I use the same words but nobody reads them. Sad.

I suspect most farmers can't survive on their own. A peanut farmer still needs to buy his bread and milk. Or are you thinking of those old picture book farmers who raise everything from their own cows, chickens and pigs right down to their own corn, lettuce and tomatoes? That or you're looking at some extremely paranoid but wealthy survivalist with a hydroponic greenhouse fifty feet underground.

Doesn't your smarthone have an airplane mode? I keep my gadgets close at hand. I have them loaded with a bunch of offline apps, including an offline copy of Wikipedia and Wiktionary and the usual calculator and document viewer. You can be the master not the slave of your gadgets, if you know how to limit or restrict them, disabling features you don't really or currently need. If you're studying for an exam, constant net access and Facebook are one of those.

"Umm... possible? Not really, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are not powerful enough for manned moon missions, not without many orbital rendezvous and other trickery. Don't be fooled by the moon tourism flyby mission, its a free return flight, Dragon capsule will not enter lunar orbit let alone attempt landing, it doesn't have enough delta v for it. ITS is in very early development stage and probably still couldn't do moon missions, despite having awesome lift mass the second stage relies on atmospheric breaking and onsite refueling, both impossible on the moon."

Not disputing your space facts but your phrasing. Not landing on the moon, a flyby, can also be considered a mission to the moon. Or what has NASA been doing with all its space probes to Jupiter, Saturn and the former planet with the same name as Mickey the Mouse's dog? Sci-fi scenario: a billionaire wants to take snapshots of the Maria showing proof that NASA buried the monoliths somewhere in the lunar regolith.

"This may be true one day. But my money would be on Chinese, not French, as the successor."

Not happening. Unless the Indians start ditching English in favor of their dozen and more native languages. Now and in the future, the only ones who'll be using Chinese as more than a diplomatic language will be the peoples of countries with large Chinese majorities like Singapore, Taiwan and of course the PROC. The languages with the greater probability of replacing English will be Spanish or Arabic.

"I mean the human race cannot even control its carbon emission, despite having known about the problem for more than 30 years now and despite alternatives being known. Get that sorted and then maybe we can talk about large-scale geo-engineering. As a technological civilization, this one is still in its infancy and geo-engineering that matters is well beyond reach."

The solutions to the problem are or could be different. To fix the emissions you need the cooperation of everybody on the planet, rich, poor, 1st or 3rd world. On the other hand there are geoengineering solutions that require MERELY the massive infusion of resources, ala Manhattan/Apollo project. So okay, the resources needed would been N times greater than either, but the effect is similar. It's the difference between tackling poverty or racism, which requires attention to detail and the cooperation of local communities and large-scale infrastructure projects which don't, that is, it can be implemented in a secretive, if not downright dictatorial manner. And so yes, I believe our chances of colonizing Mars with a few thousand adventurous (and presumably well-heeled or very healthy) astronauts than fixing poverty or climate change through conventional conservation.

Apples to something less healthy, like Nougat/Lollipops?

Seriously, I thought Android had already eclipsed Windows simply on the number of units installed since there are already billions of Android devices out there, while Windows has yet to reach or just gone past the billion dollar mark on the more costly desktop.laptop platforms. In the third world you can buy a cheap smart phone running some old unsupported possibly malware infested version of Android for a fraction the price of the least expensive netbook.

"We know matter exists, and we know consciousness exists, but we really don't know the first thing about how consciousness works."

I hate to say this, but you don't exist. You're just a figment of my imagination, so you can't prove to me that you exist. All of you supposedly "other" people "out there" are images on a VR simulation permanently attached to me that gives me the sensations of sight and sound, and sometimes other more intimate sensations, like the taste of chocolate and bananas or the feel of sweat and heat.

The Solipsist (aka The Mind in the Vat)

Hey Vlad, is that you?

Hate to go grammar nazi on your insightful comment, but your typos are so consistent I'm convinced you're using some wonky kind of speech recognition software. A simple search and replace would've fixed s/.ould of/&ould have/

A relatively simple, if not 100% secure solution. Download your favourite anonymizing live USB distribution and run it under a virtual machine with only the bare minimum of media support (e.g. disable any virtual sound card option). Enable at most a generic VGA video driver using a resolution different from your default monitor aspect or resolution. Run the browser with ad-blockading software and JavaScript white-listing only. The attacker will of course realize of course that you're using a VM.

"As a software developer of enterprise software, every company I have worked for has either produced software which reduced white collar jobs or allowed companies to grow without hiring more people."

As a software user I'd be surprised if lower level white collar jobs don't go before blue collar jobs outside the factory floor. Factories are more or less controlled environments that can quite easily, even if at first expensively, be roboticized, while truck and Uber driving have a lot of conditionals like the weather, cows and grannies crossing the street. So factory-free blue collar jobs should be more secure than (data) entry level to mid-level blue collar work and may well be the last bastion of non-capitalist humanity before the Rise of the Machines controlled by the elite.

Good for you. The Google re-captchas can be found in other web sites that use Google's JavaScript libraries/services. Facebook's re-captchas are found mostly (only?) in Facebook-owned sites, and so are easier to avoid.

I typed Nougat and the first hit was for a green robot!

At least they haven't threatened anybody with jail time or the rack. Your free speech is still fine ... so long as you pay the fine.