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.

There are situations where one could sue anonymously ( http://www.legalmatch.com/law-... ), and they should still have copyright protections ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/w... ) but proving themselves to be the actual authors and have standing to sue might be difficult?

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.

Well unlawful searches would be a violation to due process, the question then becomes what's the remedy for that? I think we're so used to the evidence exclusion rule that we tend not to realize that's just one way to "fix" the problem. You can do criminal charges against the police, or you can do civil damages.

The counterargument against excluding evidence is: you committed a crime; this evidence shows it. Why should you get off just because the police did something wrong? That didn't magically make it so you didn't commit the crime, it just turns the whole process into a game with arbitrary rules.

Competition. Invisible Hand. Selective pressure from consumers who don't want a site with 80% screen real-estate devoted to ads, and subconsciously choose to spend their time on sites with (for whatever reason) fewer, better ads.
There are obviously limits and pressures already at play, or every site would be nothing but a wall of ads, because "more profit."

Uh....Fernandez v. California says the opposite of what you're saying. In it the Supreme Court held that even though one occupant had denied police entry, that after he had been arrested and moved away from the premises the other occupant could consent to a search. Only where one occupant is physically present and denying access are the police prevented from searching.

In any event, my hypothetical was more akin to Illinois v. Rodriguez, where the Court held that as long as the police had a reasonable belief that the person giving consent to search was in fact authorized to do so, evidence won't be excluded, even if that person did not have actual authority.

That being said, I will qualify that I believe in some states actual authority is required, but at the Supreme Court/Federal level only apparent authority is needed.

I don't think there's much that can be done as a preventive measure, though I guess since a lot of these cases hinge on really close questions about whether a search was reasonable it's possible. You'd have to make it super specific I'd think, maybe something like: "No trespassing. This specifically includes law enforcement; the owner does not and never will give consent for law enforcement to search or enter these premises for any reason whatsoever. Anyone giving such consent is not the owner and is not authorized to grant any such permission. The owner reserves all rights under the law and will pursue a civil action and/or file criminal charges against anyone, including law enforcement, who unlawfully enters these premises."

Kind of over the top but in a close case it might convince a judge that whatever pretext the police came up with to enter was unreasonable. Also might be a good idea to have a motion-activated camera with sound to capture anyone who would be in a position to read it so you could capture whoever enters, if you really want to be careful.

Well the exclusionary principle isn't enshrined in law, or even considered a Constitutional requirement, it's just a policy decision the Courts have made to keep the police in line. Theoretically they could get rid of it tomorrow and offer a different remedy for an unlawful search (like lawsuits for damages). Once there's no deterrent effect (like where the cops don't know it's illegal, or at least can show that) the Court discards it as essentially useless.

I'd like to opt out of the untargeted ads. I don't so much mind relevant, possibly-useful advertising -- I don't feel like it wastes my time so much, or even, in a way, creepily insinuates I would be interested in things I'm totally not. As long as the targeted advertising is done right, I'd rather have it. The more accurate such advertising gets, the more value-per-print it can generate, and therefore the less overall advertising will be required to sustain the "free" services we use. One well-chosen ad is worth dozens of spammy ones.

Or ... could we get the big advertising systems to allow us to pay them, centrally, to remove ads across all the sites they print on? And have them just forward a portion of the money to the sites themselves, just as they would have paid them to print an equivalent number of ads, while serving me nothing but 1px placeholders?

Well IAAL (in the 11th circuit even) so I tend to get a little OCD about legal terms. You're right it has precedential value in other circuits and any court addressing the issue will take this case seriously, though circuits frequently do just explicitly disagree with other circuits so I'd be more comfortable once this gets to the Supreme Court.