I’m not sure how the term “patent” is to be interpreted here. It could be used like back in the days when Apple sued Samsung because their phone had rounded edges too…
Like a “design patent” (sorry, I’m not a native English speaker, so I’m unsure if this is the correct translation).
A lot of the pals in the game look quite close to Pokémon. Not identical, of course, but so similar that one just has to wonder if the design has been “inspired” by Pokémon…
Amnesia.
Short answer: Whales.
Long answer: Watch the South Park episode on the topic. They explain it in detail. It’s titled “Freemium Isn’t Free”.
I don’t know if this applies to CLAW, but many games back then had their audio stored as CD Audio Tracks. If that is the case, you might want to actually emulate a CDROM drive instead of just extracting the files. There is a CDROM emulator for Linux, called CDEmu, which can read CUE/BIN CD Images.
Oh, and that game seems to have an ancient 16-bit installer, which might not work on modern systems. However, according to WineHQ Appdb one can just copy the files from the CD and it works.
In addition to LibreOffice I often use standalone tools.
If I want a high quality document, I use LaTeX. Same for presentation slides. However, writing stuff in LaTeX is only worth the effort if the quality is needed. For non-important stuff I just use LibreOffice.
For calculations it depends on what I want to have in the end. If I just want to play with the data a bit, then LibreOffice Calc it is. However, if it is for something serious, I tend to write script files, or even full programs, that do the processing. That way computation and data is in separate files, and the used formulas are clearly visible and easy to debug.
I have been a user since the 90s. Back then it was still called StarOffice.
Its feature set differs from that of MS Office, and its performance could be (a lot!) better, but I strongly prefer the LibreOffice user interface, and the features that matter to me (like CSV import) are way better in LibreOffice. However, LibreOffice does not have all the features of MS Office, and some are notably worse (for instance auto-fill in spreadsheets, where Excel is way better at guessing the next value).
Sadly it’s not only a matter of preference, because file exchange between different office suites is not flawless. MS Office and LibreOffice don’t agree 100% on how to load each other’s files…
It depends on what kind of patent. I just googled the term I had used before, and it is indeed what I expected it to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent
And yes, that name is stupid. That’s why I am happy that my native language, German, has a better distinction between “Patent” (what you described) and “Geschmacksmuster” (design patent).
About patents being public: They are. That’s because the idea behind patents is that after they expire, anyone can use them to build the technology they describe. The temporary exclusive usage rights that they offer are meant as an incentive for inventors to publish their findings. The only problem is that the legal situation did not keep up with the creativity of patent lawyers… (I will stop now, otherwise this will turn into an endless rant about how broken the patent system is.)