Nine private spaceflight companies are bidding on contracts to deliver robotic NASA payloads to the moon — and Thursday NASA said they’d like them to start flying “this calendar year.”
Discover magazine reports NASA envisions this “as the first step toward returning to the moon, this time for good.”
The first tasks will be to practice launching and landing on the moon, as well as answering questions about its surface… They will test habitation for future crewed missions. They’ll prove that they can collect materials from the lunar surface and return them to space or Earth. And they’ll establish communication networks between robots on the moon’s surface, way stations in lunar orbit, and mission control on Earth.
But NASA also wants to deploy demo technology that can mine the moon’s resources “to pave the way for human settlement,” Space.com reports:
The main lunar resource to be exploited, at least initially, is water. The lunar surface has lots of this stuff, locked up as ice on the permanently shadowed floors of polar craters. This water will aid lunar settlement and further exploration, and not just by slaking astronauts’ thirst, NASA officials say. Water can also be split into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, the chief components of rocket fuel.
The Commercial Lunar Payload Services program is just part of NASA’s broad moon-exploration plan, which prioritizes an open architecture that encourages cooperation with many commercial and international partners. (Indeed, NASA wants to be the commercial landers’ first, but not only, customer.) One of the most critical pieces of this plan is a small space station, called the Gateway, which NASA aims to start building in lunar orbit in 2022. Gateway will be a hub for many kinds of lunar exploration, including sorties to the surface by landers both crewed and uncrewed.
If everything goes according to plan, NASA astronauts will take their first such sortie in 2028 — 56 years after Apollo 17 crewmembers left the last boot prints on the lunar surface

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Source: Slashdot – NASA’s Plans To Build A Human Settlement on The Moon

The Guardian reports: Bruno Ganz, the Swiss actor who played Adolf Hitler in the film Downfall, has died in Zurich at the age of 77, his agent announced. The actor became internationally renowned for his 2004 portrayal of the German dictator’s final days inside his Berlin bunker. In a Guardian review of Downfall Rob Mackie described Ganz as “the most convincing screen Hitler yet: an old, bent, sick dictator with the shaking hands of someone with Parkinson’s, alternating between rage and despair in his last days in the bunker….” It is widely believed to be the cinematic footage most often shared online, as well as the cause of one of the world’s most productive internet memes.

They’re referring to “One climactic scene featuring a Ganz tour de force” that was “relentlessly parodied in widespread ‘Hitler Finds Out…’ videos, featuring anachronistic subtitles depicting his rage and fury over topical, mundane, or banal events and trivial gossip,” explains long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed:

The spread of the meme was aided inestimably by the Streisand Effect caused when the production company, Constantin Films began sending DMCA takedown notices to YouTube. Eventually the company relented as the parodies constituted strong fair use cases.

When the director of the film was asked about the parodies, he admitted that “I think I’ve seen about 145 of them! Of course, I have to put the sound down when I watch. Many times the lines are so funny, I laugh out loud, and I’m laughing about the scene that I staged myself! You couldn’t get a better compliment as a director.”

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Source: Slashdot – Star of Film ‘Downfall’ and Widespread ‘Hitler Finds Out…’ Meme, Dead At 77

“New Hampshire lawmakers got an early taste last week of the arguments that manufacturing, technology and telecommunications lobbyists will use to try to hobble and defeat right to repair legislation in 16 states this year,” writes long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy.
The Security Ledger reports:
Curious children could find themselves dismembered by run-away washing machines. A phalanx of illegally modified lawn tractors and leaf blowers will belch pollution in defiance of the EPA, darkening the sky… At least, that’s the scene painted by representatives from some of the U.S.’s biggest industry groups. At a hearing before the New Hampshire House of Representatives Committee on Commerce and Consumer Affairs February 5, they painted a dire picture of the consequences of passing a proposed Digital Fair Repair Act, HB 462, saying the proposed legislation would stifle commerce, leave New Hampshire consumers vulnerable to cyber crime and even physical harm at the hands of clueless owners and inexperienced or unethical repair professionals.

“There is a lot at stake when it comes to Right to Repair, and you could feel those stakes in the room,” wrote Nathan Proctor, the head of the right to repair campaign at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), in an email statement. “Legislators have their work cut out for them sifting through all the frantic opposition and their deceptive, and at times bizarre, arguments,” he wrote.
HB 462 would require original equipment manufacturers that do business in New Hampshire to make the same documentation, parts and tools available to device owners and independent repair professionals as they make available to their licensed or “authorized” repair professionals. Similarly, documentation, tools, and parts needed to reset product (software) locks or digital right management functions following maintenance and repair would also need to be made available to owners and independent repair professionals on “fair and reasonable terms.”

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Source: Slashdot – Lobbyists Demonize ‘Right To Repair’ Legislation

Bruce Perens co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond — and he’s also Slashdot reader #3872.

Bruce Perens writes: Here’s the IBM ad used to open their Think 2019 conference, featuring Buzz Aldrin, Arianna Huffington, Janelle Monae, Miaym Bialik, and astonishingly: me. Interesting of IBM to have an ad including Open Source, security, and data rights as human rights!
Web version with subtitles. Version used to open the Think conference, on Youtube.. “I would like to make open source software the standard…” Perens says in the video, adding “Let’s champion data rights as human rights,” and asking “How do we bake security into everything we do?” But it’s a montage of different speakers who each begin their comments by saying “Dear Tech,” offering open letters with their hopes for the entire industry.

“Let’s use blockchain to help reduce poverty.”
“Let’s use IoT to help victims of natural disasters.”
“I feel like you have the potential to do so much more.”
“Are you working for all of us, or just a few of us?”

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Source: Slashdot – Bruce Perens Calls For Open Source, Security, and Data Rights In IBM Ad

Remember that landmark 2013 study that found that people on a Mediterranean diet had a 30% lower chance of heart attack, stroke, or death from cardiovascular disease than people on low-fat diets? An anonymous reader quotes Vox:
Last June, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine pulled the original paper from the record, issuing a rare retraction. It also republished a new version [of the PREDIMED study] based on a reanalysis of the data that accounted for the missteps… But after spending several days talking with some of the brightest minds in nutrition research and epidemiology, I now feel the PREDIMED retraction is actually cause for hope — maybe even a new beginning for the field.
Yes, studies with big flaws pass peer review and make it into high-impact journals, but the record can eventually be corrected because of skeptical researchers questioning things. It’s science working as it should, and the PREDIMED takedown is a wonderful example of that. This process should bring us a step closer to what really matters: informing people who want to know how to eat for a healthy life.

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Source: Slashdot – What Can We Learn From The Retraction of the Mediterranean Diet Study?