They are sensitive to sudden positive high-pressure air flow; flapping of a wing, motion of a bird. A continuous negative high-pressure air flow won't activate them.

I'm not sure they can discriminate between a predator and non-predator. They go by smell to find food and partners. Just about anything that is a dark shadow or moves relative to the background is a potential predator - either they get squished or eaten,

They do vision by a method called "optic flow". Imagine everything you see is projected onto a hemispherical dome (like one of those IMAX theaters). The only way you can tell how the camera is moving is whether the picture rotates around a single point, a particular area of the picture gets larger or smaller and any combination of the two. How quickly different parts of the picture move tells them how near it is.

The interesting thing about the home computers vs the IBM PC and clones was that the home computes (Atari ST, Amiga, Apple) were ahead of the IBM PC in terms of connectors (MIDI) and display capability (GUI's), but it only took a couple of graphics and audio boards (Soundblaster) for the PC to catch up.

I do have to wonder what the next two iterations are going to be? Wearable computing? Implantable computing?

I would go for the Wacom style art tablet with a built-in screen, but still with a keyboard. That allows for additional interaction including tilt, pressure, and multiple stylus pens to be used simultaneously. I've tried explaining how to use a computer to some of my more senior relatives, and they immediately get all annoyed and panicky when I tell them to "grab the mouse, and pull it towards them". They panic at the thought there is a rodent on the table.

Both the British and Americans used the same government contact for their information, but they didn't tell each other who that contact was. In fact, they had different codenames for the person. When they cross-referenced each others information, they got two confirmations.

Why do you think it is purely luck? When you have these wild discussion parties - things like "is a bright blob of pixels on a Mars Rover image a cosmic ray, a high-voltage dust-devil, light contamination of a camera box, a gas geyser", you will have an incredible combination of experts - everyone from geologists, ranchers, hill-hikers, photographers, astronomers. Geologists will tell you want can and can't come from the ground, ranchers and hill-hikers will tell you things they have seen and never seen, photographers will tell you what visual artifacts can appear on a camera, and astronomers tell you what can fall from the sky and can't, and what those falling things look like.

It's like solving a giant logic problem where everyone can cross off or tick what what they know. Eventually the set of possible answers reduces down to one or two.

Being able to program is only a small part of being a programmer or engineer or developer. First skill = being able to handle ambiguous specifications or even being able to extract them from the client or other engineers tactfully. Second skill = being able to write and document well structured code. Third skill = being able to herd a team of junior programmers towards the same goal.

Sometimes employers use different terms; software developer, application developer, programmer, junior programmer, senior programmer, senior engineer.

Highly-paid people still need to eat, drink (bars, cafes, restaurants), buy clothes, shoes (stores, sales assistants, sales managers), maintain their appearance (hairdressers, barbers, estheticians), keep healthy (fitness centres, doctors, dentists), and then they'll want to live somewhere pleasant (architects, landscape gardners), may want to explore their inner self (yoga instructors, meditation), learn new skills (community college), may want to be driven somewhere (taxi drivers, chaffeurs, limo services), want their homes upgraded (builders, painters, interior decorators).

That was the idea of the dollar - one days wage for one days work. Split up into dimes, quarters and cents.

Programming is always becoming obsolete. Every time a new compiler, API comes out there's a boom time where programmers in a particular field are in demand, then once all that infra-structure has been built, applications have been ported, the industry moves onto the next level. In the early 1990's, you could get a job with knowledge of C, X-windows, X-toolkit and GLX, X.25 and ISDN were also in demand. By the late 1990's, you needed to know C++, Win32, MFC, Then web page design took off around 2000, so a new path opened up as web page designer. That needed knowledge of HTML, ActiveX. Now, big data is another path that has opened, and that requires knowledge of things like Reduction, Hadoop, So there is a constant need to retrain as you go along.

I've seen documentaries on the operation of modern car making plants. Car components are ordered automatically, they are then distributed to the correct area of the factory by automatic trolley systems. Robots lift up the parts, weld them in place. Windows are put in place by robot. Spray-painting is done by machine. Humans do things like final testing.

Detroit suffered from something called "Devil's night" where certain groups of people attempted to set fire to as many homes, businesses and other property as well.

They're doing it all the time at "abovetopsecret.com"

Light source seen on Mars: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/...

Ammonite fossil seen on Mars: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/...

Mystery rock found on Mars: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/...

Stone Hut seen on Mars: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/...

Look up "boids". Each critter has a field of view and a current direction. It only responds to what it sees in that field-of-view. If other critters start running, it starts running too. If they stop, it stops. With fish, the minute one turns, there is a flash of light. That instructs all the others to turn as well, providing the flash is bright enough. Maybe it takes two or more.

There was an idea in computing several decades ago about "asynchronous computing". The idea was that you could get rid of the need to have all the different regions of your silicon chip clocked at exactly the same speed. Instead, data would move between different units at different speeds according to demand. If a particular circuit wasn't used, you could put it in a low power state, if something was being filled up with data, you boosted the clock speed. You end up with data "flowing" through the system or data-flow- computing.

So it's much similar to the brain where different regions light up under fMRI analysis as oxygen flow increases as they are used. And scientists have a good idea what different regions of the brain do - usually a high-level function like generate-muscle-motion-to-say-phrase or recognise-name-of-object-from-picture. From other methods of MRI scans, they have identified the pathways where different parts of the brain communicate along, and are able to visualize these as "connectograms", Phineas Gage is the best example.