The Hill:
Pro-Choice Caucus livid at talk of deal with Stupak on abortion  —  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday evening met with a visibly angry Pro-Choice Caucus amid rumors from Democratic aides that the Speaker was working on a last-minute deal with Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) to give his abortion language a separate vote.

Jane Hamsher / Firedoglake:
Stupak Abortion Language to Be Substituted for Senate Language in Deal to Secure Health Care Votes  —  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has made a deal with Rep. Bart Stupak in order to secure his vote and that of other anti-choice Democrats for the health care bill, which is scheduled to be voted on this Sunday.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the most interesting interview OSV conducted with Catholic iconographer Marek Czarnecki, that I referred to yesterday, we gain a sense of how we can properly understand the real language of icons. Before I quote from the second part of that OSV interview let me answer a question or two about this subject.

Am I suggesting that you cannot worship fully without icons? Not in the least. Am I suggesting that icons must be used in public worship? No. But are icons a form of idolatry? Those who answer yes to this question are numerous in evangelical Protestant circles and can easily impress others to follow their simplistic and iconoclastic reasoning without the evangelical having a framework for considering this subject. I am attempting to give such a framework and at the same time telling you why I use icons in my own worship.

Here is the second part of the interview that I began sharing yesterday from the (February 7, 2010) OSV.

*************

OSV: It seems like there is a lot going on in icons that many of us are not aware of. Is that true?

Czarnecki: When you look at an icon, the meaning of it should be absolutely open. There shouldn’t be anything hidden in an icon. There shouldn’t be anything esoteric in an icon. There shouldn’t be anything so complicated in an icon that you can’t immediately start praying with it. It’s like the Gospels. You don’t need a degree in philosophy or theology to open up the Gospels and read them and understand them. The icon has to be exactly the same. . . . People think icons are some very complicated symbolic map, and they’re not. They express the reality of a person’s life. Iconographers only use signs and symbols when the language when the language of naturalism is inadequate to express a spiritual truth.

It’s forbidden to make an icon of God the Father because the First Person of the Trinity is inexpressible. Like when Jews write up the Torah, they leave an empty space, and that absolutely correct. We have no adequate expression of God the Father, even though our churches are filled with them. In order to express that Jesus is divine, we can only make an image of his physical presence. To show that he’s divine we have to use signs and symbols because there is no adequate way to express his divinity. So we start with a halo, we put a three-barred cross in his halo, and the Greek characters that in English look like WON, which is an abbreviation for “I am Who I am.” Y putting in those characters, we demonstrate what Christ himself said, which is, “I and the Father are One.” But there’s no way that I can figure out how to paint that so we have to lapse into the use of semantic symbols, but it should be minimal, and it should only be used when you can’t express something in a very straightforward way.

OSV: For Westerners, icons can sometimes seem foreign, even off-putting. What’s behind that and how can we get past it?

Czarnecki: When the schism [between the Eastern and Western Churches] happened, it was such a profound thing, like a divorce. The Western Church moved toward more incarnational theology. The Eastern Church developed into more mystical theology. And the art in both churches reflects that theology. Both are correct. . . . Western art was much more naturalistic because it talked about the immanence of God in the world. Orthodox iconography just kept developing internally to show the transcendence of God in the world.

There are a couple of things that make the artistic language of the icon a little bit different than Western art, and one is the idea of space. When we make a naturalistic painting of a landscape, for example, an artist uses what’s called one-point perspective. You have a horizon line and all space recedes as it gets to the horizon line and things become smaller. In the icon, the idea is that we are looking through a window into that space of eternity. Since we’re looking into an eternal space, there can’t be a horizon. There can’t be an end. We use what’s called inverse, or reverse, perspective so that all things continually open up in front of us. . . . The other thing that’s different is the way the iconographer uses light. In a naturalistic painting, you always have some definite light source. In the icon, the light has to look like it comes from inside the figure and from many different points outside it. In an icon, you’ll never have cast shadows because a shadow means that there’s some light source.

OSV: If icons are looking into eternity, where does Western religious art look?

Czzarnecki: If you think of St. Francis of Assisi and that traditional act of making the first Nativity scene, what he was doing was starting the process of the humanization of Catholic art. . . . . When he made that Nativity scene and people were able to walk into a setting where they felt themselves participating in that space and God was participating in their space by statues, it was an articulation of God coming out into our space, and that’s an articulation of immanence.

It’s also a reflection of the very strong social mission of the Catholic Church. We aren’t afraid to get our feet dirty. I think of Dorothy Day. We put ourselves out into the world, go out into the world and find God.

Orthodoxy is inverted. It’s not better or worse, it’s just a different vision. In Orthodoxy, the approach is usually to leave the world, go find some high mountain, some dense forest, some dry desert and go into God’s space. That’s also the vision of the icon—to go into God’s space—whereas statues articulate God coming out into our space. Both ways are correct, but that schism created what I call a psychosis, two halves of the same picture.

*************

Several years ago I was involved in a dialogue with a group of Anglican priests and lay folks in an annual meeting of the Anglican Mission in America in Dallas. I was in a room where Dr. James I. Packer and I were asked to discuss theology and ministry with mostly younger leaders. It was a memorable time for me. There was a moment when someone asked Dr. Packer if he still held to the view he held against religious art being used in worship as a clear violation of the second commandment. (He expresses such a view in his classic book, Knowing God.) I was not surprised to hear Dr. Packer say that he had changed his mind about his understanding and that he no longer held to a strict Puritan view about religious art. I came to the same view many years ago but did not know Jim had also changed his mind. I thought to myself, “This is another reason why I love this man so dearly. He is willing, in his eighties, to keep thinking and to even admit that he had changed his mind regarding a particular section of a best-selling classic book that he wrote decades ago.”

Whatever you think of art and icons I hope you will better understand the positive role that they have in the hearts and experience of Christ’s people now. The word iconoclast broadly refers to those who oppose widely accepted traditional views. The word actually originated in the church. An iconoclast was a person who made it their goal to write and speak against icons. Some even worked to destroy icons as their special ministry for Christ. The spirit of the iconoclast lives on in many forms, literally and spiritually. An understanding of the real purpose of icons just might change all of that. I expect that we will see a growing number of younger Christians return to the use of icons as they see them in the way that I have explained in this mini-series. I welcome this and hope that they will discover more of Christ’s power and love in the process.

Macedonian bloggers and other new media users offered their own responses to the question “How internet changed your life?”, posed in an article [MKD] on BBC's Macedonian language site.

Darko Buldioski of Komunikacii.net applied a style figure reminiscent of Slavic antithesis to rephrase the question into “If I had no internet…” and posted the following answers:

I would not have…

• …been able to write on my blog, in which I invested much and got much in return :)
• …known that BBC covers this topic, as I don't listen to radio news, I read it all online
• …met a bunch of excellent people with whom I regularly communicate about different subjects
• …ordered various trinkets that my brother transports for me when he comes from America (it's supposedly cheaper there)
• …worked on what I do now, because my work is about Internet.

Linking to the relevant South Park episode - “Over Logging” - Buldioski also invited others to share their thoughts.

Dozens of Twitter users offered their opinions via the hashtag #danemaseinternet [MKD] or “If there was no Internet”…

• …I would have to carry a notebook with me like [the author] Venko Andonovski to record my thoughts [- Sead93]
• …by God I would have dealt with scientific research and as a result I would have found evidence to disprove the Theory of Relativity [- goranmitev]
• …I would never have discovered what life on a farm is like [- lazyvlad]

…and a number of them blamed the internet for not being in shape, lack of muscle mass or excess fatty tissue.

Marjan Zabrcanec considers his blog Golemata slika (The Big Picture) and his Twitter and Facebook profiles his “loudspeakers” for exercising his right to the freedom of speech. He explained [MKD] that he opened his first e-mail account 15 years ago, and that without internet he would not have known “which topics and arguments are used by debaters from all over the world. Research would have been tremendously hard. Now, there's Debatopedia,” and would not have been able to effectively manage his NGO, or offer cheap but powerful internet marketing campaigns for the clients of his current employer.

Vasilka Dimitrovska reckoned [MKD] that without Internet she would have never learned how to blog and use new media to “detect, present and protect cultural heritage,” and influence the public opinion, including appearing on TV.

…I would have remained just one more archeologist in the sea of unknown and anemic archeologists in Macedonia without any attention from the society, and with even less respect.

Ribaro (The Fisherman) responded via a vlog post, with audio in Macedonian and English subtitles.

Viktor Arsovski wrote [MKD] that without Internet he probably would have continued to teach English, and not take part in the founding of IT.com.mk, and…

• I would take our media “for granted,” and not read information from other sources.
• I would have never known that some things in the society can improve.
• I would not get frustrated by watching football (soccer) on [Macedonian TV] Sitel. Now by watching online streaming I know there are quality anchors who explain about the sport instead of talking nonsense. Therefore, even though it sometimes makes me nervous, at least I know that the Internet offers me a choice!

Bloggers who posted on this subject also included Kihu Potru [MKD], who emphasized the Internet's importance in sharing art and establishing connections between artists - from visuals to haiku; Kuzmanov [MKD]; Martin [MKD]; and Dzaman [MKD].

Finaly, some people responded through comments on blogs of others, like Oksimoron, who said [MKD]:

If there was no internet… I would have walked around more, I would have been a better housewife, and would not look silly laughing alone in front of the monitor :-)

Nadezhna said [MKD]:

- I now read more books, and they are much cheaper :)
- Someone listens to my voice (reads my blog).
- The Internet helped me to get a job.

PRoom noted [MKD] that without Internet:

…would not have enrolled into post-graduate studies (found over the Internet)
- I would not have stayed awake till 5 in the morning
- I would not have known many of my current friends
- I would not have been able to book a hotel in Nice
- I would not have been able to surprise my loved ones who are far away with gifts
And for certain I would not have known that one day the Internet will die [MKD] ;)

In the last couple of weeks I started trying IntelliJ 9.0.2 EAP on our flex source code, and intially there were a ton of RED errors.  I filed a bunch of "good code red" youtrack issues, and Maxim M. and others resolved almost all the issues.   Now, with IU-94.585, about 95% of the files are GREEN.  The only signficant source of "good code red" errors is that we have some MXML files which include ActionScript files using this syntax:

In some cases, the developer really shouldn't have put the actionscript in an external file. It should have just been included in the MXML file.  But we have some cases where code is being "shared" between MXML files in this manner.  I really don't like injecting actionscript from a file into the MXML -- this is the exact same problem we had with developers including JSP fragments into JSP files. IntelliJ is correctly evaluating JSP fragments in the context of which JSP file(s) they are included into, so maybe IntelliJ can do the same for MXML/ActionScript.

Other case where we have "good code red" is where MXML is using  fully encapsulated actionscript components; When editing the actionscript for one of these components, IntelliJ cannot resolve "flash.events.Event" class or some other core class because the actionscript class doesn't import it.  The code compiles because the actionscript class is only ever referenced by MXML file which imports "flash.events.*" already.  I could fix these by adding the import to the actionscript class, but the problem is that currently at my company everyone is using FlexBuilder for flex development, so they don't see these errors.  It would be nice if IntelliJ somehow handled this, i.e. evalulate actionscript component in context of the MXML file(s) it is included in.

One other comment is with the JavaScript inspections being using for ActionScript.  Some of the Javascript inspections are specific to the Javascript running inside a browser.  And there are differences between ActionScript and JavaScript.  Jetbrains seems to be patching the inspections where possible so it supports both languages. But I think to make things clear the toplevel "Javascript" inspection should be renamed as either "Javascript/Actionscript" or the base dialect "ECMAScript" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript) , and then have subfolders for Javascript/browser specfic inspections and ActionScript specific inspections.  I think there are probably alot of new inspections that could also be added for ActionScript and/or MXML.

I haven't done much active flex development using IntelliJ yet, so I can't comment how well completion and refactoring are working.   I'm startng the design/implementation phase of our next release, and I am going to use IntelliJ now instead of FlexBuilder for any flex work and see how it goes. Hopefully things like Introduce Variable and Extract Method are working without alot of bugs...

For me, it is a no-brainer to use IntelliJ for flex development since I have used IntelliJ for so many years for java/j2ee development.  But trying to convert our UI developers who do 100% flex development and have only ever known FlexBuilder is probably a lost cause.  Heck, I can't even get our java developers using Eclipse to switch to IntelliJ...

The Iranian indie band talk about life as outlaws in their homeland, as documented in their new film No One Knows About Persian Cats

At first glance, Take It Easy Hospital look like any other aspiring indie duo. Dressed in impeccable Shoreditch chic – plaid shirt and skinny jeans for him, cute vintage dress, black tights and brogues for her – their teenage epiphanies came on copied cassettes of Nirvana and Pink Floyd, while these days they're more into Sigur Rós and Foals.

Their ambition for next year, once they find a drummer, is to get on to the bill at Glastonbury or Reading. The difference is that Take It Easy Hospital originally formed in Iran, where rock music is banned. When the local music industry is non-existent, gigs and recording studios are regularly raided by police and even MySpace is monitored, simply finding someone who shares your love of guitars and plaintive vocals is fraught with difficulties.

Ash Koshanejad and Negar Shaghaghi, the twin songwriters of Take It Easy Hospital, are the stars of a new Iranian film by garlanded Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi, called No One Knows About Persian Cats (so named because pet cats, like rock musicians, are outlawed in Iran). The film is a fictionalised account of the duo's attempts to recruit a rhythm section in order to play a local underground gig and ultimately escape to the rock-friendly west. As the two indie innocents are taken under the wing of music-loving wide-boy Nader (Hamed Behdad), the film becomes a Linklater-esque romp through Tehran's clandestine rock underground. All the bands and musicians featured are real, but whether hairy blues rockers, jazz singers, class-war rappers or indie kids, they exhibit a love for making music that overrides the fear of being arrested the moment they switch on their amps. "If you were discovered playing rock music, you'd get arrested, you'd have to pay a fine," reveals Ash, matter-of-factly. "Sometimes you'd go to prison."

The film gleans affectionate humour from the various bands' ingenuity when it comes to hiding their rehearsal spaces from the authorities in diligently-soundproofed underground caverns, shacks constructed on the roofs of tower blocks or, in one case, in a working cattle barn (much to the cows' displeasure).

By coincidence, there is a British film out this month which also documents the struggle of a couple of indie dreamers to form a band – except 1234 is based in London, so the only obstacles are their own musical inadequacy and weedy sexual tension between bandmates. Persian Cats makes 1234 look rather pathetic.

In Iran musicians are forced to behave like fugitives, even though the charges invoked against them are vague (Ahmadinejad imposed a ban on "western and decadent music" soon after becoming president in 2005). "It's a not a written law," complains Negar. "There isn't this red line. You never know when you're crossing it. [The authorities] don't even really know what they're opposing. They don't see that music brings energy and good nature to society."

In 2007, Ash's former band Font staged an open-air gig in a private garden in a suburb of Tehran. Armed police arrived en masse to shut it down, arresting everyone in the audience, and slinging the band in prison for 21 days. "They didn't have any law that said what they should do with us, so they called us satanists. They said we were against the moral law and disgracing the face of society." Ash chuckles wryly at the memory. "It was an odd experience, sleeping next to a serial killer for three weeks. But it made me believe even more in what I was doing."

Font and Take It Easy Hospital are rarities: most Iranian wannabe rockers never even get further then their bedrooms, due to the subtle pressure exerted within families. "Under this regime, you don't have any opportunity to make a living from being a musician, so families prevent their children from learning music in the first place," Ash explains. "Families are a small example of big government. They don't trust the young generation."

When Ash and Negar were kids, the only opportunity they had to hear western rock music was when somebody from their community travelled abroad and brought back CDs. "They'd be copied on to a tape over and over again," says Negar. "We used to write the track names in class when the teacher wasn't looking and take it home with such excitement to listen to it." Even so, whatever they got depended on the tastes of the traveller; often hoping for something similar to Nirvana, they'd end up having to make do with ABBA.

The advent of the internet changed everything for Iranian teenagers, who were suddenly able to participate in global youth culture, employing their technological nous to stay one step ahead of government censors. The fact that the bands in No One Knows About Persian Cats wear Strokes T-shirts and pass around copies of the NME shouldn't seem that strange. But what is the attraction to Ash and Negar of the kind of fey indie music that even within its countries of origin is often considered a bit insular?

"Well, we are indie!" declares Ash. "We had to do it ourselves in bedrooms because if you step out into the streets, you cannot even tell anyone you've just written a song. We would make our own imaginariums in our rooms."

If they'd grown up in England, Take It Easy Hospital's wan, organ-driven indie-pop, topped with earnest observations about the "human jungle", might stand accused of being a little bit twee. But once you learn how hard Ash and Negar have had to fight just to get their songs heard, they take on a whole new complexion. And despite their ugly experiences in Iran, they are determined not to make rebel rock. "Me, I don't care about politics," says Negar. "The value of art is a lot more than politics. Politics is something that passes, but art stays for years."

Ash picks up the thread: "Politics is a tool to solve a situation at one moment. We believe that art is pure and always depending on human nature, so we've always kept ourselves far from politics. Our music is not dangerous, but the current regime in Iran feels that it has to keep people away from honest expression because if they face up to the reality they will soon find out what they are missing."

Ash and Negar agreed to star in Persian Cats not to make a political point, but to try to show the older generation, including their parents, that music is a force for good. But while Ash has received some positive feedback from older Iranians – "I've heard that they walk away after seeing this film to remember what they had before the revolution" – Negar is despondent that most of them haven't been able to overcome their prejudices. "I guess that when people decide to close their eyes to something, you can't force them to see the truth."

In the light of last year's post-election protests, the police crackdown on young people involved in music and the arts has intensified. When Take It Easy Hospital's old drummer went back to Iran several weeks after the election, he was arrested and beaten. Last January, the film's co-writer, Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, was arrested in Tehran and handed an eight-year jail sentence on trumped up charges of being a US spy (she was eventually freed following a global outcry).

Reluctantly, Ash and Negar decided it was unsafe to return to Iran and have successfully applied for asylum in the UK, where they've been living since coming over to play at Manchester's In The City festival in 2008. In the film, the duo never make it to London, so in this case, truth is happier than fiction. However, Negar is at pains to point out that they never viewed England as the promised land, despite our rather more relaxed laws regarding the public airing of Farfisa-driven jangle pop.

"Some people say we've run away," says Negar. "But there is no running away. Moving from one country to another doesn't necessarily solve all the problems that are on your mind." Proof that indie introspection truly is an international language.

No One Knows About Persian Cats is out Fri; it previews at Brixton Ritzy, SW2, Tue

• World cinema

The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the first beta release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Long-Term Support) Desktop, Server, and Netbook editions and of Ubuntu 10.04 Server for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) and Amazon’s EC2. Codenamed "Lucid Lynx", 10.04 LTS continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop and Netbook Editions continue the trend of ever-faster boot speeds, with improved startup times and a streamlined, smoother boot experience.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Edition provides even better integration of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, with its install-time cloud setup.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server for UEC and EC2 brings the power and stability of the Ubuntu Server Edition to cloud computing, whether you’re using Amazon EC2 or your own Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.

The Ubuntu 10.04 family of variants, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Mythbuntu, also reach beta status today.

Desktop features
————————

Social from the start: We now feature built-in integration with Twitter, identi.ca, Facebook, and other social networks with the MeMenu in the panel.

New Design: Cleaner and faster boot, new notification area, new themes, new icons, and new wallpaper bring a dramatically updated look and feel to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu One: Choose any folder in your home directory to sync, choose from millions of songs for purchase in the Ubuntu One Music store.

Please see http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/lucid/beta1 for details.

Server features
———————-

Cloud computing: The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud installer has been vastly improved in order to support alternative installation topologies. UEC components are now automatically discovered and registered, even with complex topologies. Finally, UEC is now powered by Eucalyptus 1.6.2 codebase.

UEC and EC2: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS continues the tradition of official Ubuntu Server image releases for UEC and for Amazon’s EC2, giving you everything you need for rapid deployment of Ubuntu instances in a cloud computing environment. UEC images, and information on running Ubuntu 10.04 on EC2, are available at:

http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04/beta1

Stability and security: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS brings many improvements over Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to keep your servers safe and secure for the next five years, including AppArmor profiles for many key services, kernel hardening, and an easy-to-configure firewall.

Ubuntu Netbook features
———————————-
Ubuntu Netbook Edition is optimised to run on Intel atom based netbooks. It includes a new consumer-friendly interface that allows users to quickly and easily get on-line and use their favourite applications. This interface is optimised for a retail sales environment.

It includes the same faster boot times and improved boot experience as Ubuntu desktop.

Kubuntu features
————————

Kubuntu 10.04 LTS will be the first LTS to feature KDE 4 Platform and Applications. KDE 4 has come a long way since its early releases and is now suitable for the high demands of LTS users. Being an LTS we have focused on bug fixing and stability for this release, but we did find time to add features such as touchpad configuration, Firefox KDE integration, Kubuntu notification improvements, and cross-desktop systray menu standardisation. Kubuntu features the Plasma Desktop while Kubuntu Netbook Remix comes out of preview status with the Plasma Netbook workspace.

See https://wiki.kubuntu.org/LucidLynx/Beta1/Kubuntu for more details.

Edubuntu features
————————-

Edubuntu in Lucid features a more complete live environment containing more software from universe and all existing language packs as well as our usual educational software in their current version. For Lucid the text installer has been removed and so is LTSP for the time being. We expect to have LTSP back on the DVD for the next beta. The DVD is then much smaller than it used to be but will still provide a complete education environment based on Ubuntu Lucid.

Also included on the Edubuntu DVD is a small repository containing the required packages to transform the regular Edubuntu desktop into a LTSP server or install the Netbook edition interface.

Mythbuntu features
—————————

Mythbuntu 10.04 introduces MythTV 0.23. This new version is significantly faster and should feel more responsive and stable than older versions. It also integrates better into the OS with better support for things like ConsoleKit and Upstart.

Please see http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Release_Notes_-_0.23 for more details about changes introduced in 0.23.

See http://mythbuntu.org/10.04/beta for information about the Mythbuntu beta release.

Other
——-

* On the Desktop: GNOME 2.30, KDE SC 4.4, XFCE 4.6.1, OpenOffice.org 3.2.0, X.Org server 1.7.5

* On the Server: Apache 2.2, PostgreSQL 8.4, PHP 5.3.1, LTSP 5.2

* "Under the hood": GCC 4.4.3, eglibc 2.11, Linux 2.6.32.9, Python 2.6.5

The full release notes can be found at
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/karmic/beta1

About Ubuntu
——————

Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, and servers, with a fast and easy installation and regular releases. A tightly-integrated selection of excellent applications is included, and an incredible variety of add-on software is just a few clicks away.

Professional technical support is available from Canonical Limited and hundreds of other companies around the world. For more information about support, visit http://www.ubuntu.com/support

To Get Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1
———————————————

To upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1 from Ubuntu 9.10 or Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, follow these instructions:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LucidUpgrades

Or, download Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1 here (choose the mirror closest to you):

Africa:

* http://ubuntu.saix.net/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (South Africa)

Asia:

* http://mirror.rootguide.org/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (China)
* http://ubuntutym2.u-toyama.ac.jp/ubuntu/10.04 (Japan)
* http://mirror.khlug.org/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Korea, Republic of)
* http://ubuntu.qualitynet.net/releases/10.04 (Kuwait)
* http://ftp.mtu.ru/pub/ubuntu/releases/10.04 (Russian Federation)
* http://tw.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Taiwan)
* http://ftp.linux.org.tr/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Turkey)

Europe:

* http://ubuntu.linuxbe.com/10.04 (Belgium)
* http://ubuntu.ipacct.com/releases/10.04 (Bulgaria)
* http://hr.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Croatia)
* http://releases.ubuntu.mirror.dkm.cz/releases/10.04 (Czech Republic)
* http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/ubuntu-cd/10.04 (Denmark)
* http://ftp.estpak.ee/pub/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Estonia)
* http://ubuntu.trumpetti.atm.tut.fi/releases/10.04 (Finland)
* http://ftp.oleane.net/ubuntu-cd/10.04 (France)
* http://ubuntu.mirror.tudos.de/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Germany)
* http://speglar.simnet.is/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Iceland)
* http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Ireland)
* http://releases.ubuntu.fastbull.org/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Italy)
* http://nl.releases.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04 (Netherlands)
* http://no.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Norway)
* http://cesium.di.uminho.pt/pub/ubuntu/10.04 (Portugal)
* http://rs.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Serbia)
* http://ubuntu.cica.es/releases/10.04 (Spain)
* http://se.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Sweden)

North America:

* http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Canada)
* http://mirror.pnl.gov/releases/10.04 (United States)
* http://mirror.yellowfiber.net/ubuntu/10.04 (United States)
* http://mirrors.ccs.neu.edu/releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (United States)
* http://mirrors.gigenet.com/ubuntu/10.04 (United States)

South America:

* http://ubuntu-cd.innova-red.net/10.04 (Argentina)
* http://mirror.pop-sc.rnp.br/mirror/ubuntu/10.04 (Brazil)
* http://ubuntu.c3sl.ufpr.br/releases/10.04 (Brazil)

Rest of the world:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Great Britain)

Please download using Bittorrent if possible.

The final version of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is expected to be released in April 2010.

Feedback and Participation
—————————————

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at

http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate/

Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help turn this Beta into the best release of Ubuntu ever. Please note that, where possible, we prefer that bugs be reported using the tools provided, rather than by visiting Launchpad directly. Instructions can be found at

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

If you have a question, or if you think you may have found a bug but are not sure, first try asking on the #ubuntu IRC channel on FreeNode, on the Ubuntu Users mailing list, or on the Ubuntu forums:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/

More Information
————————

You can find out more about Ubuntu and about this preview release on our website, IRC channel and wiki. If you are new to Ubuntu, please visit:

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Originally sent to the ubuntu-announce mailing list by Steve Langasek on Fri Mar 19 16:32:05 GMT 2010

GNU Hackers meetups are a face to face meeting to balance the online collaboration that GNU maintainers and contributors do all the time. These are  a recent (since 2007) thing, and are having a positive effect within GNU and the FSF.

The LibrePlanet 2010 GNU Hackers meetup runs concurrent with the first day of LibrePlanet.

We started with some project updates:

• SipWitch – a project to do discovery of SIP endpoints and setup encryption etc. This looks quite interesting, and is looking for contributors.
• Bazaar – I presented an update on where Bazaar is at and what we’re focusing on now and in the future:
  • short term: merging and collaboration:
    • merge behaviour
    • conflict behaviour
    • develop a rebase that can combine unrelated branches
    • looms to be polished, or pipelines extended – something to manage long-standing patches for distributions, or other environments that need long lived patch sets.
  • long term
    • continuing optimisation of network and local perf
    • meta-branch operations – mirror collections of branches,
    • work with many branches at once (many branches in one dir (a-la git, hopefully less confusing)
    • easier ‘get up and go’ for new contributors
  • now and forever
    • keep fostering community growth
    • we’re aiming for negative bug growth- get on top and stay there

Felipe Sanches presented his list of things that should be on the high priority project list:

• accessibility since 1st boot
• reconfigurable hardware development (FPGA tools) – this is particularly relevant for handling e.g. wifi cards that have a FPGA in the card, so we can replace the non-free microcode.
• nonfree firmware issue

–lunch–

John Eaton on Octave. John compared the octave contributors – 30 or so over the years, and never more than 2 at a time. The Proprietary product Matlab that Octave is very similar to has 2000 staff working at the company producing it. Users seem to expect the two products to be equivalent, and are disappointed that Octave is less capable, and that the community is not as able to do the sort of support that a commercial organisation might have done. Octave would like to gain some more developers and be able to educe users more effectively – convert more to become developers.

Rob Myers, the chief GNU webmaster gave a description of his role: The webmasters deal with adding new content, dealing with mail to webmaster@, which can be queries for the GNU project, random questions about CDs, and an endless flood of spam. The webmasters project is run as a free software project – the site is in CVS (yes CVS), visible on Savannah. Templates could be made nicer and perhaps move to a CMS.

Aubrey Jaffer on cross platform. There is a thing called Water which is meant to replace all the different languages used in web apps – generates html, css, alters the DOM, does what you’d do with javascript. So there is a Water -> backend translator that outputs Java for servers, C# for windows, and so on. (I think, this wasn’t entirely clear). He went on to talk about many of the internals of a thing called Schlep which is used as a compiler to get scheme code running in C/C#/Java so as to make it available to Water backends in different environments.

Matt Lee spoke about GNU FM – GNU FM is a free ‘last.fm’ site. The site is running at http://libre.fm/.  24ish devs, but stalle after 6 months – whats next? Matt has started GNU Social to build a communication framework for GNU projects to talk to each other – e.g. for each GNU FM site to communicate on the back end, with a particular focus on doing social functionality – groups, friendships, personal info. The wiki page needs ideas!

GNU advisory board discussion…   too much to capture, but focused GNU wide issues – things like how projects get contributors, contributions, coordination. Teams were a big discussion point, bug trackers – how to coordinate teams followed up of that, and there is s ‘GNU Source Release Collection’ project to do coordinated releases of GNU software that are all known to work together.

Andrei Loshak's much-discussed text about corruption and “the normal functioning of an irrational system” in Russia has been translated into English by OpenDemocracy.net (the Russian-language original is at OpenSpace.ru).

• Read the letter in full

A group of senior public figures have called on the government to abandon its plan to push through controversial digital economy bill before the election, amid claims that the move could "sidestep" the democratic process.

Earlier this week the government revealed that it wants to force the digital economy bill - which includes the controversial "three strikes" rule to cut off the internet connections of those accused of illegal file sharing - into the statute books in the next few weeks.

While it usually takes far longer to create an act of parliament, thanks to the public debates held by MPs, the secretary of state for business, Lord Mandelson, plans speed up the process by making use of a controversial parliamentary technique known as the "wash-up".

Under those rules, party whips bypass the usual debating process and make a series of horse trades in order to get proposals into law before parliament dissolves ahead of a general election.

That proposal has already caused concern, but today a coalition including a cross-party group of MPs and peers - as well as figures from the business world and entertainment industry - said that short circuiting the democratic process could have disastrous side effects.

In an open letter the group suggests that the controversial nature of the legislation - which it says "threatens to severely infringe fundamental human rights" and could introduce "website blocking" measure that impede free speech - must face the full scrutiny of parliament before it becomes law.

Among the signatories are musician Billy Bragg, human rights activist Peter Tatchell and writer Graham Linehan, who helped create comedy series including Father Ted and The IT Crowd. They are joined by a number of activists and campaigners, as well as politicians drawn from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party.

"Our worry today is that none of this will be properly debated by parliament," says the letter. "Last week Harriet Harman failed to give the Commons any reassurances that this important, complex and controversial bill will be properly scrutinised by our elected MPs."

"Democracy and accountability will be sidestepped if this bill is rushed through and amended without debate during the so-called 'wash-up' process. The thousands of people we know to be contacting their MPs with concerns will find their faith in politicians even further undermined."

The plans, which first became public last autumn, have caused controversy at almost every turn.

As well as the three strikes rule and measures to take down websites accused of infringing copyright - which could potentially result in the closure of major web destinations such as YouTube - Lord Mandelson has also sought the power to alter copyright law without the assent of parliament.

In addition, it has also been suggested that the bill's measures to prosecute the owners of internet connections used for illegal file sharing could hit anybody who provides web access - such as universities, libraries and cafes, as well as those individuals who leave their home Wi-Fi connections open.

While the made it through three readings in the House of Lords, it was not without serious objections. Lord Puttnam, the film producer, said he had faced "an extraordinary degree of lobbying" over the proposals, while others questioned the revelation that an amendment used language British music industry body the BPI.

Earlier this week BPI chief Geoff Taylor said that it was imperative that the legislation is passed before the election.

"It is vital for the future of the UK's creative sector that the digital economy bill becomes law before the dissolution of parliament," he said.

However, the open letter suggests that the bill's most controversial elements must receive proper debate or be removed from the bill entirely and left until after the forthcoming election.

• Digital Britain
• File sharing
• Wi-Fi
• Internet
• Piracy
• Law and technology

Filed under: Comedy, Foreign Language, Romance, Casting, Deals, Scripts

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Here's just a taste of what you can do with Movavi Video Converter for Mac:

• Convert video and audio files between popular formats: AVI (including DivX, XviD, and other codecs), MPEG 1,2, MP4 (including H.263, H.264, and other codecs), 3GP (3GPP, 3GPP2), Flash (FLV) as well as MP3, WAV, OGG, AAC and FLAC.
• Use the ready-made presets for the popular media players: iPod, iPhone, PSP, Apple TV, Epson, BlackBerry and more.
• Fine-tune any output format settings to get exactly the results you want.
• Join multiple videos and combine them into a single movie.
• Save time with our ultra high-performance video converting technology.

• Conversion technology improved
• Minor and major bugs fixed
• GUI support for German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, French languages added

The Hill:
Anti-abortion Democrats working on a vote deal with Senate on bill  —  At least six anti-abortion Democrats are open to supporting the healthcare bill if they can get a guarantee from the Senate that it will move separate legislation containing the House abortion language, one of those Democratic holdouts said Friday.

One of Yahoo’s key chief technologists, Sam Pullara, is leaving the company to become an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Benchmark Capital. Pullara was the technologist how headed up the development of the the Yahoo! Open Application Platform, the Yahoo! Query Language and Yahoo! Pipes. His departure follows that of veteran Yahoo senior executive Ash Patel earlier this week.

Back in 2008, Yahoo was making a big push to open itself up to developers, and Pullara was one of the champions of that strategy. He was also Yahoo’s representative on the OpenSocial Foundation, which sought to create a counterweight to Facebook.

Pullara has been an EIR before. In 2004, he held that position at Accel Venture Partners and created a startup called Gauntlet Systems, which he sold to Borland in 2006. At Benchmark, he will be looking for new startup opportunities. He will also be working again with Benchmark partner Peter Fenton, who was at Accel when Pullara was there. Pullara’s last day at Yahoo will be on April 1. Yahoo has no plans to hire a replacement.

Who says you can’t attract a substantial number of users on a shoestring budget?

Spain-based social networking platform provider Genoom, which lets family members communicate amongst each other on private online community sites, is about to sign up its millionth user.

This isn’t exactly a huge milestone, but I think it is noteworthy since the startup is operating on a mere $80,000 in seed funding, which it raised from Midatel roughly 3 years ago.

Genoom was launched in July 2007 and will cross the 1 million registered users mark by this weekend. According to company spokesperson Bob Samii, the site is now available in 17 languages and counts more than over 10 million profiles from families all over the world.

On the Genoom website, users can add family trees, personal information, photos, videos, and related documents about ancestors and living relatives alike, limiting access to uploaded information through invitations and custom group privacy settings. This makes the service effectively a marriage between genealogy and social networking.

Genoom offers a handy Facebook application, allowing users to access their family tree and communicate with family, all while logged into their Facebook account.

Two dispatches from the far frontiers of science send our panellists into orbit around such issues as "how many years will it be before we all carry our personal genomes around with us, alongside our mobiles and our wallets?" and "why hasn't ET phoned earth yet?"

We hear astrophysicist Paul Davies's views on what the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would do to the religions of the world. And we consult a new book by Barack Obama's medical supremo, Francis Collins, to discover whether genomic medicine will be the saving of us, or our damnation.

We also interview the poet and memoirist John Burnside about the problems that plagued his early adulthood, from alcoholism to the neurological condition of apophenia – the experience of perceiving patterns and connections in random objects.

Reading list:

The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalised Medicine, by Francis Collins (Profile)
The Eerie Silence: Are we alone in the Universe? By Paul Davies (Allen Lane)
Take Off Your Party Dress: When Life's Too Busy for Breast Cancer, by Dina Rabinovitch (Pocket Books)
Waking Up In Toytown, by John Burnside (Jonathan Cape)

Elsewhere: Tim Radford's latest science book club choice is Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, by Ian Stewart.

DigiTimes:
Wintek blamed for Apple iPad delay, says report  —  Taiwan-based touch panel supplier Wintek has been blamed for a delay of Apple's iPad shipments, according to a Chinese-language report on Liberty Times.  —  The report claimed that Wintek is facing a manufacturing bottleneck in its touch panel production …

GetEQUAL's Robin McGehee discusses the arrests yesterday and why GetEQUAL is taking civil disobedient action.

Says McGehee: "We believe we need to do more than lobbying, making phone calls, and giving money to people who are not making true to the promises we were given. And that's the reason that we organized with Lt. Dan Choi and Cpt. James Pietrangelo today, to take action at the White House where true pressure needs to be given. Everyone knows that without repeal language added to the Defense Authorization bill, that there is not a true course or a true plan of action that will be successful by this year's end."

• Supervise the implementation of ACTA
• Consider further "elaboration" or "development" of the agreement
• Address "disputes that may arise regarding the interpretation or application" of ACTA
• Consider any other matter that may affect the operation of this agreement.

• Establish ad hoc or standing committees, working groups, experts groups, or task forces to carry out various activities.
• Seek the advice of non-government persons or groups
• make recommendations regarding the implementation of ACTA,
• provide guidelines for implementing the agreement
• identify and monitor techniques of piracy and counterfeiting
• assist non-parties in assessing the benefits of accession,
• share information on best practices
• support international organizations
• take other such actions as the parties may decide.

In the article on icons, that I referred to previously from the Catholic weekly OSV, there was an interview with a Catholic iconographer named Marek Czarnecki. Czarnecki has been writing icons for fifteen years. For him, this is more than a simple job, it is his personal calling. He sometimes devotes whole periods of time to prayer and fasting before writing. The Connecticut-based artist studied iconography for ten years with a Russian Orthodox iconographer before he began his work. Here, to give you an idea of what such a writer of icons does, is a small part of that interview:

***************

OSV: How does iconography relate to art, to theology, to prayer?

Czarnecki: People think that iconography is a style of religious art, and it’s not. It’s a whole vision of reality, but we use art as a tool to scribe that reality. . . .We say icon writing instead of icon painting because what we are making isn’t just a picture but a theological text. That theological text can in no way disagree with what is the written text or what stands in holy tradition. It’s not my job to figure those things out. The church has already decided those things. My job is just to articulate them.

OSV: When you get ready to write an icon, do you have to prepare in a spiritual way?

Czarnecki: I’ve been doing this for so long it’s just an integral part of my life. I teach, and as a group we start with a prayer of consecration and a mission statement about our work. Then, while we work, we pray. That’s just as important as the preparation you do before you start working. It’s that way with the very simple Jesus Prayer. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” [I pray the Jesus Prayer every day, all day, and into my sleep at nights.] You just repeat it over and over, and it’s like a wheel that turns in your head. What it does while you’re working is that it forces you to focus on what you’re doing. It’s a real prayer, so while you’re praying it, you’re connecting yourself with God. It acts like a metronome while you’re working, too. It gives your mind something to hold on to, and it paces you while you work so that you don’t rush through your work, you connect it with your breathing, you connect it with every brush strike. Eventually it just doesn’t stop. It’s like your heartbeat.

OSV: With icons, there are certain images that would be considered classic, but you’ve also done images of St. Maria Goretti and Faustine Kowalska and others. Is iconography something that can be both classical and contemporary?

Czarnecki: It has to be both. I think one of the classic functions of the church is to work as a treasurer keeper, and the treasures of the church are the lives of the saints. The prototypes that were created for the lives of the saints, even ancient ones, have some historical truth to them, and that’s why we don’t have permission to change them. . . . These old prototypes, some of them go back to the catacombs. The icon of the nursing Virgin is the oldest image we have of the Virgin Mary historically, and we still make an icon almost exactly like that fresco. There’s a deepness to those prototypes that we can’t even begin to approach. . . . Even if you’re going to write “new” icons you have to have a grounding and a foundation in that traditional language. There’s no way you can create new icons without immersing yourself in all of that.

***************

I particularly note several things in this interview that intrigue me as an evangelical Protestant. While I do not invoke the saints merit on my behalf I have come to believe the saints, thus all of those who have died in the Lord, are praying and worshiping as they stand before Jesus at this very moment. They are most active in prayer and I cannot help but believe they pray for you and me. I also believe it is right we remember them in our worship and prayer given a passage like Hebrews 11. They are not dead! They are very much alive, more alive than we are really. It was D. L. Moody himself who reproached people at his death bed who felt that he was about to enter the land of the dying by saying, “No, I am about to enter the land of he living, it is you who will remain in the land of the dying.” How true. There is a great deal that we simply do not know about life after death but it seems apparent that those who die in the Lord reign with him on high right now and are as active in his kingdom as ever, more so than we on earth in one way at least. Yes, their activity is different but there are no passive bystanders in heaven. I have come to believe that it is right for us to celebrate the victorious completion of their earthly journey and to remember them in more ways than scrap-booking and biography.

Note that Czarnecki also says the church “is to work as a treasure keeper.” It seems to me that when evangelicals were pushed away from the Roman Catholic communion during the 16th century they forgot this point. We ceased being “treasure keepers” seeing this work as Roman and unbiblical. It seems that we have often forgotten much more than we can afford to forget. We despise tradition and have no collective memory of the past. So far as I can tell multitudes of evangelical Protestants will not even go back to what happened last Sunday, much less what happened in a previous century before the sixteenth. But even when we do go back we know next to nothing about any treasures of the past except those that came to us from Wesley, Whitefield, Edwards and Spurgeon. Now don’t get me wrong. I love these men, always have and always will. I have photographs of each of them around me in my library. But these are not the only great men in the treasured history of the Christian church. And this doesn’t even touch on the question of great women. Evangelical Protestants have forgotten the great women of faith even more than their Catholic and Orthodox brothers and sisters.

Finally, we note that in this interview Czarnecki speaks about his “not having permission” to change the old prototypes. There is a respect here for that which is ancient. Few people in my evangelical Protestant background understand this at all. It is this very kind of thinking that has deeply penetrated my own mind and heart because of my growing love for the Great Tradition of the one, holy, catholic church. May God open your minds and hearts to all of his truth, even the truth found in places you may never have expected to find it.

Right-wing bloggers and columnists have recently accused President Obama of instigating an "intifada" against Israel through his administration's criticism of Israel's announced plan to expand housing in a section of East Jerusalem or by purportedly "incentiviz[ing] Palestinian Arabs to violent uprising."

Shapiro: "This is the Obama Intifada." Ben Shapiro wrote in his March 17 syndicated column that "When President Obama is unhappy about his inability to convince Americans to nationalize health care, he incentivizes Palestinian Arabs to violent uprising" and that the Obama administration's response to Israel's announcement "was far too well-rehearsed for it to have been triggered by something equivalent to a Housing and Urban Development dispute in the United States." Shapiro added:

This is the Obama Intifada. It is he who has suggested that the Palestinian Arabs have legitimate grievances, that Israel is the victimizer, and that the United States will stand aside and allow violent atrocities by Arabs to go forward without comment. He wants this Intifada, and he's got it.

The Obama Intifada will serve a dual purpose: it will knock health care off the front pages, and it will provide a "crisis" for Obama to solve. If a few Jews get killed, Obama doesn't truly care. What's a few eggs if you're frying up a socialized health care omelet? What's a few Jews if you can win another Nobel Peace Prize?

Nothing, to President Obama. All that matters is his personal victory, even if America and her allies lose.

Geller issues "Call to End Obama's Intifada." In a March 16 Atlas Shrugs post headlined "Action Alert: Call to End Obama's Intifada," Pamela Geller urged her readers to "Join Christians United for Israel in their surge against the President's intifada against Israel," and quoted their statement that "the Obama Administration has reacted to this announcement by creating the worst crisis in relations with Israel in decades. First Vice President Biden condemned the announcement in unusually harsh terms. Then, over the weekend, Secretary of State Clinton and advisor David Axelrod escalated the rhetoric still further. Today, Middle East envoy George Mitchell indefinitely postponed his trip to the region. Where will it end?"

Jawa Report headline: "The Obama Intifada." A March 16 Jawa Report blog post, headlined "The Obama Intifada," included numerous links to stories and blog posts about the controversy, adding, "This too shall pass, by which I mean the current US administration." The post was a reposting of a March 15 post on the Internet Haganah blog carrying a similar "Obama Intifada" headline.

2008 report made right-wing rounds. Jihad Watch and NewsBusters were among the conservative blogs that highlighted a November 3, 2008, article in an Arabic newspaper by Abdelbari Atwan, the first journalist to have met with Osama bin Laden. According to Robert Spencer's translation of the French-language blog post he cited at Jihad Watch, Atwan's article carried the headline "The Historic Intifada of Obama" and claimed that with Obama's election, "the Americans thus give the kickoff of their historic Intifada against racism." In highlighting the Atwan's article, NewsBusters' Warner Todd Huston wrote: "A president Obama is no friend to Israel or the west, at least as far as Abdelbari Atwan and many of his comrades are concerned. The most pressing question that Americans have is: should we support a man for President of the United States that our enemies imagine to be on their side?"