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Comment Amiga 2000 in East German nuclear research (Score 3, Insightful) 192

In the late 1980ies, the Nuclear Research Facility at Rossendorf near Dresden, Germany had two Amigas 2000 as central processing units for their accelerator experiments. It was fascinating, because Rossendorf was in communist East Germany, and the Amigas probably were bought half-legally for obscene amounts of (east german) money. But appearently they urgently needed the 32bit processing capability and were using selfdeveloped Zorro cards for the signal reception and processing.

Comment Re:How did they launch from the moon? (Score 1) 211

I've never understood how they were able to launch from the moon back towards Earth. Launching from the Earth requires massive infrastructure and huge rockets. Yes, the moon's gravity well is shallower, but still significant.

It's because the fundamental equation that relates a rocket's performance and the mass fuel it requires to orbital velocities is exponential. This makes it work out so that any chemical rocket leaving earth has to have the vast majority of its weight as fuel, where as a rocket leaving the moon only about half of its weight as fuel.

What's more, the entire lunar module and its fuel supply is dead weight as far as the earth launch is concerned, which makes the earth rocket and its fuel multiple all the bigger. Then there's the issue of bringing along enough fuel to slow down the craft into lunar orbit, and escaping lunar orbit back to earth. The lunar lander didn't need to handle any of that, either.

Comment Re:I'm sure (Score 1) 261

I'm sure the NSA has the widest spread program to do so. No other country routinely collects all information of all people all over the world (though they claim not to collect the information about U.S. citizens under certain conditions). And for UK, they are already in conflict with the European High Court about collecting this information.

And at the same time, the NSA is the most useless organisation when it comes to fight domestic terrorism, as the only fact related to domestic terrorism they ever uncovered was a money transfer by a San Diego cab driver to a charity in Somalia which is considered a front to a terrorist organisation.

Comment Re:Hard to place? (Score 4, Informative) 45

Actually, they are considered pan-arthropoda, a greater group, that includes the arthropoda, but also the tardigrades and the onychophora, and if they are indeed related to the velvet worms, they would be classified as onychophora and not arthropoda. And yes, they are connected, in the same sense that all protostomia are connected.

Comment Re:Hard to place? (Score 3, Informative) 45

Yes. Because they are, as far as we know, not related to shrimps, though they look superficially similar. According to the article, they might be far relatives to today's velvet worms. That means that even the Tardigrades (microscopically small livings in puddles and wet soil) are closer related to shrimps than the Anomalicarididae.

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