Yes. We are restricting your freedom to restrict freedoms of others.
In particular, we are imposing a very small restriction, which prevents you from imposing arbitrarily large restrictions on others.

Are you going to cry foul that the government is restricting your freedom to force people into slavery?

Swap file in RAM?
I always thought that's a kind of in-joke. Something like that marathon runner carrying bricks, so that he could drop them before the last mile for extra boost.

How did he pronounce the asterisk?

...in 4.8.3. Then it resurfaced in 4.9.0 and .1

You're calling 'more liberal' 'more free'.
Doesn't work like that. How free is OS X (based upon BSD-licensed software)?

BSD is very permissive - to the point of permitting software being based on it ceasing to be free.

GCC is more restrictive, assuring both the license and the source spreads "virally" with the program, so the program never ceases to be free.

Amen to that.

Professionalism is primarily doing your job correctly.

Stuff like good behavior, dress code or good relations are all secondary to that.

If you lack in the latter cases, you may be in for a mild reprimand. If you regularly fuck up the former - oh well, Linux is unable to fire a GCC developer, so he goes for the next best thing in that situation.

Without root privleges, and with properly set up security?
Because of course there are things like 'drivers in the userspace' where the user can create a blocking function where one that's supposed to return immediately should go, and obviously these can hardlock the kernel. But you need root to do that.

There's more than technical merit to every product.
There's the price, the licensing, the support, the market, plus all these factors applied to dependencies (e.g. hardware your software is meant to run on.)

Bad management can snuff the most superior technological merit.

Let's imagine a mod for your_newest_game: giving it anisotropic antialiasing x4.
In your game, you can enter "Options", click "Graphics", "Advanced", and drag the anisotropic filtering slider to "x4". Then click "Apply" and it's saved in a config file in the game directory.
Meanwhile, the mod finds the configh file and changes the line that reads "GFX_Anisotropic_Filtering=0" to 4.

Would you agree that's rather silly, considering this is within skill of about every user?

Well, now remove the option from game menu. Pack the game files with an obscure compression program.
It took some smart modder to figure out the compression program and be able to create an automated tool that applies modifications inside the archive - without need to repack the multi-gigabyte archive. He released the tool, and another one that allows you to browse the game files, as if they were unpacked.

Now someone else finds the config file, and uses the program to change "GFX_Anisotropic_Filtering=0" to 4 within the archive. Anyone with access to the tools can do this. The actual modification of the game is completely trivial. It's just that even most trivial tweak to the game must be packaged in the same, complex tool as a mod.

Do you want pretty graphics or an excuse to keep griping about?

Actually - not so much "modders" as "tweakers". Back in the day, it was editing an .ini file, and what they do is nothing else. They don't add external shaders, they don't add or replace any content, they just enable content that is there, in game, disabled by settings. The only reason this is done through mods and not plain config file edit is that the config file is buried within proprietary archive of the game, and can be modified only through a mod.

"Get" stuttering? The mod actually managed to REMOVE stuttering from the original game.

I truly found Enlightenment - at least the early version - ridiculously cumbersome.
Imagine this: you stop your mouse cursor over any UI element and a tooltip about that element appears. Reasonable? Not quite. the desktop is considered an UI element, and if you leave the cursor anywhere over it, it opens a tooltip. With rich borders and description of every single action you can perform by clicking, right-clicking, shift-clicking etc - the tooltip was the size of your average terminal window, and "always on top" meaning it covered a sizable chunk of the screen. You'd have to carefully "park" the cursor over some inactive area, because just leaving it around opened huge tooltips obscuring the content.

There's a problem with this claim. Similarly to file-sharers, they don't *actually* cost the transport companies any money.

1. It assumes they would pay if not the scheme. It doesn't assume they would take alternate transport medium.

2. It assumes all the income is from the tickets. It disregards both tax-funded subsidies (from 'freeloaders' tax money) and the punitive charges income (no matter if paid by given freeloader alone or from 'insurance')

3. It assumes cost scales linearly with the number of passengers.

Let me expand on that. The cost of operating a line is mostly a fixed value - amortization of the bus, salary of the driver, costs of operating the infrastructure. Fuel is only a minor part, and even then, then, take bus weight of 10 tons, passenger weight of 100kg, assuming (falsely) the fuel use increases linearly with number of passengers, the difference in cost between driving an empty bus and one with 1 freeloader would be 1%.

In other words, each freeloader in the absolutely worst case scenario adds 1% to the cost of operating a line. In more realistic scenario, this number will be over an order of magnitude smaller.

As effect - yes, the freeloaders do increase the costs for others. Assuming 10 of them per ride - by about 1%.

And one thing more. If they can't break even on the punitive charges, that means the controls are too infrequent. If $15/month suffices to cover $180/capture, that means one control per 14 months. Seriously? Make the average 1/month (still very little with people riding daily) and the 'insurance' will need to rise to $180/month. With $150/monthly pass, the problem will vanish.

Snow is iresome, making the ride uncomfortable, slower, and more risky.
Even small amounts of ice make the ride practically impossible.
During a turn on a bike there's a significant lateral stress against the tire. On slipery surface you just fall, period. With snow or mud the tire squeezes a track, keeping some traction. On ice it just slips.