> You can get rid of all human enemies by knocking them unconscious (I play expert mostly so killing is forbidden anyway). But right, if you go rambo even on lower difficulty levels, you'll most likely get overwhelmed
I can't recall if they're in Thief 1, but in Thief 2 at least there are guards with helmets which are immune to the blackjack, but afaik none of them are immune to gas arrows/mines.
On a related note, I believe the the engine they developed for the first two Thief games and System Shock 2, the Dark Engine, was also the first to use an entity-component system.
From what I've heard The Black Parade mission style hews close to the style of Thief: The Dark Project. If your tastes are closer to Thief II: The Metal Age (or you'd just like more taffing about), I enjoyed T2X: Shadows of the Metal Age[1] quite a bit. The voice acting was pretty rough in places, but I found that kinda charming. I've also heard good things about Death's Cold Embrace[2].
4. These days even Thief III is enjoyable, thanks to the https://www.moddb.com/mods/thief-3-sneaky-upgrade megapatch doing crazy things like stapling back together maps that had to be cut-with-loading-screen due to Xbox limitations!
I'm in Massachusetts and have been doing the same thing with our lawn in the five years since becoming a homeowner. We rake leaves away from the house a few times in the fall to make our house less attractive to mice and then run the mower around to mulch those piles and whatever else is in the yard. I let the leaves sit where the mower drops them, although I occasionally put the hopper on the mower and collect a few to throw into garden beds to help our plants overwinter. A lot of the trees around our property are oaks, which have leaves which take a while to break down, but when they're cut into tiny bits they seem to go away quickly enough. Overall it's worked quite well. It's low effort and is far less disruptive than blowing leaves around, especially with an electric mower.
Treating the symptoms can be helpful in the long term if symptoms are a contributing cause to the disease. I used to ride my bike 150+ miles a week, but after not being able to do so for a bit due to other reasons I gained some weight. At the level of riding I was doing, an extra 20-30 lb of weight makes riding far less pleasurable, particularly when it comes to going uphill or on dirt paths.
Just finding 10-12 hours in which to exercise every week is challenging on its own. It's much more difficult when the exercise itself becomes harder and less rewarding.
>To be clear, the prisoners aren’t literally forced to do this work. It’s a job they can choose to apply for and do while in prison.
Sorry, do you have a source for that? The requirement to work is a major point of contention, and a very quick check with this[1] directly contradicts your claim in the federal system: "Sentenced inmates are required to work if they are medically able. Institution work assignments include employment in areas like food service or the warehouse, or work as an inmate orderly, plumber, painter, or groundskeeper. Inmates earn 12¢ to 40¢ per hour for these work assignments."
Those programs you’re referring to in your quote are work within the prison itself:
> Institution work assignments include employment in areas like food service or the warehouse, or work as an inmate orderly, plumber, painter, or groundskeeper.
Meaning some prisoners work in the kitchen preparing food for other inmates, others are on clean up duty, and so on. You could argue that nobody in prison should have to participate in anything inside their community and that’s a valid debate to be had.
In my state, the jobs that provide things outside of prison are applied for.
Apologies for the misinterpretation. I thought you were speaking of all prison jobs, though I don't think it makes much of a difference. From an ACLU report[1] on prison labor in the US which covers both labor for prison upkeep and labor for producing goods to be sold or providing services for companies or governments:
> They work as cooks, dishwashers, janitors, groundskeepers, barbers, painters, or plumbers; in laundries, kitchens, factories, and hospitals. They provide vital public services such as repairing roads, fighting wildfires, or clearing debris after hurricanes. They washed hospital laundry and worked in mortuary services at the height of the pandemic. They manufacture products like office furniture, mattresses, license plates, dentures, glasses, traffic signs, athletic equipment, and uniforms. They cultivate and harvest crops, work as welders and carpenters, and work in meat and poultry processing plants.
> From the moment they enter the prison gates, they lose the right to refuse to work. [...] More than 76 percent of incarcerated workers report that they are required to work or face additional punishment such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation, or the inability to pay for basic life necessities like bath soap. They have no right to choose what type of work they do and are subject to arbitrary, discriminatory, and punitive decisions by the prison administrators who select their work assignments.
For anyone unaware, that is nearly[1] the entirety of the text of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution from 1865. This exception is rather (in)famous. I remember being quizzed on it in an elementary or middle school history or social studies class.
[1] the only excluded bit is the followup "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." Without this, the power to enforce the 13th Amendment would be left up to the states due to the 10th Amendment ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."), which would have slightly useless given the whole war that had just been fought over some states wanting to keep slavery.
> If your job is cut by AI, you've been producing mediocrity anyway.
In my opinion it’s unfortunate and inaccurate to frame this as most likely being a problem with the quality of the work of a person who was let go or who can’t find a job. It’s very possible that management thinks AI is just good enough to justify not hiring someone for the role.
Most people are doing bullshit jobs. Are we surprised they are automated away? Taste and general intelligence won't be imho. That's all I'm saying. Take agency over the career you're building. Too many people settle for whatever.
All I was saying is that your framing was callous and also likely terribly inaccurate. It assumes that management always assesses layoffs and technology adoption rationally and objectively based on merits without influence by hype, advertising, or other external forces. People are frequently laid off randomly at large companies. Layoffs at big companies often don't involve someone saying "get rid of these specific 20 copy writers because their copy is worse than what an AI produces". They will ignore performance of individuals completely and instead reduce headcount randomly across a cost center. That doesn't mean that every person who was let go was "producing mediocrity".
> And you don't need the internet to sell applications.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? I don't know how you'd sell them otherwise. How do you do you process a payment without a network connection? The only thing I can think of is offering a catalog in the OS which users could browse and physically order stuff from, but I wouldn't call that a store.
Even back then, game console manufacturers had licensing agreements with developers, so those developers had to pay royalties, even though distribution was handled by physical stores.
In some cases, some console manufacturers even handled the manufacturing of cartridges/CDs and the distribution side too.
Sorry, I'm a little confused about the relevance here. Could you elaborate a bit on how it ties into what I was saying? How did the users view products, how did they purchase them, and how did they receive them?
You asked how a company could sell (presumably third-party) apps without internet. I gave an example of it happening. Money-wise the model was very similar to Apple's AppStore.
> How did the users view products, how did they purchase them, and how did they receive them?
For the specific case of games, it was mainly via physical stores but I'm sure there were other methods such as catalogs, especially internationally.
EDIT: Remember GP is talking about the 90s and without internet, so it doesn't mean an app store where the app is instantly in your possession after clicking a button.
> Remember GP is talking about the 90s and without internet, so it doesn't mean an app store where the app is instantly in your possession after clicking a button.
Right, but how is that an app store and not just a catalog?
…am I fully misunderstanding and they just meant a physical store?
>Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? I don't know how you'd sell them otherwise. How do you do you process a payment without a network connection? The only thing I can think of is offering a catalog in the OS which users could browse and physically order stuff from, but I wouldn't call that a store.
Not GP but, processing payments absolutely does not require a network connection. Doing so is absolutely not nearly as convenient, but in my adult lifetime it was pretty normal for retailers to pick up a phone, give a customer service rep and/or automated call handler CC info and dollar amounts and get appropriate confirmations.
As for a business without an OS interface not being a "store," that's ridiculous on its face. If that were true, we'd have to call 7/11 or any similar place (like those at most gas stations) convenience "locations with items for sale but not a store, because stores are only places with catalogs in my OS," and "places which sell stuff but aren't stores because rimunroe says they can't be a 'store' without a catalog in their OS."
> Not GP but, processing payments absolutely does not require a network connection. Doing so is absolutely not nearly as convenient, but in my adult lifetime it was pretty normal for retailers to pick up a phone, give a customer service rep and/or automated call handler CC info and dollar amounts and get appropriate confirmations.
I forgot about phone payments, but that doesn't change my argument. If it's a built in listing of products, it presumably needs to be updated occasionally too, which I'm not sure how you'd do without mailing disks if you didn't have a network connection. I also don't know how you'd make room for the bundled software. My memory of my Windows 3.1 machine involves a lot of wishing I had more space on my HDD.
> As for a business without an OS interface not being a "store," that's ridiculous on its face.
That indeed would be absurd. Fortunately, I never argued this. I argued that without taking payments or distributing the software through the "store", I don't think it would qualify as a store but would qualify as a catalog. I think of a store as somewhere you go to exchange money for goods/services. If it's doing neither of those things is it still a store?
> Touch grass, friend.
I don't know why you felt this hostility was warranted. Did I slight you in some way?
There wasn't an argument. The OP was just asking a (presumably honest) and simple question: How do you do you process a payment without a network connection?
I can understand how someone under, say, 30, might not know how commerce happened before the Internet. My 13 year old can't believe there was even once a world without the Internet.
> I can understand how someone under, say, 30, might not know how commerce happened before the Internet.
I remember those days, but I think most people would call something where you viewed a list of products and then called or mailed to order and received the product elsewhere a catalog, not a store. As for over-the-phone payments, I forgot about that method for a moment but don't think it meaningfully affects my argument. It's just as out-of-band as the mail order example I included.
I think it has the best explosions in any game I've played too. They're so dang punchy. Combined with their atmospheric effects (fog and dust and whatnot) frantic firefights with bots look fantastic.
I can't recall if they're in Thief 1, but in Thief 2 at least there are guards with helmets which are immune to the blackjack, but afaik none of them are immune to gas arrows/mines.
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