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FaxeTheCat writes "The Norwegian Public broadcaster is doing a five-and-a-half-day, around-the-clock broadcast from the coastal liner 'Hurtigruten.' Not only is this (according to them) the world's longest direct TV broadcast, the material will be made available as torrents with a Creative Commons license, and there is a 'mashup' competition. Not your average action show, but if you like fjords and mountains and a slow pace, this may be just the thing for you."

xiando writes "Norwegian police were asked by officials in Italy to get personal information about two bloggers who were using a server in Oslo. The police decided the best thing to do would be to take the server's hard drive, along with personal information from about 7,000 other users (Google translation of Norwegian original). Other ISPs say this is standard operating procedure in Norway these days."

Ch_Omega writes "A mysterious light display appearing over Norway last night (more pictures) has left thousands of residents in the north of the country baffled. Witnesses from Trøndelag to Finnmark compared the amazing display to anything from a Russian rocket to a meteor to a shock wave — although no one appears to have mentioned UFOs yet. The phenomenon began when what appeared to be a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain. It stopped mid-air, then began to circulate. Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky. Then a green-blue beam of light shot out from its center — lasting for ten to twelve minutes before disappearing completely. The Norwegian Meteorological Institute was flooded with telephone calls after the light storm — which astronomers have said did not appear to have been connected to the aurora, or Northern Lights, so common in that area of the world." The Bad Astronomer makes the case that a malfunctioning rocket spewing fuel is a parsimonious explanation, backed up by witnesses to similar events and a cool simulation (on video). An anonymous reader suggests that this Proton-M Carrier Rocket might be responsible for the display.

frokost writes "There is an editorial at freshmeat written by Jim Gettys, one of the original authors of X. Very interesting, indeed." S: Jim's idea of cross-toolkit themes should be extended to Wine: many companies will use Wine to port to Linux, simply because there are a lot of Win32 capable programmers out there. Wine will therefore be one of the important GUI toolkits out there. I also agree with his point that WIMP is step 1. Voice recognition is step 2. Right now, Linux GUI standards are in very rapid development, which makes it the right time for a voice recognition standard to be built and added so that apps may be designed/reworked early to include voice-recognition. Some work similar to what he's talking about has been done by IBM, such as a browser to help blind users surf the web.

frokost writes "After searching for "Linus Torvalds" on AltaVistas Photo Finder, I ended up with links to several pictures of, well.. Linus Torvalds. I clicked a "Visually Similar"-link, and ended up with this page. It seems like Bill and Linus aren't that different after all ;-) " Someone whose name got lost by my Netscape 4.04 crashing again came across this support incident today. And finally, the denizens of Castle Slashdot are slowly recovering after an angry peasant mob stormed their home by surprise yesterday.

frokost writes "The creator of Amiga OS, Carl Sassenrath has released a new programming language, REBOL. This seems like an interesting language with a differnet philosophy. " I've been checking out a page of code examples. It definately has strange syntax, but it looks pretty interesting. It would take a miracle to get me to give up Perl though.