Crap, Must be off my meds again . Jafo's making sense.  

I think its that American cowboy thing. YeeeeeHAwww

The gun is the ultimate personal empowerment tool and this was daddy taking ALL the power. Free speech is dead and gone in that family an soon across America and you will not even complain.

 Imagine da gull of dat damn union wantin' its memebers to be allowed to sleep an' eat after I let dem live in America and bask in my glory.
BOOOM YAY yur dead, whoz next?

myfist0 ....yes, Fuzzy's English .... I'm Australian....and you're Canadian.  None of us is American, but we appear to be 'it' at finding fault with his use of a firearm.

It's certainly 'telling', ain't it? ....

Guns are great. Idiots make them less so. 

I fully support gun rights.   I don't support publicity stunt-seeking rednecks.  They're a big enough blight on this state as is.

Remember, Fuzzy's from a different planet.

Oh, and sorry to bust up the gun debate, but another thought on kids and jobs....

We're adults for a lot of years and a kid for only a few.... so how about letting kids be kids to enjoy their childhood.  I mean, it's not like they haven't got enough to do with schoolwork and study, chores at home, etc, is it?  They have enough pressure on them to succeed at school/college without the pressure of having to formulate a work history before they're old enough to shave.

If a kid wants to work for a bit of extra cash, fine, don't stop them... but if they just want to be a kid, then let them

Probably about time we got back to the original topic.....

....but tangents are just sooooo 'out there'....

Yet, the corporate world needs little pieces of paper on it to assuage their fears in an interview to sort out the candidates.

I have only met one HR guy that actually knew what he was doing when he hired people... someone who understood that you are the man in the room, not the man on paper.  I've seen too many people with undeserving yet "amazing" reputations while I served with them in the US Navy(which is a sub branch of the corporations Lockheed Martin and Northrupp Grumman).

  The problem with getting degrees is that once you have earned it, you are satisfied.  If you aren't satisfied after a lifetime of schooling, you have mental issues and will never be satisfied with anything(and deserving of our pity).  After school you want to get lazy and earn some bucks for all the bullshit you just had to sit through.  Why do we tire out future generations with this ridiculously long and unnecessary training period?  To make college administrators more money?  That is what they get paid to do after all, increase restrictions to degrees so that they can keep people in school longer to make more money off of them. The longer you have people jump through hoops, the more readily they will do so. 

Our current system is set up to train overconfident slaves, we build up their confidence with paper and provide their heads with knowledge (but not necessarily the appropriate thought tools to process this knowledge) and then we set them free on a predatory world waiting to exploit them.  I call these people "useful tools" and I personally have used them frequently to get what I wanted.  Its fun, they are smart enough to get the job done yet not smart enough to understand they are being controlled through carefully manipulated choice reduction.  This is much like how games are designed, and I have always enjoyed playing games that allow me to do this, such as Sins of a Solar Empire.  Thank you to the developers of that game, you are some smart twisted fucks, just like me.

This kid was 15 or 16, and what the parents were facing was that she was going to be off to college before long.  Then they'll be paying tens of thousands of dollars for someone to go to college with zero work ethic.   Trying to instill basic living habits in your kids with a year left is like planning for retirement at age 64.  Other parents might have different opinions on how to handle it--let alone plenty of other backseat drivers who don't even have teenage kids--but to them, this is their family, and this is the way they did it (the wife told him to put a bullet in the laptop for her, so this isn't just him...this is both parents).  I can certainly see where they're coming from.   This girl needs to feel a big wave of guilt that she even has two parents who love her and would even send her off to college, and she needs to shape up. 

How do you achieve choice reduction in Sins?

Well, thats a question with a lot of answers.  You start by building a fleet.  Your oponnent scouts that fleet and you being the smarty pants that you are will then provide the counter to that fleet.  You can then get status updates on determining how your opponent measures up to your fleet by frequently scouting them.  This provides a baseline competence level that will lead you to determine a great many things, including when and where to attack your opponent.  Choice reduction is the manipulation of your production and strategy to limit your opponents options, it is in essence practically applying your experience of playing the aforementioned strategy so many times that you are able to manipulate it to your advantage. 

It is true, the opponent can always choose to do a capital ship spam, they have the choice.  But it is not an effective choice and therefore the reasonably rational opponent will not choose capital ships to counter your lrm spam.  The sins early game is all about limiting the effective choices an opponent has and the key to victory is to see so far ahead that your choices in the end will result in victory.  This is how this game is much like chess, another game that excels at providing players the ability to reduce the choices of their opponents.

I think I can sum up my response in one word : Experience.