Care to provide any supporting information for your assertion that organic farmers use "older and much more toxic" pesticides? Talk about pure bullshit...

Here's what the EPA has to say about it.

As for the issue of pesticide residue, I'm sure that the amount of pesticide residue for a given piece of produce usually falls below some FDA threshold, and I'm sure that washing produce helps even more. The point I was trying to make, though, was not that pesticides are eeeeevil. They have their place in agriculture, but there is growing evidence that they are being overused. In short, heavy use of pesticides (and fertilizers) is not sustainable agriculture.

When you need to dose the shit out of your plants (killing pollenating insects and doing other harm to the biosphere) to keep them from being eaten alive, you're doing it wrong. Your crops are too dense. When you need to pour on the fertilizer to make up for the fact that you've pulled all the nutrients out of the soil, you're doing it wrong. It's not sustainable. You're reliant on Monsanto for your engineered seed + RoundUp and Saudi Arabia for your petro-based fertilizers.

My concern is not based in some wooly-headed "o noes chemicals" fear. I would sign up to have a neighborhood-sized pebble-bed nuke plant next to my backyard if I could. I just believe that we can choose better ways to do things.

As I thought I made clear in my original post, my motivation for buying Organic food is not specifically for a perceived superiority in taste. High-quality produce is high-quality produce regardless of whether or not it's Organic.

Meat, on the other hand, is a whole other ball of wax.

As an example, the "free range" chicken breasts I buy are far and away superior in taste and texture to the premium conventional breasts I buy every once in a while (depending on which grocery I get to). I usually make a chicken vindaloo several times a month (sometimes twice a week if we're fixated), and my wife can always tell when I've bought the Perdue chicken. I'd be willing to believe that it's simply a matter of freshness, but given the consistent discrepancy I'm not so sure.

I know that often the factory chicken producers inject their meat with saline to plump it up, so maybe that's it... Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that one set of chickens is crammed into a pen so small they can't turn around and fed growth hormones their whole (short) lives, and the others are allowed to develop somewhat normally. I dunno. I don't really care -- I'm willing to pay more for chicken that tastes good.

As for steak... Have you ever had real grass-fed steak? ...

My point, again, is not that I think progress is evil or that we should all return to hunter/gatherer society or something. I just think that if more people choose to support sustainable agriculture, it will be better for all of us in the long run.

But I know that for some people "sustainable" or "organic" are watchwords for hippy libruls smokin' dope and trying to take away guns or whatever.

It usually does taste much better, and it is common sense that eating foods which haven't been doused with pesticides is better for you. Irrespective of those arguments, the weight of which vary wildly from person to person, I think that eating certified Organic foods is morally superior. I know, that sounds awfully hippy-dippy, but what cemented it for me was an article which pointed out that organic foods cost more because they're more expensive to produce. Duh, but why? Well, it's because they're produced in a sustainable fashion. The farmers can't use pesticides, so crop density has to be lower. The farmers can't use certain classes of fertilizers, so the yields are smaller. The animals are free-range and not crammed full of growth hormones and antibiotics, so it takes longer to grow fewer of them.

The result of choosing organic produce and meats is that we eat less meat. In my mind, this is a good thing. As a society, we've allowed the agribusiness industry to externalize costs, which results in artificially reduced prices for their products. They don't account for the increased societal health costs of a corn- and meat-heavy diet. They don't account for the pollution that results from factory farming (Fertilizer Runoff, Pigshit Lagoons, etc.), and they're doing it all with nice juicy federal subsidies. What is wrong with us?? We're paying them (via taxes and at the grocery store) to make us less healthy!!

I know that many people don't have the luxury of spending more for their calories. My family is fortunate enough that we can. I look at it as an investment in our own health and as an investment in sustainable agriculture. I'm under no illusions that we'll ever make factory farming go away, but if enough informed consumers choose to pay more for better product, then we'll at least put pressure on Big Ag to clean themselves up.

Could you repeat that, I was busy texting.

2.) They ignore how many distractions come from the radio in the car - they would never move to ban radios

3.) They ignore how many distractions come from passengers/pets - they would never more to ban passengers/pets

4.) They hold on to the idea that if a phone was in the car, it caused the accident, no matter what the actual cause was
5.) To such people, the citing of a couple of personal examples shows what all of humankind is like
6.) They fit into the general pattern of those who want to tell others what to do

The truth is that when bad things happen, people inevitably seek to blame whatever thing/behavior that they don't like but think they have good enough chances of hanging the blame on. Aren't there any studies on actual distraction level and human tolerance for such? Statistics taken at the scene of accidents are just as unreliable as they were in the 80's when any car with any amount of alcohol in it, regardless of form (groceries, sealed bottles, etc) was considered an "alcohol-related" accident.

Actually, the Hawking radiation doesn't come from inside the black hole.

When a particle/anti-particle pair tunnels into existence at the edge of a black hole, for some reason, the anti-particle tunnels into existence inside the black hole and is immediately annihilated by an already existing particle in the black hole (thus reducing the mass of the black hole by one particle's worth). The particle that tunneled into existence outside the black hole spins off and is referred to as "Hawking Radiation".

The wikipedia article is excellent.

Are you capable of forming an opinion on a subject without requiring a study to back it up? Are human beings in general able to master things that the average person in the average study wasn't capable of?

I don't doubt that many people are too stupid or unskilled to safely text while driving. There's also a lot of people who can't juggle, and most can't walk on a tight rope over a canyon without falling to their deaths. Yet somehow, some people are able to do these things. I can type out a text message on my phone while watching traffic and barely even thinking about the message I'm sending, the same way I can type at 100 WPM on a keyboard while simultaneously holding a conversation with someone on a different subject. It comes from practice. Maybe you aren't practiced or skilled enough; I'm sorry. That doesn't change the fact that I can do these things, and neither do your studies.

You can complain about MS all you want, but aside from the malware tool they occasionally send, they do not push NEW software over their updates. They offer them through the Windows Update website as optional / recommended updates that are NOT preselected.

From your link:

7 Can any applications use the license?

The license is available for applications on any platform, except for applications that compete directly with the five Office applications that currently have the new UI (Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Access). We wanted to make the IP available broadly to partners because it has benefits to Microsoft and the Office Ecosystem. At the same time, we wanted to preserve the uniqueness of the Office UI for the core Office productivity applications.

Firefox does not compete with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook or Access. Microsoft might claim Thunderbird competes with Outlook, if the Mozilla folks want to add ribbons there as well, but unless the actual license text is substantially different, there should not be any problem for Firefox other than possibly users' objections.

You make the mistake of assuming that the 'evidence' presented is true. you also make the mistake assuming any trial by jury is a fair one, considering anybody that is a member of FIJA is almost immediately removed from the jury pool. That leaves out the informed people, leaving only the idiots to judge your guilt or innocence.