Distributed drone delivery and refueling? Bit torrent for packages! Genius! Cut the US Postal service out of the snail mail business completely using technology in e-space and meat-space.

Have you looked at how much robotics parts cost? A cheap servo is $12, an acceptable servo costs $45, and good servos you might use with surgical precision start at $95. High torque high precision motors a human sized model start in the $450 range and go up from there.
 
Six range of motion arms (let alone three digits per finger) means 12 servos for just the arms. It's no wonder people are looking at pneumatics, hydraulics etc for high torque high precision "digitla muscles". Robotics is expensive. And when you wire a servo wrong at 4 in the morning because you've been working too long you end up replacing these things at a fast rate (Ask me how I know). Just getting in to a 5 degree of motion laser cut wood arm, starting the hobby from scratch, cost me about $600. And that's with the $12-20 level servos.

Social media works great for things I will talk my friends about movies, politics, and occasionally global sports like the world cup or Olympics. Since I don't watch TV I couldn't tell you what's playing right now, especially since most movies are reboots or sequels which really blend together unless you've seen the trailers a few times. I did end up buying a ticket to the Lego movie due to an ad on Facebook. After almost all of my friends had been talking about it for weeks. Ads for dishwashing soap, soda, pizza etc don't even register for me mentally online.

Citation needed on point 1; everything I've read says that football produces about $15 for every $1 invested in the program. This probably isn't true for other sports, but College Football is Big Business in the south for Universities.

If you're paying $$ for custom Intel processors, you probably already have a way to leverage a particular function in parallel on the CPU

Force of habit. Honestly I'm a little surprised that Slashdot doesn't parse BBcode these days.

I think the term you're looking for is [url=http://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942244/ikes-warning-of-military-expansion-50-years-later]Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex[/url], which he gave a stern and grave warning about as his last words before he left office.

Does blender have a greater, lesser or parity feature set compared to RenderMan? That's an important question for the casual user. I use blender quite a bit for 3D modeling for Kerbal Space Program, but if Render Man is better, and has the features I need, then I might look at their free edition. I use blender because it's free and do about 20 hours a year of 3D modeling a year for hobbyist purposes.

What happens to Blender? Will RenderMan have the ability to replace Blender as an all-in-one 3D modeling/sculpting/rigging/animation/rendering engine, or is RenderMan only an animation/rendering engine?

This probably has something to do with the fact that Chromebooks are something like 20% of the new laptop marketshare, Apple commands something like 25 or 30% leaving Windows with 50-60%, whereas Microsoft used to own 90% wholesale of the market. It's a lot harder to replace your old market share with new when you have half of the market presence you did six years ago, and the consumer marketplace is contracting at the same time. Desktop numbers probably look a lot better, but consumers buy laptops 2:1 and enterprise has learned to move from a 3 to a 6 year upgrade cycle.
 
My next laptop is going to be an Android powered laptop or Chromebook with crouton on it, so I can RDP in to work (windows environment). Nothing I do besides games requires Windows these days, and Steam in Home Streaming will probably solve that as well.

What do you think the X-37B is doing up in orbit right now? NOT housing an orbital laser targeting system for ICBMs?

Google just bought Titan Aerospace, which builds and sells solar powered airplanes that can fly for 5 years straight. In theory they would intercept the satellite transmission and then beam the signal down to "the last mile", or in this case last 40,000 ft.

Unless you're watching a Michael Bay film, most dramas etc with indoor, static sets and camea shots will stream 4K just fine. Obviously panning and car chases etc will impact your video quality on a standard American broadband connection.

Football and soccer would look GREAT on an 80 inch 4k TV. It will change how the games are shot, so you can really get a sense of what everybody is doing instead of following the ball so closely.

Football is shot at close angles specifically to tell a narrative; they will not and are required not to show the full field during a play. This is the view that coaches get on a closed loop. It is available to the public, but only 4 hours after the game ends and you have to pay a special subscription to get it.

Netflix? House of Cards and all of their new original series are shot and displayed in 4K if your device and display support it.
 
Also, there's a much higher quality Samsung 4K display for $50 more, that is probably the model you want.