I dunnoh... reading data, writing data. Even if you only ever talk to a database JDBC has API's for accessing data through a stream. It's kind of the default way to handle networking and file data...
Sure, but what am I going to do with that data? It's very rare that I'd want to twiddle the individual bits; 99% of the time a stream is an opaque handle that I pass through to an ObjectInputStream or an XML parser or write to an http response.
