And sell 10 million toy Scaled Composite rockets for $3-4 in licensing fees each...
Re:If protecting against the weather is possible..
on
Broadband Barrage Balloons
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Neglecting air resistance (hah!).50 BMG bullets are about 700 grains or 0.045 kg. Muzzle velocity is around 1000 m/s, for kinetic energy of 22500 J. This implies a.50 BMG bullet could reach an altitude of 51,000 m maximum (at which point it would have zero velocity). But of course, you can't neglect air resistance, especially with fast-moving objects as it increases faster than linearly with velocity.
I've seen a study looking at the maximum trajectory of.50 BMG for surface-to-surface use, which is generally around 25,000 feet surface range and maximum height of around 8000 feet. At maximum height, horitzontal velocity is down to 100 m/s.
Another study has shown that rifle bullets tend to reach a maximum altitude of about 9000 feet.
Finally, here there is a quote about an Army firing table for the Browning M2 with.50 BMG for anti-aircraft use, which tops out at 7500 feet altitude (but within 400 yards horizontal distance).
So extrapolating, I think it is safe to say that.50 BMG will generally not reach higher than 10,000 feet, and will probably be fairly useless in engaging targets much more than 7500 feet high.
Airborne time is generally limited only by the weather (60% standard operational availability) and routine maintenance downtime, which is minimal. Since the aerostats are stable in all winds below 65 knots, the aerostat program provides low-cost, one of a kind radar coverage uniquely suited for its given mission.
My wife has a fairly rare disease. Her daily existance depends on a drug that is not FDA approved, because it would cost too much to obtain US FDA approval versus the number of people who have the disease. Also its side effects would probably lead to many lawsuits in this country, despite the fact it is the only drug that keeps her going.
So we have to hand import it from relatives (doctors) in Central America. It is also available in New Zealand, Canada, and Europe. It is illegal for a doctor in the US to prescribe...
Now onto government and medical care - between Medicare, VA doctors, and Medicaid, the US government spends 50% of health care dollars in the US. It regulates health care in those three areas in such a way as to underpay providers and pass on the costs to those not covered by Federal health care. Note I didn't say "negotiates" but "regulates." Medicare may soon expand dramatically into prescription drugs, which will raise the cost of drugs for everyone else.
I'm ultimately scared of widespread manditory government socialized healh care. We have already seen that you can't have unlimited medical care for a fixed contribution - people have no inclination to consume health care with an eye towards costs - that is why we have HMO/PPO's. No doubt a fully socialized health care system would have cost restrictions. But to allow people to go outside the socialized health care solution would create a two-tier system with rich people (who have the money) going private and poor people (who don't) going public. As a result, there would be less money flowing into the system. Past concepts on this included laws against private health care.
It took about 15 doctors before a specialist identified my wife's disease. Being relatively normal, I'm served well and cheaply by and HMO, but for her we obviously had to go outside her HMO, and pay out of pocket. I didn't mind paying, it saved her life. What if this was illegal? What if we couldn't go out of a legally required health care solution?
Health care costs alot because 1) we have a highly regulated medical system for safety sake, which has good points and bad points 2) we have a highly regulated government health sub-system for the old, poor, and veterans, which is 3) expanding rapidly because the last four years of life, often under Medicare, consume 50% of health care dollars as well, and 4) health care technology is improving, keeping costs high, but saving lives at the same time.
I'm not going to say I know what the best solution is, but I suggest that we keep the medical freedom for the individual to seek the kind of care we need (even if, gasp, we have to pay for it individually).
Apparently you can use rblsmtpd as a front-end with blocking of RBL-listed sites. It calls your "real" smtpd (such as Qmail or Sendmail) if the IP of the sender is not on the RBL.
I am not bothered enough in bandwidth terms to use this yet, plus I am too paranoid about false positives.
Install TMDA now!
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 2, Informative
In the few days I have been using TMDA, I have been exceedingly satisfied. It is a much better solution than SpamAssasin. You should try to whitelist most of the people you expect to receive email from ahead of time, but I haven't had any complaints from people having to respond to a message bounced back to them for authentication.
That, in combination with qmail's revokable dash-addresses (howard-amazon@cow.com, howard-slashdot@cow.com, etc.) make it an excellent solution not just for avoiding spam, but for tracking its sources as well.
Yes, but Wexler SUPPORTS campaign finance "reform." Which shows what an empty topic it truly is....
I applaud the recent passage of campaign finance reform, which bans the use of soft money and will begin the process of returning control of the federal government back to the people rather than the special interests. I sponsored the House version of this bill, which bans all soft money donations to the national political parties -- that means large unregulated donations from corporations, labor unions, and individuals. This bill also prevents independent groups from running television and radio campaign commercials right before an election, which are disguised as "issue ads," and requires more timely disclosures of independent expenditures.
The importance of the Miller-Urey experiment is that it lead science to recognize that there are ways to create what seem to be fairly complex organic molecules in a simple way.
While their atmosphere/ocean model may be chemically the "wrong way," but as you mentioned, it inspired many experiments looking into alternative atmospheric conditions, energy sources, catalysts, etc.
As you may know, one of the advantages of cable is that it has so many channels that there is the opportunity for niche markets.
Digital Television provides 19.4 Mbps of data per channel. This could either be a single high-definition stream, or a multiplex set of standard-definition streams (or even a mixture of both).
So you could have 4 times as many digital video streams on the air as you have analog video channels today, if they all do a 4 way multiplex (they call it "multicast", but that confuses us IT folks) at SD bitrates equivalent to those of SD digital cable.
It remains to be seen what might be made of those multiplexed digital television channels.
PBS, for example, provides a pre-multiplexed DTV feed to public television stations broadcasting a digital channel, including a children's feed, and an adult learning feed, and many are running with this 4 channel "multicast" during non-prime hours.
So it might be that broadcast DTV becomes more "cable-ized" through the addition of multiplexed channels.
Broadcast is losing to the cable channels because they do a better job at providing "individualized" content to smaller niches, which pulls viewers off broadcast. Most people wouldn't watch "Discovery Channel," but I would. Top rated Discovery shows pull 2-4 million households. Add enough (10 or so) little cable networks pulling 2-4 million at a time and your 100-200 million former broadcast numbers start to go down by about 20-40 million.
Broadcast network demographics show they reach the oldest audiences. That is their market niche, and it is a big one. Most other market niches are too small for broadcast. Someone talked about Friends...the goal of the broadcast networks seems to be to put some young pretty people in front of the camera for old people who are not interested in paying for cable or getting on the roof and installing DBS satellite. And yes, Friends stills pulls in ratings:
Nielsen Media Research Top 20 Week of April 27-May 4, 2003 Rank/Program Name/Network/Households 1/CSI/CBS/15,627,000 2/E .R./NBC/14,019,000 3/FRIENDS/NBC/13,615,000 4/AM ER IDOL TUES/FOX/13,179,000
Anyway, I personally feel like I am perfectly served by television (with cable!). I feel sadly at a loss on the FM dial, but recognize that the majority of listeners are probably happy with it. I'm more into XM...
Re:what sucks is globalization
on
DRAM Price Fixing
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Look at Linux distributions, for example!
Obviously there is price collusion, because so many are offered for exactlty the same price, $0!!! Get me a federal prosecutor!
The Washington, DC, area has more jobs now than a year ago. If you can't get a job in New York or SF/SJ, please pick yourself up and move to DC.
Older coders who are more likely to get a security clearance are needed, especially if you have any old military or government experience.
The trick is finding the position that gets you your first security clearance. Take less money for it. Once you have one, you will have little problem holding a job in the DC area.
Besides government, there are also many non-profits and lobbying groups in the area. National Geographic is looking for an experienced webmaster, for instance.
While AOL and Wolrdcom/MCI/UUWho shed some people, it is looking like many of them are ending up in other places. Plus MCI is moving their main operations to Northern Virginia.
Jobs might not be as cool in the DC area as they were three years ago, but the good news is that there are jobs at all, and that there are cheap places to live in DC. South of DC in Maryland, $250k buys you a spacious McMansion. Cheap rents in Oxon Hill and SouthEast DC. Just don't live in MD north of DC or in Northern VA, it is expensive there.
Anyway, the best way to avoid loss of data is to simply RAID 5 it with hot-swap drives, and keep a spare. Rebuilding lost drives is "automagic" with modern hardware RAID controllers.
Infact, I have a Proliant DL380 that had three drives in RAID 5, and I wanted to stripe across more drives for better performance, so I threw in three more drives and turned on expanding the array across all six. At the same time it is doing this in the background, I can still use the machine.
To find life, we need to look for chemical imbalances that are not supported by known non-living forces. Life is very effective at changing the rates and directions of typical chemical reactions.
For example, oxygen combines with a large number of elements to oxidize them (at a wide range of pressures and temperatures).
When you have oxygen coming out of something when the chemistry says it should be going in, that is a hint of life. This could apply to a wide range of reversals of expected chemical reactions.
In the US, HD DTV terrestrial broadcasts are done with a MPEG-2 transport stream of maximum 19.39 Mbps using the ATSC standard.
In practice, most people will be receiving HD at slightly lower speeds to allow a multiplexed SD feed (2-4 Mbps) in the ATSC channel along with the HD feed (15-17 Mbps)
I am under the impression that most DBS HD will also be in the 10-20 Mbps department. HDNet programming varies from 10 Mbps to 18 Mbps, while DBS HBO HD only goes up to 15 Mbps.
Uncompressed HD is somewhere around 1.485 Gbps. The "standard" for broadcast HD tapes is HDCAM which is at 140 Mbps. Then it gets squished down to below 19.39 Mbps for broadcast. So there is a lot of compression before you get over the air.
The government IS already involved. Your DSL comes over ILEC pairs that are highly regulated and guaranteed at least some sort of monopoly by a combination of your state government and the FCC.
Your cable modem comes from a cable MSO which is similarly regulated and guaranteed a monopoly (or in limited cases, a duopoly).
So if the USA isn't wired enough, I blame government! End all wired telecom regulation.
Your house inherits from the class of all houses, so you don't have to build much of it. Yet pointers still allow you to punch holes through your walls.
The house that C# built:
You can mess up your house and much as you want, then a garbage collector comes by to clean it up. Your house in controlled over the Internet with web services. Your rent goes to Bill Gates.
The house that Scheme built:
Your house is a mystery to everyone else. Your wife complains about all the parentheses around. Lambda.
Both Comcast and RCN are now offering the "VCR-like" VOD. Here is a link to the RCN's. They expect to add features to this over time. From the site:
RCN Impulse ON-DEMAND is a new video-on-demand service that gives you hundreds of titles to choose from. And you can order your selection with just a click of your remote -- 24 hours a day/7 days a week. You can even use your remote to rewind, fast forward, pause, or stop your movie -- just like a VCR!
This is an announcement about SeaChange VOD technology offered by Comcast that is actually Tivo-like.
The problem is that better quality video codecs don't tend to just be a change of software - they tend to need more CPU power and memory as well.
Then there is the issue of getting the same software on everyone's box. It is doable, but another hassle for maintaining the system (and hassle == cost).
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if we see more programmability of set-top boxes, but I suspect the codecs will continue to be hard-coded in specialized VLSI chips.
At the NAB convention, I saw a talk about a new set-top box that is being rolled out in Philadelphia which has all the same features of a DVD player - including 'director's commentary' and such - available over cable VOD.
As wasteful analog spectrum on cable systems go away, a ton of space opens up for more digital channels, IP, and VOD. If you cleared out all of the analog channels, digital cable can deliver over 1000 channels.
Major cable MSOs are now planning to offer hundreds of hours of FREE VOD to local broadcasters. Those broadcasters can offer up free or ppv VOD of their content to cable subscribers.
The issue here is trying to keep cable competitive with DBS satellite, no way DBS can do that kind of complex VOD service.
BTW, I don't see MPEG-2 going away any time soon for delivery over digital cable - it is written into to many set-top boxes and the ATSC DTV standard. However, I would expect that at some point broadcast video servers might move over to MPEG-4 AVC for storage.
Of course, if Microsoft takes some of their cash and buys everyone in the US a Windows Media set-top box, that is a different matter...
Of course, when Christian Law dominated the West, it was called the "Dark Ages," but be that as it may, this is an interesting analysis...
A'isha (RA) narrated: That Buraira came (to 'A'isha) and said, "I have made a contract of emancipation with my masters for nine ounces (of gold) to be paid in yearly instalments. Therefore, I seek your help." 'A'isha said, "If your masters agree, I will pay them the sum at once and free you on condition that your Wala' (loyalty) will be for me." Buraira went to her masters, but they refused that offer. She (came back) and said, "I presented to them the offer but they refused, unless the Wala' (loyalty) was for them." A'isha (RA) mentioned that to the Messenger of Allah (saw) so he said, "Do (it)" so she did. The Prophet (SAW) then got up and gave a speech to people, where he glorified and praised Allah, and said, " What about some people who impose conditions which are not present in the Book of Allah? So, any condition which is not present in the Book of Allah is invalid. Allah's ordinance is more deserving, and Allah's condition is more firm. Verily, the Wala is for the liberator." The wording (mantooq) of the hadith indicates that the condition which contradicts what is in the Book of Allah and the Sunnah of His Messenger should not be adhered to. As long as the conditions of protecting intellectual property make the use of the sold asset restricted to one sort of benefit to the exclusion of another, then they are invalid conditions and contrary to what is in the Book of Allah (swt) and the Sunnah of His Messenger (saw). This is because it contradicts the requirement of the shar'i contract of selling, which enables the purchaser to freely dispose of and benefit from the asset in any legitimate manner such as selling, trade, gift etc. The conditions which prohibit the Halaal are invalid due to his (saw) saying: "The Muslims are bound by their conditions except a condition which forbids the Halaal or permits a Haraam." Therefore, it is not allowed in the Shar'a to protect publishing rights, copyrights and patents. Rather they are permissible rights. Thus, the thinker, scholar or inventor of a program owns his knowledge as long as his knowledge is with him and he has not taught it to others. However, once the knowledge went out to others through teaching, selling etc then the knowledge is no more his property. This is because it went out from his ownership when he sold it. So he does not possess the right to prevent others from freely disposing of it after its ownership has transferred to them through a shari'a means such as selling or other means.
Slashdot Mirror
And sell 10 million toy Scaled Composite rockets for $3-4 in licensing fees each...
Neglecting air resistance (hah!) .50 BMG bullets are about 700 grains or 0.045 kg. Muzzle velocity is around 1000 m/s, for kinetic energy of 22500 J. This implies a .50 BMG bullet could reach an altitude of 51,000 m maximum (at which point it would have zero velocity). But of course, you can't neglect air resistance, especially with fast-moving objects as it increases faster than linearly with velocity.
.50 BMG for surface-to-surface use, which is generally around 25,000 feet surface range and maximum height of around 8000 feet. At maximum height, horitzontal velocity is down to 100 m/s.
.50 BMG for anti-aircraft use, which tops out at 7500 feet altitude (but within 400 yards horizontal distance).
.50 BMG will generally not reach higher than 10,000 feet, and will probably be fairly useless in engaging targets much more than 7500 feet high.
I've seen a study looking at the maximum trajectory of
Another study has shown that rifle bullets tend to reach a maximum altitude of about 9000 feet.
Finally, here there is a quote about an Army firing table for the Browning M2 with
So extrapolating, I think it is safe to say that
My wife has a fairly rare disease. Her daily existance depends on a drug that is not FDA approved, because it would cost too much to obtain US FDA approval versus the number of people who have the disease. Also its side effects would probably lead to many lawsuits in this country, despite the fact it is the only drug that keeps her going.
So we have to hand import it from relatives (doctors) in Central America. It is also available in New Zealand, Canada, and Europe. It is illegal for a doctor in the US to prescribe...
Now onto government and medical care - between Medicare, VA doctors, and Medicaid, the US government spends 50% of health care dollars in the US. It regulates health care in those three areas in such a way as to underpay providers and pass on the costs to those not covered by Federal health care. Note I didn't say "negotiates" but "regulates." Medicare may soon expand dramatically into prescription drugs, which will raise the cost of drugs for everyone else.
I'm ultimately scared of widespread manditory government socialized healh care. We have already seen that you can't have unlimited medical care for a fixed contribution - people have no inclination to consume health care with an eye towards costs - that is why we have HMO/PPO's. No doubt a fully socialized health care system would have cost restrictions. But to allow people to go outside the socialized health care solution would create a two-tier system with rich people (who have the money) going private and poor people (who don't) going public. As a result, there would be less money flowing into the system. Past concepts on this included laws against private health care.
It took about 15 doctors before a specialist identified my wife's disease. Being relatively normal, I'm served well and cheaply by and HMO, but for her we obviously had to go outside her HMO, and pay out of pocket. I didn't mind paying, it saved her life. What if this was illegal? What if we couldn't go out of a legally required health care solution?
Health care costs alot because 1) we have a highly regulated medical system for safety sake, which has good points and bad points 2) we have a highly regulated government health sub-system for the old, poor, and veterans, which is 3) expanding rapidly because the last four years of life, often under Medicare, consume 50% of health care dollars as well, and 4) health care technology is improving, keeping costs high, but saving lives at the same time.
I'm not going to say I know what the best solution is, but I suggest that we keep the medical freedom for the individual to seek the kind of care we need (even if, gasp, we have to pay for it individually).
Apparently you can use rblsmtpd as a front-end with blocking of RBL-listed sites. It calls your "real" smtpd (such as Qmail or Sendmail) if the IP of the sender is not on the RBL.
I am not bothered enough in bandwidth terms to use this yet, plus I am too paranoid about false positives.
In the few days I have been using TMDA, I have been exceedingly satisfied. It is a much better solution than SpamAssasin. You should try to whitelist most of the people you expect to receive email from ahead of time, but I haven't had any complaints from people having to respond to a message bounced back to them for authentication.
That, in combination with qmail's revokable dash-addresses (howard-amazon@cow.com, howard-slashdot@cow.com, etc.) make it an excellent solution not just for avoiding spam, but for tracking its sources as well.
The importance of the Miller-Urey experiment is that it lead science to recognize that there are ways to create what seem to be fairly complex organic molecules in a simple way.
While their atmosphere/ocean model may be chemically the "wrong way," but as you mentioned, it inspired many experiments looking into alternative atmospheric conditions, energy sources, catalysts, etc.
As you may know, one of the advantages of cable is that it has so many channels that there is the opportunity for niche markets.
Digital Television provides 19.4 Mbps of data per channel. This could either be a single high-definition stream, or a multiplex set of standard-definition streams (or even a mixture of both).
So you could have 4 times as many digital video streams on the air as you have analog video channels today, if they all do a 4 way multiplex (they call it "multicast", but that confuses us IT folks) at SD bitrates equivalent to those of SD digital cable.
It remains to be seen what might be made of those multiplexed digital television channels.
PBS, for example, provides a pre-multiplexed DTV feed to public television stations broadcasting a digital channel, including a children's feed, and an adult learning feed, and many are running with this 4 channel "multicast" during non-prime hours.
So it might be that broadcast DTV becomes more "cable-ized" through the addition of multiplexed channels.
Broadcast network demographics show they reach the oldest audiences. That is their market niche, and it is a big one. Most other market niches are too small for broadcast. Someone talked about Friends...the goal of the broadcast networks seems to be to put some young pretty people in front of the camera for old people who are not interested in paying for cable or getting on the roof and installing DBS satellite. And yes, Friends stills pulls in ratings:
Anyway, I personally feel like I am perfectly served by television (with cable!). I feel sadly at a loss on the FM dial, but recognize that the majority of listeners are probably happy with it. I'm more into XM...
Look at Linux distributions, for example!
Obviously there is price collusion, because so many are offered for exactlty the same price, $0!!! Get me a federal prosecutor!
Where I live, I can drive a half mile and find multiple gas prices, often different by up to 10 cents!
The Washington, DC, area has more jobs now than a year ago. If you can't get a job in New York or SF/SJ, please pick yourself up and move to DC.
Older coders who are more likely to get a security clearance are needed, especially if you have any old military or government experience.
The trick is finding the position that gets you your first security clearance. Take less money for it. Once you have one, you will have little problem holding a job in the DC area.
Besides government, there are also many non-profits and lobbying groups in the area. National Geographic is looking for an experienced webmaster, for instance.
While AOL and Wolrdcom/MCI/UUWho shed some people, it is looking like many of them are ending up in other places. Plus MCI is moving their main operations to Northern Virginia.
Jobs might not be as cool in the DC area as they were three years ago, but the good news is that there are jobs at all, and that there are cheap places to live in DC. South of DC in Maryland, $250k buys you a spacious McMansion. Cheap rents in Oxon Hill and SouthEast DC. Just don't live in MD north of DC or in Northern VA, it is expensive there.
No, it is not nirvana, but there are jobs here.
Scale8?
Anyway, the best way to avoid loss of data is to simply RAID 5 it with hot-swap drives, and keep a spare. Rebuilding lost drives is "automagic" with modern hardware RAID controllers.
Infact, I have a Proliant DL380 that had three drives in RAID 5, and I wanted to stripe across more drives for better performance, so I threw in three more drives and turned on expanding the array across all six. At the same time it is doing this in the background, I can still use the machine.
To find life, we need to look for chemical imbalances that are not supported by known non-living forces. Life is very effective at changing the rates and directions of typical chemical reactions.
For example, oxygen combines with a large number of elements to oxidize them (at a wide range of pressures and temperatures).
When you have oxygen coming out of something when the chemistry says it should be going in, that is a hint of life. This could apply to a wide range of reversals of expected chemical reactions.
In the US, HD DTV terrestrial broadcasts are done with a MPEG-2 transport stream of maximum 19.39 Mbps using the ATSC standard.
In practice, most people will be receiving HD at slightly lower speeds to allow a multiplexed SD feed (2-4 Mbps) in the ATSC channel along with the HD feed (15-17 Mbps)
I am under the impression that most DBS HD will also be in the 10-20 Mbps department. HDNet programming varies from 10 Mbps to 18 Mbps, while DBS HBO HD only goes up to 15 Mbps.
Uncompressed HD is somewhere around 1.485 Gbps. The "standard" for broadcast HD tapes is HDCAM which is at 140 Mbps. Then it gets squished down to below 19.39 Mbps for broadcast. So there is a lot of compression before you get over the air.
Perl and Python run on Windows - so does BASH under Cygwin - I'd be lost without them!
The government IS already involved. Your DSL comes over ILEC pairs that are highly regulated and guaranteed at least some sort of monopoly by a combination of your state government and the FCC.
Your cable modem comes from a cable MSO which is similarly regulated and guaranteed a monopoly (or in limited cases, a duopoly).
So if the USA isn't wired enough, I blame government! End all wired telecom regulation.
The house that C++ built:
Your house inherits from the class of all houses, so you don't have to build much of it. Yet pointers still allow you to punch holes through your walls.
The house that C# built:
You can mess up your house and much as you want, then a garbage collector comes by to clean it up. Your house in controlled over the Internet with web services. Your rent goes to Bill Gates.
The house that Scheme built:
Your house is a mystery to everyone else. Your wife complains about all the parentheses around. Lambda.
Keep in mind, when you hear 800x600, that is 600 lines, not 800 lines! Lines means vertical resolution, not horizontal.
Also, HD is 13:9 aspect ratio, not 4:3, so you lose about 10% of your lines in letterbox if you use a 4:3 display for 13:9 letterbox.
So on a 4:3 display, you'd need 792x1056 to display 720P 13:9 full resolution letterbox.
You mean there was a difference between the membership of the Computer Club and the D&D Club?
This is an announcement about SeaChange VOD technology offered by Comcast that is actually Tivo-like.
Software set-top boxes have many issues...
The problem is that better quality video codecs don't tend to just be a change of software - they tend to need more CPU power and memory as well.
Then there is the issue of getting the same software on everyone's box. It is doable, but another hassle for maintaining the system (and hassle == cost).
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if we see more programmability of set-top boxes, but I suspect the codecs will continue to be hard-coded in specialized VLSI chips.
At the NAB convention, I saw a talk about a new set-top box that is being rolled out in Philadelphia which has all the same features of a DVD player - including 'director's commentary' and such - available over cable VOD.
As wasteful analog spectrum on cable systems go away, a ton of space opens up for more digital channels, IP, and VOD. If you cleared out all of the analog channels, digital cable can deliver over 1000 channels.
Major cable MSOs are now planning to offer hundreds of hours of FREE VOD to local broadcasters. Those broadcasters can offer up free or ppv VOD of their content to cable subscribers.
The issue here is trying to keep cable competitive with DBS satellite, no way DBS can do that kind of complex VOD service.
BTW, I don't see MPEG-2 going away any time soon for delivery over digital cable - it is written into to many set-top boxes and the ATSC DTV standard. However, I would expect that at some point broadcast video servers might move over to MPEG-4 AVC for storage.
Of course, if Microsoft takes some of their cash and buys everyone in the US a Windows Media set-top box, that is a different matter...