Sitecore AbortStaticFiles with Pipeline

Sitecore has a very flexible pipeline implementation allowing developers to extend the basic behaviours of how a page/file etc will be handled. In certain cases you don’t want to kill the system and just let certain files be executed without the Sitecore context and let the files be returned to the user as quickly and with minimal processing required. Now why do we want this, if you allow ASP.NET to handle all traffic, such as turing off extensions and friendly media file names then ASP.NET is running over every single server request made to the system, such as calling static files like jquery-1.5.js etc.