nothing short of removing a foot of sand in a mile radius around the pass is going to remove it, and generally the whole process either leading to getting the bombs past the border, or such a paralysis and paranoia on the border that the precautions and constant fear of the attack outweight what would happen if the attack actually happened.
You miss the objectives of a terrorist. Killing people is totally secondary to causing fear in masses.
1) hard to detect
Since we're talking radioactives here, it's difficult, though not impossible. Additionally, supplement this with "early". It can be detected shortly before the explosion, it's all fine as long as it gets to explode (no people have to be in the vicinity as long as the material gets scattered). Multiple in different places make it hard to detect all.
2) reliable The simpler the more reliable; redundancy (many bombs) add to it - only some need to go off.
3) able to explode on a large scale (big cloud of material) or don't explode, yet rely on some form of continuous release.
Explosion is a must because of psychological reasons. 'Dirty bomb' is deeply grounded in people's psyche. 'Scattered radioactive dust' is way less so. While continuous release (say, vacuum cleaner running on reverse with the pipe sticking out of the roof of your car) would be likely more efficient and easier in terms of delivery, it wouldn't create the amount of panic.
OTOH blast radius is a function of more than a square of the amount of explosives used. Many smaller bombs cover a bigger area than one big.
4) easy to build by their minions It is. Dead easy.
5) deployed intelligently (wind directions, precipitation, etc etc...) Just good coverage, multiple places in major arteries of the city.
6) contain the particles in a small enough form so that they would enter the respiratory system deep enough That's strictly a factor of used grinding stone, but in fact that's still all about efficiency at killing (which would be very low) and not about efficiency at causing panic.
"depleted uranium or DU, contains less than one third as much U-235 and U-234 as natural uranium" --wikipedia
Meaning U-238 is not the only danger of depleted uranium. One third of 0.72% is still some 0.6 grams of U235 in a single 30mm bullet, meaning over half a kilogram in a 1000+ bullet belt you have to handle while loading rounds on an aircraft.
If the bad guys would have the skill and means to actually accomplish something like this
Once you have the radioactives, the "dirty bomb" is actually -easier- to make than a normal bomb. Transport might be tricky but not impossible.
Gather the bullets scattered in the ground. Once you found two, finding more should be easy, they usually form long trails at regular intervals in the ground, just as the cannon shot them.
File the bullets to null on a grinding machine, which can be picked in any hardware store, or even make from scrap. Gather the filings.
take the filings, mix with any gunpowder, taken from standard ammunition or homemade black powder. Note dirty bomb doesn't need to have the destructive power of a normal bomb. All it needs is to scatter the payload.
Pack in pipes, maybe even lead pipes to combine shielding and shell.
Add a detonator of your choice, a common fuse will suffice.
Scrap-iron is not thickly packed. Lots of air space and the reflections will eventually let some of the radiation out. It's like stopping water with a sponge vs a block of plastic. A transformer core is a solid block, no gaps. Plus while truck-sized load of steel might make it detectable, a truck-sized load of steel plus a few tons of lead might not.
OTOH scattering some radioactive dust upwind from the detectors would pretty much cripple them. A dirty bomb made just from dust that's been sitting next to radioactives for a while; just enough to rise the background level up to what the car would emit.
Copernicus was a priest but he wrote his works in secret from the church and had them only released post-mortem. Not all christians are no-brain idiots, but the Church as an institution definitely is.
"Dirty bomb goes off in Manhattan" as a headline sounds reasonable though, because that's exactly what it would be. If they withheld the info the bomb contained radioactive material, people would be outraged (and terrorists would be happy to announce it first, sending all the dread they wish, exaggerating the possible effects. If they give the info the bomb did contain radioactives, they'd be really hard-pressed to come up with a note that calms the panic that would arise at once.
Imagine a hidden compartment at the end of a container. An 18-wheeler truck would hardly feel it. A meter at the end, a fake wall hiding the content, pretty hard to spot.
A different hideout: in Poland, the police found drugs smuggled that way but only thanks to a tip they got. A transformer (no, not the robot. A voltage changing device), and hide the material in the core. You can't take it apart without damaging it without unwinding a few miles of wire off the coil. In Poland, these were electric welding machines, each housing a few pounds of cocaine right inside the hollowed-out transformer core. If you want nuclear materials transported, you can get an industrial size transformer, the size of a small house. It can't be checked without being damaged beyond repair, its composition is mostly densely wound copper wire and closely laid steel plates (5 tons of lead wouldn't make a difference, plus the steel and copper mean a good shield already) and inside of the core is spacious enough to host a quite large nuke, not just a dirty bomb.
"4. Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab" Honey, why is your face glowing? In 1951, A.C. Gilbert introduced his U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, a radioactive learning set we can only assume was fun for the whole math club. Gilbert, who American Memorabilia claims was "often compared to Walt Disney for his creative genius," had a dream that nuclear power could capture the imaginations of children everywhere. For a mere $49.50, the kit came complete with three "very low-level" radioactive sources, a Geiger-Mueller radiation counter, a Wilson cloud chamber (to see paths of alpha particles), a spinthariscope (to see "live" radioactive disintegration), four samples of uranium-bearing ores, and an electroscope to measure radioactivity.
Called one of the most dangerous toys of all times, despite totally harmless radiation levels, yes?
Imagine a dirty bomb made from ground depleted uranium bullets (Iraq, Afghanistan and some more have a plenty of them, just to pick up and use) goes off in Manhattan. Of course you and me know depleted uranium is called 'depleted' for a reason and you'd have to try really hard to get any results off it. But imagine how would a "Joe Average" react to the news: "Manhattan has been contaminated with slightly radioactive Uranium dust. The radiation level is entirely harmless. There is no reason to panic, the radioactive dust will not affect your health."
Sure I know how to do this. The question is, do the government employees know? Do their bosses know? (I mean, they are the ones who decide which procedure is deemed safe enough.) And does it pay to do so and sell the drives? (I'm not sure what manpower would have to be employed but knowing the way govt institutions do this kind of stuff, the that wouldn't be one unpaid intern but a team of security firm contractors at $80/hour)
Slashdot Mirror
...especially if they smelt the rat and spiked the cake with something funny :)
Serial-Attached-SCSI supports SATA. Meaning SATA is a subset of it - a subset of the current SCSI standard which consists of 'SCSI of the old' and SATA - SAS without SATA is not SAS, it's some crippled monstrosity.
USB Storage uses SCSI command set. What more should it use to satisfy you to define it as a SCSI device?
(E.g., the command for "write data at block #foo" is the same sequence of bytes in IDE and SCSI. This is roughly equivalent to building an editor that uses the vi commands for insertion and deletion, but the emacs commands for cursor movement and searching. Okay, not a great analogy, but it's short notice :).)
Nope, it's like writing an editor that is key-for-key, bug-for-bug vi-compatible only written in Python, or maybe in ARM assembly.
The same command set, the same functionality, different backend, different way of doing things but with the same outcome.
What's this new editor then? A port. It IS vi, only a vi written in Python, or vi running on ARM. The inner workings may be entirely different but the functionality is the same. And if the functionality differs partially but remains very similar, it will be called a clone, but it still will be a 'vi clone', 'a kind of vi'.
SCSI protocol ported to ATA still uses the same command set, it serves the same purpose. The inner workings are modified for the new platform it's running on, but what makes you say it's not SCSI anymore?
Exactly where does that leave SAS (Serial Attached SCSI)
:)
As a superset of SATA.
SCSI standard got extended to embrace it, and took form of SAS
Not even close. USB mass storage is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike SCSI.
...on certain abstraction layer. There's of course USB architecture below and the filesystem above, but right there what makes them mass storage and not, say, printers or webcams from the OS point of view, is SCSI. The OS sees them as "removable SCSI drives".
They support SCSI Primary Command (SPC) Set and SCSI Block Command (SBC) Set. That makes them very much compatible with SCSI
The SATA and SCSI protocols are similar
SAS is a next revision, extension of SCSI - THE new SCSI standard. And SAS supports SATA devices. Meaning that SATA, being a subset of SAS is a subset of nowadays SCSI. Even though SATA protocol is only -similar- to SCSI of the old, it is a part of -current- SCSI standard (SAS).
SCSI is faaaar from dead. Actually, SCSI is dominating the market currently, killing all the competition. Except it's done with weird parallel buses with 50 different incompatible connectors. And it changed the name, but it's still the same old SCSI protocol.
;) CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs use it.
* ATAPI is SCSI over ATA - all non-SATA (or non-SCSI
* SATA is SCSI over a special serial cable. Meaning - only obsolete PATA disks are non-SCSI. All CD drives are SCSI this or another way.
* USB Storage (pendrives, external drives etc) are all SCSI.
Essentially mostly every mass storage device you connect to the computer is SCSI nowadays.
What Xenu? You're not supposed to know that!
A hour a day minus weekends, holidays and days off, if you happen to work at loading them on the plane?
Grab from storage, cart to the plane, load, repeat with next plane. Of course this is not the only weapon you'd load but essentially a hour seems like a good estimate.
gosh, read the other posts in this thread.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=497104&cid=22843494
Depleted uranium would be VERY exciting to the press and general public.
It's not about absolute value of the radiation, but relative to what you're going to smuggle. 10 kilograms of depleted uranium scattered all around the pass should be quite enough to obscure radiation from 100 kilograms of the same depleted uranium smuggled in a shielded container.
As I wrote before: there's a PLENTY of depleted uranium shallow in the ground free to pick all over Iraq and Afghanistan.
Spread it over a reasonable number of people and you become impossible to find amongst them.
But if they had to close down half or more of the crossings? Sure they'd smell -something- is about to happen, but they'd be pretty much powerless to find it, with not a -couple- of people in a day, but with more than half of the people coming through - easily achievable by contaminating road surface, see some post about radioactive frogs.
They would soon find out that scrutinizing every second car that comes through completely paralyses the pass, that once a section of the road has been decontaminated, it didn't last a week till a different section was 'hot' again, that sand in the area around the passes contains some uranium filings and nothing short of removing a foot of sand in a mile radius around the pass is going to remove it, and generally the whole process either leading to getting the bombs past the border, or such a paralysis and paranoia on the border that the precautions and constant fear of the attack outweight what would happen if the attack actually happened.
You miss the objectives of a terrorist. Killing people is totally secondary to causing fear in masses.
1) hard to detect
Since we're talking radioactives here, it's difficult, though not impossible. Additionally, supplement this with "early". It can be detected shortly before the explosion, it's all fine as long as it gets to explode (no people have to be in the vicinity as long as the material gets scattered). Multiple in different places make it hard to detect all.
2) reliable
The simpler the more reliable; redundancy (many bombs) add to it - only some need to go off.
3) able to explode on a large scale (big cloud of material) or don't explode, yet rely on some form of continuous release.
Explosion is a must because of psychological reasons. 'Dirty bomb' is deeply grounded in people's psyche. 'Scattered radioactive dust' is way less so. While continuous release (say, vacuum cleaner running on reverse with the pipe sticking out of the roof of your car) would be likely more efficient and easier in terms of delivery, it wouldn't create the amount of panic.
OTOH blast radius is a function of more than a square of the amount of explosives used. Many smaller bombs cover a bigger area than one big.
4) easy to build by their minions
It is. Dead easy.
5) deployed intelligently (wind directions, precipitation, etc etc...)
Just good coverage, multiple places in major arteries of the city.
6) contain the particles in a small enough form so that they would enter the respiratory system deep enough
That's strictly a factor of used grinding stone, but in fact that's still all about efficiency at killing (which would be very low) and not about efficiency at causing panic.
"depleted uranium or DU, contains less than one third as much U-235 and U-234 as natural uranium" --wikipedia
Meaning U-238 is not the only danger of depleted uranium. One third of 0.72% is still some 0.6 grams of U235 in a single 30mm bullet, meaning over half a kilogram in a 1000+ bullet belt you have to handle while loading rounds on an aircraft.
If the bad guys would have the skill and means to actually accomplish something like this
Once you have the radioactives, the "dirty bomb" is actually -easier- to make than a normal bomb. Transport might be tricky but not impossible.
Gather the bullets scattered in the ground. Once you found two, finding more should be easy, they usually form long trails at regular intervals in the ground, just as the cannon shot them.
File the bullets to null on a grinding machine, which can be picked in any hardware store, or even make from scrap. Gather the filings.
take the filings, mix with any gunpowder, taken from standard ammunition or homemade black powder. Note dirty bomb doesn't need to have the destructive power of a normal bomb. All it needs is to scatter the payload.
Pack in pipes, maybe even lead pipes to combine shielding and shell.
Add a detonator of your choice, a common fuse will suffice.
Transport. That's the tricky part.
Dump the stuff in trashcans all over the city.
Scrap-iron is not thickly packed. Lots of air space and the reflections will eventually let some of the radiation out. It's like stopping water with a sponge vs a block of plastic. A transformer core is a solid block, no gaps. Plus while truck-sized load of steel might make it detectable, a truck-sized load of steel plus a few tons of lead might not.
OTOH scattering some radioactive dust upwind from the detectors would pretty much cripple them. A dirty bomb made just from dust that's been sitting next to radioactives for a while; just enough to rise the background level up to what the car would emit.
Copernicus was a priest but he wrote his works in secret from the church and had them only released post-mortem.
Not all christians are no-brain idiots, but the Church as an institution definitely is.
"Dirty bomb goes off in Manhattan" as a headline sounds reasonable though, because that's exactly what it would be. If they withheld the info the bomb contained radioactive material, people would be outraged (and terrorists would be happy to announce it first, sending all the dread they wish, exaggerating the possible effects. If they give the info the bomb did contain radioactives, they'd be really hard-pressed to come up with a note that calms the panic that would arise at once.
1. Are you calling the OP a copycat?
Only halfway so. He's still missing a printcat for that.
Imagine a hidden compartment at the end of a container.
An 18-wheeler truck would hardly feel it. A meter at the end, a fake wall hiding the content, pretty hard to spot.
A different hideout: in Poland, the police found drugs smuggled that way but only thanks to a tip they got.
A transformer (no, not the robot. A voltage changing device), and hide the material in the core. You can't take it apart without damaging it without unwinding a few miles of wire off the coil. In Poland, these were electric welding machines, each housing a few pounds of cocaine right inside the hollowed-out transformer core. If you want nuclear materials transported, you can get an industrial size transformer, the size of a small house. It can't be checked without being damaged beyond repair, its composition is mostly densely wound copper wire and closely laid steel plates (5 tons of lead wouldn't make a difference, plus the steel and copper mean a good shield already) and inside of the core is spacious enough to host a quite large nuke, not just a dirty bomb.
Yes, except:
fear factor. People are deadly scared of radiation and it isn't enough to say 'the levels are harmless' to stop the panic.
See this: http://radarmagazine.com/features/2006/12/toys-print.php
"4. Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab"
Honey, why is your face glowing? In 1951, A.C. Gilbert introduced his U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, a radioactive learning set we can only assume was fun for the whole math club. Gilbert, who American Memorabilia claims was "often compared to Walt Disney for his creative genius," had a dream that nuclear power could capture the imaginations of children everywhere. For a mere $49.50, the kit came complete with three "very low-level" radioactive sources, a Geiger-Mueller radiation counter, a Wilson cloud chamber (to see paths of alpha particles), a spinthariscope (to see "live" radioactive disintegration), four samples of uranium-bearing ores, and an electroscope to measure radioactivity.
Called one of the most dangerous toys of all times, despite totally harmless radiation levels, yes?
Imagine a dirty bomb made from ground depleted uranium bullets (Iraq, Afghanistan and some more have a plenty of them, just to pick up and use) goes off in Manhattan. Of course you and me know depleted uranium is called 'depleted' for a reason and you'd have to try really hard to get any results off it. But imagine how would a "Joe Average" react to the news: "Manhattan has been contaminated with slightly radioactive Uranium dust. The radiation level is entirely harmless. There is no reason to panic, the radioactive dust will not affect your health."
it could glow in the darkness.
If you're unable to nuke the site from the orbit (say, because your troops are there) you must get your hands dirty.
Say, the enemy has tunnels a'la Vietcong, or underground bunkers or such. You need to send a scout. Who will it be?
And it wouldn't be good if the robot gets captured, so a good self-destruction mechanism is in order.
I frankly don't see the actual use in war, besides transporting things
Other than an autonomic anti-tank cannon or 100KG of explosives?
Sure I know how to do this.
The question is, do the government employees know?
Do their bosses know? (I mean, they are the ones who decide which procedure is deemed safe enough.)
And does it pay to do so and sell the drives? (I'm not sure what manpower would have to be employed but knowing the way govt institutions do this kind of stuff, the that wouldn't be one unpaid intern but a team of security firm contractors at $80/hour)