Are you speaking of a moral right or a legal one? A moral right can be debated either way. However, in the United States at least, the legal right doesn't exist. That, as you probably know, was removed by the DMCA.
Why you aren't getting modded up, I have no idea, except maybe it's Windows...
But seriously, you're almost spot on. Why push this OP, admittedly computer handicapped, to a more complex solution? Windows Vista and 7 alone provide:
I do the same as the AC, but I keep a copy of the smallest par2 from the set on my local drive for recovery (and back these up as well). If a CD/DVD ever goes bad to the point it won't even read the FS, you can still create an ISO file of it including all errors. The par2 recovery can be done using the ISO image at that point, and as long as the damage to the DVD didn't exceed the redundancy level, full recovery of the original files is possible.
Note that you aren't recovering the ISO itself at this point, you are using the ISO as input to par2repair (or the GUI). The recovery is done using the blocks of the original files and pars. The end result is the original file(s) stored on the disc.
It sounds like dvdisaster does something similar, but I've been using this technique with pars for a few years now.
Tru2Way is the new name for what was formerly "OpenCable," the standard which is not open as you need to register with CableLabs and sign an NDA just to see many of the specifications.
Just plain wrong on so many levels, and it's sad that this is modded "informative" at the moment. Tru2Way is the new name for "the OpenCable Application Platform", also known as OCAP. This is a software platform with an open API. All of the specs are freely downloadable from the CableLabs website.
You are thinking of "OpenCable Host" which are the specs related to the encryption of digital channels. Note that this encryption is nothing new -- It's been a part of digital cable since the beginning. What's "new" about OpenCable Host is that it moves the encryption to the CableCARD.
OCAP (now Tru2Way) and CableCARD are actually two different things, each independent of the other, but working together in some cases.
CableCARD contains the SECURITY component of the equation. The CableCARD decrypts the digitally encrypted QAM channels. As you mentioned, since July 1, 2007, almost all cable settops sold in the United States are required to utilize a CableCARD for the security component.
OCAP/Tru2Way, on the other hand, is the SOFTWARE component. If a device supports Tru2Way, it can theoretically run any application written to the standard. It's a set of Java APIs and specs designed to create a common software environment for cable devices.
Time Warner Cable has written a program guide/navigator for OCAP that it has deployed in some of its markets (not to be confused with the native-code version that they deployed in a smaller number of markets). Other cable companies and third-parties are creating OCAP guides and applications as well. Having the navigator be available to Tru2Way devices means that viewers could use that device to view VOD content (something that just can't happen today).
Another Tru2Way example would be The Weather Channel app (known as an xlet) which could be launched by a viewer to get current weather/traffic information when tuned to the The Weather Channel.
In the US, a TV (or other device) would have to support both CableCARD (to decrypt programming) and Tru2Way to run the software needed for VOD and the program guide. Your cable company will also have to be one that is utilizing Tru2Way software.
In the list of new features, I noticed the following:
Improved Support For Extensions: Extensions can now add custom columns to the message list pane in addition to storing custom message data in the mail database.
Perhaps this means that the problem is fixable by an extension now?
I was glad to see a state AG go after Blockbuster for this. It seemed like a pretty fraudulent advertisement when you read the fine print. They basically just renamed "late fees" to "restocking fees".
I had nearly the same experience. In the 2-week trial, I had abysmal turnarounds. The fastest turnaround was 6 days, but that was only one DVD. The rest were 8-9 days from the time I dropped a DVD at the post office until I received the next.
According to their FAQ, they are supposed to be linked up with the Post Office to determine when a DVD has been put in the mail to be returned so a new one can be sent out immediately. I believe that was the way they hoped to stay speed-competitive with Netflix' larger distribution system. It apparently isn't working at many post offices, however.
But I will say that the friend that recommended Blockbuster to me is receiving his much faster. He says he has seen them send the next DVD in the queue the very day he dropped out off at the local Post Office. So it's working for some locales.
Interesting that I got an e-mail the day I cancelled Blockbuster letting me know that they had just opened a new distribution point in my city so I should start to see increased speeds. I may try them out again in a few months, especially if they complete the promised tie-in with in-store service.
For now I'm going to give Netflix a try though. I just finished signing up for the Netflix trial a few hours ago, so I'm curious to see how turnarounds are there.
Thank you - Very informative link. I'd already updated the profiles to 2004.3 based on the recommendation of one of my portage upgrades last night, but I was curious about the structure and use of profiles. This cleared it up.
I doubt the parent poster needs any convincing about the power of portage - As he said, it was based on FreeBSD's ports system in the first place. He just prefers BSD to Linux.
Random musing: I keep wanting to try out BSD some time, but I just never get around to it =/
While I've never used an apt-get system, I had the same problem with dependencies on RPM-based systems. It seems that most distributions try to provide as much functionality in the package as possible to meet the needs of the widest possible user-base. The result is that grabbing a small package can result in multiple large dependencies being downloaded and installed.
Gentoo's answer to this is the set of USE flags. You can provide your flags either globally or on a package-by-package basis. For example:
... would compile packagefoo without support for kde or gnome, but would provide support for maildir-style mailboxes. There are currently 309 different USE options available, so you can tweak things just the way you like them. In reality, you would probably want to put the use flags in/etc/portage/package.use so that they will be remembered permanently rather than setting the USE variable on the command line.
As far as managing dependencies after the initial install, "emerge --deep packagefoo" will check for any updates to the dependencies themselves, and the portage maintainers track and flag which upgrades break/block an existing package.
Doubtful, someone there really likes nano =/. vi is always my first emerge on a new Gentoo system. Well, except on a slow box, where I set up distcc and ccache first.
I think that once set up, Gentoo takes much less time to maintain and run than any Distro I have ever used (Redhat 5.2-9, Fedora 1 and 2, Debian, Mandrake, Knoppix (on hard drive), slackware).
I think that this is partly because the package manager is so great (trustworthy, stable and easy to use), and partly because the software that is installed is compiled specifically for all of the other software installed.
I agree - I've been through a similar list of distributions over the last 12 years and Gentoo is the first one that strikes the right balance of power and simplicity to me.
Two things got to me after a while with other distributions -- First, version upgrades of the distribution tended to be a complete pain. Moving from Mandrake 8.x to 9 basically meant backing up the old system, clearing off everything, installing Mandrake 9, and then selectively restoring the config of the backup. You *could* try it over the top if you really knew what you were doing, but you were going to end up fixing a lot of things after the install either way.
As others have mentioned here, there's really no "upgrade" to 2004.3 since you tend to keep everything up to date along the way with portage. I was in the middle of setting up a local rsync mirror and http-replicator for the Gentoo files tonight when the 2004.3 announcement came along, and the only thing I had to do was change my/etc/make.profile link because one of my boxes was based off the now unsupported 1.4 profile. And, of course, the instructions for doing this were displayed by the most recent emerge.
The second thing that bugged me about other distributions was that I always tended to need to install *some* package from source every now and then. Maybe because of a certain configuration on my system, maybe because the package wasn't available as an RPM for my version of Mandrake, etc. Once I started throwing tarballs into a Mandrake system, I lost the ability to handle the dependencies through rpm. I did create some SRPM's, but this was just too unwieldy at the time. I understand there is now a tool to capture a./configure and make session to SRPM, but I don't know enough about it to know if it's all it's cracked up to be.
The first thing that really drew me to Gentoo was Daniel Robbins' article on IBM Developerworks about the ebuild system being designed to simply wrap around existing tarballs. While Gentoo was still a bit too bleeding edge at the time for me, I came back and tried it out when I got some time this year.
Sure enough, the ebuild system lived up to the writeup in the article from 4 years ago. When I finally found a package that I wanted that wasn't already in portage (well, it was, but it was far, far out of date), it took me less than 4 hours to learn, from scratch, how to write an ebuild file for it. The ebuild simply downloads the tgz from its normal website, untars it to portage's working directory, compiles it and its dependencies, installs it, and handles future package management for it. A very nice change from what I'd seen on previous distributions I'd used.
While Gentoo is certainly not the distribution I'd recommend to Linux newbies (mainly due to the lack of automatic install), portage is making package management and upgrades easy enough for me that I've installed it on four boxes so far in my home.
I know for sure that was the case with Microsoft Word, since "Samna Word" predated it by several years. Samna Corporation went on to create Ami Pro, which Lotus purchased in 1991. Then Lotus renamed Ami Pro to "Word Pro" in 1995 around the same time as IBM purchased them (the name change was already established before the buyout though).
Back then, the conventional wisdom was that you couldn't trademark common-use terms, so the trademarks were cited (if not registered) on "Samna Word" and "Microsoft Word." Of course, that conventional wisdom went out the door when Microsoft trademarked and enforced the generic term "Windows."
The article states that they will be coming to the U.S. for $20,000 as SUV's, not $12,000. The cars cost about $13,000 in Europe but do not meet U.S. emissions standards. Some companies are retrofitting the global version of the Smart car to be U.S. street legal, but these would be a minimum of $14,000 as well.
I thought it was better than average, but not great. I'd give it somewhere around a 7.5 out of 10 for the first episode -- Enough for me to come back and check it out next week to see if it might make my weekly viewing schedule.
The early buzz on the show was great. The summer buzz was fairly negative after Fox thought the original pilot wasn't a great opener and had this episode put in instead. I guess we'll find out whether or not this was a good idea when the original pilot airs in December. Something tells me that the Slashdot audience would probably have liked the original pilot better, but the "mainstream" audience needed a different introduction to the show.
With 9 regular cast members, I can understand why Whedon wanted a two hour premier to introduce them all. One hour really didn't seem like enough time to introduce the crew and pull off a plot episode at the same time. Whedon took two hours of premier episodes to introduce the 8 recurring cast members of Buffy, for example. With only 4 recurring cast members in the Angel premier, it only took an hour.
As for the "it will be cancelled quickly" naysayers here, let's not forget that the Slashdot audience doesn't exactly have a great track record when picking television that sticks around. The last TV thread I jumped into here was where Slashdotters were busy telling us how bad CSI was - Hey, if you don't like it that's fine, but just because you don't like it doesn't mean it will be cancelled.
Some people are upset because Dark Angel was apparently cancelled in favor of this. While Dark Angel lost me shortly into its second season, we all hate to lose shows we like ("Sports Night" and "Now and Again" were two of the biggest losses for me). However, you should be judging Firefly on its own merits, *not* hating it simply because it's not Dark Angel.
Then there are those here who fault Firefly for using ideas from other shows. Give me a break - After 50 years of television and centuries of books, there are very few *new* ideas out there. Almost every plot point of every show/movie/book has been used so many times it isn't funny.
Let's look at some other examples just from this season so far - If you've followed the news of the fall premiers at all, you've probably heard how there are two shows ("Do Over" and "That was Then") that have a person return through time to high school. Of course, it's easy to point to "Back to the Future" as a predecessor, and I'm sure someone can remember a work that did it even earlier.
The most blatant rip-off of the season has to be "Fastlane". Cop in flashy clothes and car seeks to avenge his partner who was killed in a bust-gone-bad. Cop drives to climatic showdown at night with the street-lights reflecting off the hood of the car to the beat of Phil Collin's "In the Air Tonight". I'm sure there were more, but these elements were *identical* in the Miami Vice premier 15 years ago.
Does this make any of these a bad show by default? Absolutely not.
The strength of almost any show is not in presenting new concepts, it's *how* they use the concepts that have almost certainly been done before. It's in the delivery, the set up, the execution.
Did Firefly pull this off in its premier? Barely, but yes - As I said originally, "above average, but not great". But the hope I have for the show isn't in how well it delivers one episode, it's in the fact that Whedon likes to weave episodes together to create a strong continuing storyline. Just look at Buffy and Angel as examples.
I made the mistake of judging an "arc" show too early once before with Babylon 5. I'm not saying that Firefly is the next B5, or Angel, or Buffy. I'm just saying that the premier didn't turn me off completely, and I'll be back next week to see where it goes from here.
I haven't played B&W yet (need to, want to, it's just been a busy few weeks), but I can certainly see a use for this in a browser. When I read the headline here about Opera implementing actual support for gestures, I was immediately interested because I already find myself doing something very similar in Internet Explorer using the mousewheel.
Pressing the mousewheel button in IE has the effect of placing it into "scroll-mode", where moving the mouse then rapid-scrolls in that direction. It's become such a habit for me to just hit the mousewheel-button and then move the mouse up rapidly to emulate a "Home" keypress without going to the keyboard. Similar results can be obtained for "End".
Believe it or not, I'm so used to doing this that I just haven't been able to move over to Mozilla as a result. I personally hope to see gesture support picked up by Mozilla at some point in time so that I could do something similar there.
Of course, I'm really a keyboard person at heart, but web browsers just don't have the support for keystrokes that they should (e.g. Why does "tab" always take you to the first link at the top of the page you are viewing rather than starting in the current viewport? How about support for something like "20 <tab>" to take me to the 20th link on the screen? Etc., etc.)
If I'm stuck using the mouse for web pages, I really don't want to have to switch over to the keyboard just to go to the top or bottom of the page. And I'd prefer not having to move my mouse over to the scroll bar either since, being so close to the edge of the window, it's all too easy to miss-click and activate the window behind the browser.
Simple gestures (nothing complex like drawing a square or anything) seem like a great answer to me.
Re:People don't watch it because its good!
on
C.S.I.
·
· Score: 2
IANAKF (I am not a Katz Fan), but CSI was already a hit even before it was moved to Thursdays for the Survivor crowd. Going back to the last week it was on Friday, it was still the 13th ranked show of the week without the help of "reality" crazed viewers.
Certainly the new placement has helped it even more, but it has not doubled the numbers as you might believe. There were about 16 million viewers the week of 1/15, and 21 million for the most recent weekly ratings of 2/29.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you speaking of a moral right or a legal one? A moral right can be debated either way. However, in the United States at least, the legal right doesn't exist. That, as you probably know, was removed by the DMCA.
Why you aren't getting modded up, I have no idea, except maybe it's Windows ...
But seriously, you're almost spot on. Why push this OP, admittedly computer handicapped, to a more complex solution? Windows Vista and 7 alone provide:
Add Microsoft's Windows Live Family Safety (free) to get:
and Microsoft Security Essentials (also free) for virus and malware scanning.
There's probably an easy and free solution for most of the other items on the list as well, but they seem more "wish-list" than essential.
I'm guessing you mean copyright?
I do the same as the AC, but I keep a copy of the smallest par2 from the set on my local drive for recovery (and back these up as well). If a CD/DVD ever goes bad to the point it won't even read the FS, you can still create an ISO file of it including all errors. The par2 recovery can be done using the ISO image at that point, and as long as the damage to the DVD didn't exceed the redundancy level, full recovery of the original files is possible.
Note that you aren't recovering the ISO itself at this point, you are using the ISO as input to par2repair (or the GUI). The recovery is done using the blocks of the original files and pars. The end result is the original file(s) stored on the disc.
It sounds like dvdisaster does something similar, but I've been using this technique with pars for a few years now.
Just plain wrong on so many levels, and it's sad that this is modded "informative" at the moment. Tru2Way is the new name for "the OpenCable Application Platform", also known as OCAP. This is a software platform with an open API. All of the specs are freely downloadable from the CableLabs website.
You are thinking of "OpenCable Host" which are the specs related to the encryption of digital channels. Note that this encryption is nothing new -- It's been a part of digital cable since the beginning. What's "new" about OpenCable Host is that it moves the encryption to the CableCARD.
OCAP (now Tru2Way) and CableCARD are actually two different things, each independent of the other, but working together in some cases.
CableCARD contains the SECURITY component of the equation. The CableCARD decrypts the digitally encrypted QAM channels. As you mentioned, since July 1, 2007, almost all cable settops sold in the United States are required to utilize a CableCARD for the security component.
OCAP/Tru2Way, on the other hand, is the SOFTWARE component. If a device supports Tru2Way, it can theoretically run any application written to the standard. It's a set of Java APIs and specs designed to create a common software environment for cable devices.
Time Warner Cable has written a program guide/navigator for OCAP that it has deployed in some of its markets (not to be confused with the native-code version that they deployed in a smaller number of markets). Other cable companies and third-parties are creating OCAP guides and applications as well. Having the navigator be available to Tru2Way devices means that viewers could use that device to view VOD content (something that just can't happen today).
Another Tru2Way example would be The Weather Channel app (known as an xlet) which could be launched by a viewer to get current weather/traffic information when tuned to the The Weather Channel.
In the US, a TV (or other device) would have to support both CableCARD (to decrypt programming) and Tru2Way to run the software needed for VOD and the program guide. Your cable company will also have to be one that is utilizing Tru2Way software.
OT, but the truth seems to be far stranger than the fiction in this case.
A better picture ;-)
I was glad to see a state AG go after Blockbuster for this. It seemed like a pretty fraudulent advertisement when you read the fine print. They basically just renamed "late fees" to "restocking fees".
I had nearly the same experience. In the 2-week trial, I had abysmal turnarounds. The fastest turnaround was 6 days, but that was only one DVD. The rest were 8-9 days from the time I dropped a DVD at the post office until I received the next.
According to their FAQ, they are supposed to be linked up with the Post Office to determine when a DVD has been put in the mail to be returned so a new one can be sent out immediately. I believe that was the way they hoped to stay speed-competitive with Netflix' larger distribution system. It apparently isn't working at many post offices, however.
But I will say that the friend that recommended Blockbuster to me is receiving his much faster. He says he has seen them send the next DVD in the queue the very day he dropped out off at the local Post Office. So it's working for some locales.
Interesting that I got an e-mail the day I cancelled Blockbuster letting me know that they had just opened a new distribution point in my city so I should start to see increased speeds. I may try them out again in a few months, especially if they complete the promised tie-in with in-store service.
For now I'm going to give Netflix a try though. I just finished signing up for the Netflix trial a few hours ago, so I'm curious to see how turnarounds are there.
The cryptography.com faq is just a "coming soon" index -- Not terribly useful at this point.
Thank you - Very informative link. I'd already updated the profiles to 2004.3 based on the recommendation of one of my portage upgrades last night, but I was curious about the structure and use of profiles. This cleared it up.
I doubt the parent poster needs any convincing about the power of portage - As he said, it was based on FreeBSD's ports system in the first place. He just prefers BSD to Linux.
Random musing: I keep wanting to try out BSD some time, but I just never get around to it =/
Doubtful, someone there really likes nano =/. vi is always my first emerge on a new Gentoo system. Well, except on a slow box, where I set up distcc and ccache first.
I agree - I've been through a similar list of distributions over the last 12 years and Gentoo is the first one that strikes the right balance of power and simplicity to me.
Two things got to me after a while with other distributions -- First, version upgrades of the distribution tended to be a complete pain. Moving from Mandrake 8.x to 9 basically meant backing up the old system, clearing off everything, installing Mandrake 9, and then selectively restoring the config of the backup. You *could* try it over the top if you really knew what you were doing, but you were going to end up fixing a lot of things after the install either way.
As others have mentioned here, there's really no "upgrade" to 2004.3 since you tend to keep everything up to date along the way with portage. I was in the middle of setting up a local rsync mirror and http-replicator for the Gentoo files tonight when the 2004.3 announcement came along, and the only thing I had to do was change my /etc/make.profile link because one of my boxes was based off the now unsupported 1.4 profile. And, of course, the instructions for doing this were displayed by the most recent emerge.
The second thing that bugged me about other distributions was that I always tended to need to install *some* package from source every now and then. Maybe because of a certain configuration on my system, maybe because the package wasn't available as an RPM for my version of Mandrake, etc. Once I started throwing tarballs into a Mandrake system, I lost the ability to handle the dependencies through rpm. I did create some SRPM's, but this was just too unwieldy at the time. I understand there is now a tool to capture a ./configure and make session to SRPM, but I don't know enough about it to know if it's all it's cracked up to be.
The first thing that really drew me to Gentoo was Daniel Robbins' article on IBM Developerworks about the ebuild system being designed to simply wrap around existing tarballs. While Gentoo was still a bit too bleeding edge at the time for me, I came back and tried it out when I got some time this year.
Sure enough, the ebuild system lived up to the writeup in the article from 4 years ago. When I finally found a package that I wanted that wasn't already in portage (well, it was, but it was far, far out of date), it took me less than 4 hours to learn, from scratch, how to write an ebuild file for it. The ebuild simply downloads the tgz from its normal website, untars it to portage's working directory, compiles it and its dependencies, installs it, and handles future package management for it. A very nice change from what I'd seen on previous distributions I'd used.
While Gentoo is certainly not the distribution I'd recommend to Linux newbies (mainly due to the lack of automatic install), portage is making package management and upgrades easy enough for me that I've installed it on four boxes so far in my home.
I know for sure that was the case with Microsoft Word, since "Samna Word" predated it by several years. Samna Corporation went on to create Ami Pro, which Lotus purchased in 1991. Then Lotus renamed Ami Pro to "Word Pro" in 1995 around the same time as IBM purchased them (the name change was already established before the buyout though).
Back then, the conventional wisdom was that you couldn't trademark common-use terms, so the trademarks were cited (if not registered) on "Samna Word" and "Microsoft Word." Of course, that conventional wisdom went out the door when Microsoft trademarked and enforced the generic term "Windows."
ftp://trillian.cc.gatech.edu/pub/mozilla.org/firef ox/releases/1.0/MD5SUMS shows:
./win32/en-US/Firefox Setup 1.0.exe
4bb6c55e5d7482ec66cefad3b93cdfef
The article states that they will be coming to the U.S. for $20,000 as SUV's, not $12,000. The cars cost about $13,000 in Europe but do not meet U.S. emissions standards. Some companies are retrofitting the global version of the Smart car to be U.S. street legal, but these would be a minimum of $14,000 as well.
Looking through my IMDB rankings, Hollow man is number 2 on my worst-of list. Dungeons and Dragons beat it out easily though.
Article is mirrored at Newsforge.
I thought it was better than average, but not great. I'd give it somewhere around a 7.5 out of 10 for the first episode -- Enough for me to come back and check it out next week to see if it might make my weekly viewing schedule.
The early buzz on the show was great. The summer buzz was fairly negative after Fox thought the original pilot wasn't a great opener and had this episode put in instead. I guess we'll find out whether or not this was a good idea when the original pilot airs in December. Something tells me that the Slashdot audience would probably have liked the original pilot better, but the "mainstream" audience needed a different introduction to the show.
With 9 regular cast members, I can understand why Whedon wanted a two hour premier to introduce them all. One hour really didn't seem like enough time to introduce the crew and pull off a plot episode at the same time. Whedon took two hours of premier episodes to introduce the 8 recurring cast members of Buffy, for example. With only 4 recurring cast members in the Angel premier, it only took an hour.
As for the "it will be cancelled quickly" naysayers here, let's not forget that the Slashdot audience doesn't exactly have a great track record when picking television that sticks around. The last TV thread I jumped into here was where Slashdotters were busy telling us how bad CSI was - Hey, if you don't like it that's fine, but just because you don't like it doesn't mean it will be cancelled.
Some people are upset because Dark Angel was apparently cancelled in favor of this. While Dark Angel lost me shortly into its second season, we all hate to lose shows we like ("Sports Night" and "Now and Again" were two of the biggest losses for me). However, you should be judging Firefly on its own merits, *not* hating it simply because it's not Dark Angel.
Then there are those here who fault Firefly for using ideas from other shows. Give me a break - After 50 years of television and centuries of books, there are very few *new* ideas out there. Almost every plot point of every show/movie/book has been used so many times it isn't funny.
Let's look at some other examples just from this season so far - If you've followed the news of the fall premiers at all, you've probably heard how there are two shows ("Do Over" and "That was Then") that have a person return through time to high school. Of course, it's easy to point to "Back to the Future" as a predecessor, and I'm sure someone can remember a work that did it even earlier.
The most blatant rip-off of the season has to be "Fastlane". Cop in flashy clothes and car seeks to avenge his partner who was killed in a bust-gone-bad. Cop drives to climatic showdown at night with the street-lights reflecting off the hood of the car to the beat of Phil Collin's "In the Air Tonight". I'm sure there were more, but these elements were *identical* in the Miami Vice premier 15 years ago.
Does this make any of these a bad show by default? Absolutely not.
The strength of almost any show is not in presenting new concepts, it's *how* they use the concepts that have almost certainly been done before. It's in the delivery, the set up, the execution.
Did Firefly pull this off in its premier? Barely, but yes - As I said originally, "above average, but not great". But the hope I have for the show isn't in how well it delivers one episode, it's in the fact that Whedon likes to weave episodes together to create a strong continuing storyline. Just look at Buffy and Angel as examples.
I made the mistake of judging an "arc" show too early once before with Babylon 5. I'm not saying that Firefly is the next B5, or Angel, or Buffy. I'm just saying that the premier didn't turn me off completely, and I'll be back next week to see where it goes from here.
I haven't played B&W yet (need to, want to, it's just been a busy few weeks), but I can certainly see a use for this in a browser. When I read the headline here about Opera implementing actual support for gestures, I was immediately interested because I already find myself doing something very similar in Internet Explorer using the mousewheel.
Pressing the mousewheel button in IE has the effect of placing it into "scroll-mode", where moving the mouse then rapid-scrolls in that direction. It's become such a habit for me to just hit the mousewheel-button and then move the mouse up rapidly to emulate a "Home" keypress without going to the keyboard. Similar results can be obtained for "End".
Believe it or not, I'm so used to doing this that I just haven't been able to move over to Mozilla as a result. I personally hope to see gesture support picked up by Mozilla at some point in time so that I could do something similar there.
Of course, I'm really a keyboard person at heart, but web browsers just don't have the support for keystrokes that they should (e.g. Why does "tab" always take you to the first link at the top of the page you are viewing rather than starting in the current viewport? How about support for something like "20 <tab>" to take me to the 20th link on the screen? Etc., etc.)
If I'm stuck using the mouse for web pages, I really don't want to have to switch over to the keyboard just to go to the top or bottom of the page. And I'd prefer not having to move my mouse over to the scroll bar either since, being so close to the edge of the window, it's all too easy to miss-click and activate the window behind the browser.
Simple gestures (nothing complex like drawing a square or anything) seem like a great answer to me.
IANAKF (I am not a Katz Fan), but CSI was already a hit even before it was moved to Thursdays for the Survivor crowd. Going back to the last week it was on Friday, it was still the 13th ranked show of the week without the help of "reality" crazed viewers.
Certainly the new placement has helped it even more, but it has not doubled the numbers as you might believe. There were about 16 million viewers the week of 1/15, and 21 million for the most recent weekly ratings of 2/29.