Don't you worry about blank, let me worry about blank!

It's a classic straw man. There's plenty of average, well adjusted, normal people who consider themselves bronies. A common interest, name, some in jokes, and a maybe few plastic figurines do not constitute a life dominating obsession, but for whatever reason, some people take that as a starting point.

I'd say I'm all four. Careful when determining who's a true Scotsman.

What do you mean by starts to define you? If you mean let it control you, than yes, that's certainty a problem. If you mean taking interests as a part of yourself, as one of the things that you enjoy and makes you unique, then no. Everyone is defined by the sum of themselves, their life experiences, their interests, their hopes, their hobbies, ect. That's the nature of individuality. And if a name and a gesture are all it takes to have serious issues, then maybe the whole world's a bit nuts.

The creator if the show did state that she wanted the main characters to have a wide variety of traits (the hard working one, the nurturing one, ect) as a kind of 'you can be who you want no matter what it is' message to the target audience of young girls. The nerdy one being the lead was a nice touch.

Also, a fun bit of trivia /. readers will probably appreciate, an episode once had a that character working with time dilation equations here.

Assuming fandom equals obsession is rather absurd, don't you think? No one is saying obsession is bad, but jumping from MLP fandom straight to obsession, as if trying to imply they are somehow more linked than other obsessions and baselines, is pretty silly. Sure, there are obsessive bronies. There are also sports nuts, crazed foodies, people who played video games to death, animal hoarders, and all sorts of other obsessions out there. The obsessive minority does not define the baseline.

You average brony is basically just another person, going about life just like everyone else. Everyone likes different things and has different hobbies, just like Trekkies, Whovians, ect. This just so happens to be something we like.

The Klingon Language Institute also has a scholarship so fandom born scholarships are not unheard off.

If I recall correctly, awhile back PETA stepped into this and offered some prize for whoever could make commercially viable vat grown meat, and a bunch of PETA members flipped out. I'm not sure what exactly their reasonings were, but they didn't like it.

And I guarantee those people will say vat grown causes everything from cancer to autism. If we don't watch out this will become the next frankenfood scare

Monsanto's first genetically engineered soy goes off patent next year. However, since conventionally bred crops are commonly patented, do you oppose conventional breeding as well?

Good news, that never happened. No one has even been sued for cross pollination, although they have been sued for doing things like spraying Round-Up on seeds from cross pollinated plants to get the transgenic traits without paying for them. The difference is like the difference between finding a stray DVD on the ground and burning off a thousand copies.

Criteria met.

just got an "iHome" BT keyboard for my Nexus 10. Makes chopping through those email replies a lot faster on the road. I was going to get Poetic the keyboard-case thingy but decided I didn't want to carry the keyboard with me everywhere. Also this keyboard is wider than the tablet, so it's better to type on.

Something to watch out for for sure, but first off the seed companies like Monsanto already had a large market share prior to GE and control a large market share for non-GE crops, and furthermore there are quite a number of options besides them, like saving your own seed, or buying form other companies.

Nice appeal to ignorance. By ecological impact do you mean this? Maybe we should stop using new technologies in fuel efficient cars because you can't prove that won't have a negative?

Biodiversity is the sum total of the genes in a population. Genetic engineering is inserting a single of a few genes into an organism, thus increasing that genetic complement. Either you know something no one else does, or you understand neither biodiversity nor genetic engineering and are just parroting tired anti-GE talking points. What decreases biodiversity are things like conventional breeding (I notice no one is against that for some reason) and consumer demand. Biodiversity is very important of course and we should all support it (really, you should buy biodiverse crops whenever possible to support that sort of thing) but its got bugger all to do with genetic engineering so stop using a worthy cause as an anti-science talking point.

Science is not a conspiracy.

I was unaware that the past 4000 years had to deal with climate change and a 7 billion person population and the land and water issues we now deal with. Fascinating.

And here's plenty more showing why it is no surprise that the Pusztai and Séralini papers turned out to be rubbish. Jeepers, citing them to claim GE crops are bad is like citing Andrew Wakefield to claim that vaccines are bad.