Buddahriffic

Anecdotal, but I haven't known a single person that reversed their journey to obesity by replacing their sugar with artificial sweeteners. At the very least, it was encouraging them to continue (or increase) overeating because this stuff was supposedly not as bad.

But it looks like research is starting to indicate that it's the same end result, just maybe involving some different biochemical pathways to get there.

Too bad his only other passengers weren't that lawyer and head engineer.

Tbh that safety guy that got fired and sued pisses me off, too. His legal fees were being covered but he still settled out of court and allowed the problem to disappear for them.

Though the real villain is the legal system that allows a lawsuit about a safety director disagreeing that something was safe to proceed or one involving the wife who wasn't otherwise involved. Which is also why I wish the lawyer, that said "ok" when the piece of shit asked him to file that lawsuit, was on the sub when it imploded.

I was part of an ISP that was a customer coop. I bought a share when I signed up and then sold it when I moved away.

Another way it could be done is via dilution. Like every so often, new shares are issued to current employees based on whatever criteria they use to determine division of ownership. Existing shares remain outstanding so former employees still get dividends and voting rights, but the guy that worked there for 3 months 8 years ago isn't an equal owner to someone who joined 3 years ago and hasn't left. Though there's then the question of can people sell their shares to someone else, potentially leaving the door open for a hostile takeover when a large enough group of former employees want to cash out? If they can't sell them, what happens to the shares when an owner dies?

The first one is cleaner. Personally, I'd go with the first option but have an exception for people retiring so their shares can act as a non-transferable pension but then the shares cease to exist once they die (or exist for a limited amount of time after death for their next of kin).

Just generally rambling about reasons why companies might not want to adopt user-authored changes in their main game.

There's copyright that applies to code (which would cover copy/paste). There's parents that apply to ideas (which might still cover cases where you didn't use copy/paste). And there's precedence where if you do something one way one time, others might expect you to continue doing it that way even if you intended it to be a one-off (which might overlap with both of those).

Oops thanks for putting that out, corrected.

For the first point, it might be more of a patent thing than copyright, because you can patent improvements you come up with for someone else's invention.

Though another angle might be that game studios want to avoid encouraging a freelance game improvement market where people look to financially gain from swooping in and making improvements to their games. It might result in improvements they already planned to make but hadn't gotten to being blocked by patents and license demands. I don't agree that this is something that should be avoided, though I don't think current IP laws would make this a desirable system for anyone other than lawyers.

That's not to say that it's legally impossible to figure out how to navigate pulling in community changes to the main game, there's just complications involved that so far Bethesda has preferred to avoid. They might even just want to avoid a case going to court to set some kind of precedent because it might involve paying royalties to modders. IMO they would deserve to be paid if their work gets pulled into the game directly or indirectly, and even just as modders adding value to the base game I think maybe they deserve some compensation for their efforts.

If an employee writes code for a company, the employer* owns the copyright.

If an individual writes code on their own time, they own the copyright.

If someone publishes a free mod containing code, that mod could contain a combination of that person's code, code from other contributors, and even other copyrighted code that none of them had the right to in the first place but it either hasn't been noticed or isn't being pursued because there's not likely any money in it anyways.

It's that murky area that I'm guessing they'd want to avoid. They might be more likely to hire the modder to do that again from scratch for them than to use their work directly. Blizzard did that back in the day with two (that I know of) of the people writing modding tools for StarCraft. Their tools remained on the modding site and were never officially adopted by Blizzard but the authors worked on the WC3 map editor to add some of that functionality right into the official map editor that was going to be released with the game.

Edit: corrected a mistake where I said the opposite of what I intended to (that the employee owned the copyright rather than the employer)

Rewording things is also one of the few things that LLMs seem to be able to reliably do, too.

Ah damn, I guess the internet monks didn't make new copies of your articles before they feel apart and decayed to dust. Too many monks these days probably follow the flashier acrobatic martial arts career path.

Though they are doing a good job of preserving the ancient internet memes.