Then how come abortion is still such a contentious wedge issue. This will be no different and will bring out the crazy bible pounders in droves.

The founders were fallible but they were wise in that they realized that and provided a means to modify and correct the constitution. They did however make it difficult to do so that it couldn't be modified on a whim. This issue however didn't need a constitutional amendment to change or another shitty court decision (morally correct but how it was done bad in my opinion), but instead needed a simple repeal of the federal DOMA and then all states that don't allows gay marriage would be forded to recognize it from other states because of the full faith and credit clause. The one exception to this I could thing of is if a state didn't recognize any form of marriage, in which case it gay marriage wouldn't matter to begin with in that state.

Which they did but this was not the way to to change the government that they had enshrined in the highest law of the land. The constitution states what rights are reserved tot he federal government of which marriage is not one of them so it was left up to the states. This would simply mean that each state could have its own laws regarding marriage and could define it any way it wanted. What muddies this issue is the full faith and credit clause which means states would have to honor marriages (and any number of other things) from other states, unless regulated by congress. So back with President Clinton the DOMA was passed by congress regulating interstate recognition of marriage, which is one of the powers granted to congress to do. I dislike this ruling, even though I feel it was the morally correct one, because it does smell of activism by the judiciary. The proper way to handle this would have been to:
repeal the federal DOMA
modify the constitution to add sexual preference as something that cannon be discriminated on
or do what my state did and have the state legislature vote to approve homosexual marriage
All of these would have been constitutional and were how the framers envisioned changing our government. The way this came down I expect it to become a huge wedge issue (more so than before) like abortion and to be something that gets rehashed many times over also like abortion.

It isn't most folks who talk about it like that it is only the government. The government is also the ones who exclude food, shelter, and gasoline from their inflation calculations.

Unfortunately that would require personal responsibility from at least one party in the transaction. In today's America this is something that is unacceptable. Why should lenders care if people can actually afford the payments? Why should individuals stop to think if they can really afford to make those payments? No one did their due dilligance it seems and yet the government propped up only half of the incompetent.

Before the big housing bust my wife and I bought our house to live in, and when we were getting a mortgage we qualified for 3/4 of a million dollars loan. The monthly payment would have been just a few dollars less than our pretax income. I looked at the loan officer and said "Are you fucking retarded? It will be physically impossible for us to even make a single payment." I then made him work backwards from our post tax income with a given monthly payment we could afford even if one of us lost our job to get a real amount. At that point I realized that the whole thing was a giant house of cards just waiting to collapse, but hey we needed a house and plan on living there for a very long time.

Why not if the option is available to you. I have considered similar options when planning for the future.

You could have just stopped there.

It would be worth a try.

Well that is a steaming pile of BS. Having been to large ore mines, iron not uranium but probably not much different equipment wise, the haul truck, shovels, and conveyor belts could all easily run off of electricity. The big shovels are all electrical internally but usually have a large stationary 2 stroke diesel engine nearby providing the power so this is just a change of power source. Most of the large haul trucks while diesel are all electric drive with the engine being a large generator and there have been tests with providing them with electricity from overhead lines as well. The conveyors that I have seen all are already electrically driven so no change is needed there.

Once the ore is delivered to the processing plant it is crushed by some huge rock crushers (electrically driven), fed into some ball mills (electrically driven) and this seems to be also required for uranium processing as well. After this the processing of iron ore and uranium ore diverge but from my understanding uranium ore becomes more dependent on electricity any way with the running of centrifuges and chemicals.

To sum up I don't think all of those huge electric motors that make this whole process possible really care where their electrons come from.

So you're saying he is a politician and a democrat .

And today I was reminded that GeoCities style pages still exist with blinking text.

But grandfathering in old vehicles wasn't being discussed, the exact opposite was. Depending on the vehicle there are few if any regulations that are applicable to them depending on their age since they get grandfathered in. I have a vehicle where the only applicable emissions requirements deal with crank case emissions of hydrocarbons, and there are vehicles olde enough that they don't have to comply with seat belt requirements. In this case it seems it would clearly be a taking and would be an absolute mess. Also I don't believe that modern vehicles can be sold that aren't OBDII, but I could be wrong.

I believe that would fall under the takings clause thus the government would have to provide compensation to all individuals who could no longer own their vehicles. The real bitch would be all of those old collector vehicles that instead of being worth a few thousand dollars are worth 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars. Having just been to one of the largest car shows in the US this past weekend you would be talking a non trivial amount of money even for the US government. Granted the value of these cars varies wildly but a lot of people with those cars have more money in them than they are worth so in such a state how would something be valued under the taking clause, the sum of the parts, appraised value, what ever the US Gov tells you? Add in that almost every one of those vehicle owners would likely file a suite against the government contesting the valuation and things would grind to a halt very quickly.

Considering the sensors, even an ideal lens would still be diffraction limited at this resolution. Granted with some post processing and anti aliasing you can probably still get slightly better resolution than pure diffraction limited but anything beyond about 10-12MP range on those little sensors is just spiking the numbers, and the difference between 8MP and 10MP isn't enough to really matter. This also assumes that the lenses are ideal f1 lenses instead of the typical cheap f2 to f3 lenses that are used in phones and cheap compact cameras.

Simple solution if you don't want one next door is for you to move. How would you feel about a neighbor owning a 10KW CO2 laser?