Since I've begun playing D-day again I've pretty much decided that Cherbourg is merely a distraction for the Americans and isn't really worth the time and effort it takes to get reinforcements all the way there.  I've begun to think that those reinforcements would serve far better to bolster the Areas around St. Lo and Caen.

What do you think?

I kind of like the intense amount of strategy involved with Germany.  I find the US kind of boring, though.  Sure they have freedom to do a lot of different things in the game, but it's rare that the US will ever be in a position where they're fighting for their lives, as is the case with most of the other nations.  To me, that seems dull incomparison.  Also, transporting a bunch of stuff over the Atlantic every turn isn't really my thing.

Well, you could ignore all the free goodies in Asia and provoke the wrath of the sleeping giant some more.  I like the approach through Alaska myself, less open ocean to coverand the US might think you're planning the amphibious assualt on the USSR.  Once you're on North America, though, be prepared to deal with massive amounts of resistance springing up out of nowhere.

In simpler terms: it's very difficult and highly situational.

I haven't played D-day as much as I would like (not enough players in my area), but your fighter strats seem pretty solid.  I especially like your ideas on preventing the Germans from advancing on Allied units after they're already on the board (Techniques 2-4).  I usually just kill the incoming reinforcements, especially if I can managed to convince the German player to place reinforcements further from places I'm focusing on, like Caen or St. Lo.  Next time I manage to play I'll have to expand my thinking on the use of air cover.

I always thought of the AA in the game as the big artillery kind and the infantry's ability to shoot down aircraft as something more mobile, like anti-air machine guns.  That's beside the point, though, as the whole thing is pretty abstract.  The ability for a unit of lesser value to destroy one of much greater value is an important part of the game, I think.  To get hits with infantry consistent enough to put fighters in serious danger, however, would require an investment in them of significantly more than 15 IPCs, though.  It all balances out in the end.  Besides, who would bother with many ground troops if fighters could attack them with impunity?

As for the laptop lasting 5-6 years...well, good luck! 

I dunno about that, I've been working on some Pentium MMX laptops lately that run pretty beautifully with a custom installation of Slackware Linux.  If it weren't for their awful resolution and the fact that the 16MB of RAM gets a little choked when dealing with Java intensive web-apps, I would probably use one just for the web.

As for your system, switch, no one deserves a celeron for a desktop.  Since you don't need top of the line I'd recommend a Sempron or a single core Athlon (with the recent price slash they are quite nice and the Athlons are better than any P4).  Dual core if you're willing to spend more than $150 on the processor alone.  As for video cards, ATI Radeon x1600's should be able to do just about anything you demand of them, or maybe Nvidia 7600s as they should be comperable in price and performance.

Other than that, if you're building it yourself get a dependable power supply.  No sense risking your shiny new components with a psu that has the potential of frying them.  I trust Enermax, Antec, and Thermaltake mostly, but there are others that build quility components.

Machines with intelligence might just view their automated anatomy as superior to any organic models.  (Just like the machines in the Matrix, they might view humans and other biological life-forms as "unnecessary" and "obsolete")

Or they may not recognize biological life as life at all.  Like Teletran-1 in the Transformers 

Been wanting to play again for a while.  Anyone in or around Laramie regularly want to have a go?  I have A&A revised, Pacific, Europe and D-day, and could even retrieve my old board for the original (though I prefer revised edition).  I have one or two friends interested, but there's nothing like a 5 player game.  My apartment is available for play.

Thar we go.  Been a few years, glad things are still up and running.

I'm at my state university for debate camp right now and I was just wondering what the debaters here (I know Yanny debates) were thinking about running.  My partner and I were thinking about running Geneticly modified fish.

Yes, Requiem for a Dream was very disturbing, but very thought provoking.  Definately not something I would watch for fun.  That movie wants to make me curl up in a dark corner, think about it for a few hours and then die.

I think you'd be correct.  You could direct all of your kamikazes at one target, virtually assuring it's destruction.

indeed, F_alk.  Gun Kata is amazing.  The first scene is simply incredible.  It made me wonder how big those clips were, luckily they explain that later.

Janus, have you read any Marx?  Are you familiar at all with the socialist movements of the mid-19th century?  Marxism and Communism used to be the same thing, Communism now refers to Marxism and all the other splinter dogmas that have eminated from it.  Now Marxism is simply a narrower descriptor for Communism.  If you don't believe me go look at who wrote the Communist Manifesto.  There are currently so many forms of Communism that there are many democractic forms.  Therefore, the two are not mutually exclusive, like I said.

Alright, you can spend a week or more in jail awaiting a preliminary hearing so that we can catch every one of those evil-doers, Janus, but I'm not going to.  Untill you do, I don't think you really have room to talk (just youing your own logic, see Halo thread).  

As for the 4th amendment, it was designed to prevent individuals from being convicted with evidence that may have been planted or otherwise ill-gotten.  If a police force is too incompetent to obtain a search warrant you're not going to take my rights away so they can convict some dumb shmuck who's growing pot in his closet, it's just not worth it.  

You say a trial by jury is prone to incompetence and misunderstanding; I say that a jury of peers is far better than a panel of judges, first of all, becuase it is a jury of peers, that is people of similar circumstance.  A jury of peers is most likely to understand a defendant, a panel of judges are appointed by governing fat-cats, hence the common person is not likely to become a judge.  That means you have a bunch of people who are going to look down their noses at most defendants becuase they are of a lower status, that's just the way our society works.

Your comments on the death penalty are absolutely ridiculus and border on human rights violations.  As a society we have determined that human life is something pretty special, and you can't just go around killing people convicted of just any crime.  Why not insititute roving bands of peasants weilding pitchforks and torches beating and killing people instead of having a court system?  Secondly, in order to make the death penalty national you'd need to ammend the consititution, good luck with that.

Are you purposefully supporting turning the US into an authoritarian state with the power to do pretty much whatever it pleases without the input of the people, becuase that's basicly what your getting at.  Imagine a group gaining power on the national level and appointing judges that will do whatever said group pleases.  They could then theoreticly make people disappear; charge them with a crime, convicted with a little evidence the defendent has never seen before, just for show, (because after all the judges do what their told) and the person is exicuted and sent to the city incinerator.  You may think it's a preposterous scenario, but it's happened in the Soviet Union, China, Nazi Germany, and even further back.  You can keep your distopian ideals, I'll never give in to authoritarianism like this.