Of course, any project that could use Qt could use GTK+ instead, which is *also* cross-platform, supports "OpenGL addons etc", but doesn't impose a tax to TrollTech.
[shrug] Okay, I'll amend my statement to "I needed to do class diagrams, haven't needed to do anything else with UML, and for that, I found Dia to be a superior tool."
I don't think I've seen NANOG buzzing this much about one topic since the infamous Verisign.com wildcard.
This kind of turned into a worst-case PR situation for Cisco -- they screwed up on their product, they tried to cover it up, and then they hassled the guy that released the information.
That said, I think Apple is giving in to the inevitable here.
That's because Apple was *wrong* before. Don't get me wrong, I think that they did a heck of a lot of things right way before anyone else was trying to do them. I also think that when they *started* their interface, one button was a great idea -- people were intimidated by computers, didn't know what mice *were*, much less how buttons on them worked. The problem is that Apple repeatedly refused, over the years, to admit that trying to force a *one button* mouse on a populace that had become used to two button mice was a stupid idea.
Apple seems to be much more appealing these days in that they're willing to admit that some of their decisions in the past were bad (PowerPC started out as maybe being a good idea, but turned out to be a bad idea). If what they're trying to do is become another Dell but try to put out superior products with good industrial design (and the PC world has been essentially dead WRT industrial design, especially for such a fast-paced industry), then I might be interested in Apple again.
LaTeX's output is phenomenal (you can always tell a Word document from LaTeX output pretty easily), but the syntax really sucks.
One thing that might help would be better perl-style error reporting, but it's just very nasty to do some things...start creating a complex document and you figure out that various packages do not interact all that well (well, *this* table package can do foo, and *this* table package can do bar, but....). There have been a bunch of times that I know *what* I want to do, but not *how* to do it.
The complaint about Win* devices is that they removed the standard interface to their hardware-based predecessors without providing a standard interface replacement.
(Also, a modem is generally operating much of the time, a printer only some of the time, and a WinModem required a driver because it had to operate in real time -- I'm talking about using a microcontroller for the real time work, so no drivers, just userspace programs.)
You know, *every time* Markoff's name has drifted across my senses, it's in connection with him blowing something out of proportion and generally smearing someone in the process. Why the heck is he still on the NYT staff? Are there literally no tech writers that are more than half-assed, or does the NYT just like alarmism?
Yeah... how about a 'something like that' that doesn't violate the laws of physics.
Hmm...what if, say, UV caused a reaction (which could only continue for so long) that caused the thing to give off visible light?
I mean, yes, it's stretching and I'm sure it's not actually what they did, but I'm not sure that it's impossible to do something like that. I guess it wouldn't really be "reflection" then...
That is a damn useful idea for a script. I've seen a lot of silly-and-not-that-useful ideas, but a up-to-the-minute currency conversion on pages (I never really know how much a pound or a euro is in dollars) would be awfully handy.
I am wondering how this helps over freshmeat's rating system?
Why, in a modern day and age, do we have to still have people like this, like freshmeat, and so forth, *still* rating software based on a simple, global, scalar metric?
One of the *best* things that computers can do versus noninteractive tables of ratings is to produce a customized rating!
So, if we have a big "web" of entries, and I rate foo better than baz, and baz better than bar, then someone else can come along and if *they* tend to rate things similar to the way I rate them, my ratings will be one of the more influential indicators in what the ratings generated for them are.
This takes into account the fact that there isn't, say, one *best* FTP client. Okay, some are more completed than others, but no matter how you look at it, there are going to be GNOME people that like gftp, console people that like lftp, and people that like whatever KDE people use for FTP. One isn't *better* than the other, unilaterally -- it's the fact that there are different types of people, that the *person* should also be able to affect the output.
There are a few cases where people are already doing this. Everyone and their brother seems to have caught onto this for music, because everyone recognizes that music tastes are subjective. But because of the "magazine ratings" of yesteryear, the sorts of accolades that people can slap on their packaging and website (4.5 from MacUser!), people are still stuck in this "one rating for everyone" mindset, which is just silly.
What I'd like to see is someone taking a "rate.com" or something like that domain, and letting people freely create entries for items, and let people freely create accounts, and let people provide partial orderings "I like this better than this". Start out with something silly and immediately appealing, like porn preferences ("Have our engine locate the porn that you're most likely to prefer") and music preferences. Then start adding things like software. And, in the process, you gain a *hell* of a sweet preferences database for banner ads at the top. Heck, you could pull a Google -- do such a good job of choosing ads that they're actually useful instead of being an irritant.
PDF/JPEG/PNG and so forth are already present in the HTTP headers. HTML/4.0 and CSS/2 are where the problems come in -- no brower is going to be perfectly compliant with the standard, so these headers will be wrong.
What *might* be reasonable is to have another stage of translation (I'm sure someone's done this, since it's pretty obvious). Write your CSS/2 and non-CSS/2 pages. Still have the browser send the user-agent. Have a database, periodically updated automatically, of the supported features of each user-agent. Then generate your own HTML/4.0 and so forth text.
Doesn't apply. That's trying to smuggle drugs into US borders and being stopped before entering US waters. I'm talking about not letting them enter the United States at all.
But seeing Halle Berry in leather lingerie running around in the latest pop movie *is* what sex is all about?
but I don't partake in interracial gangbangs, facials, or S&M
Gangbangs may not be common, but many people *do* engage in oral sex or (especially light) BDSM. It's fine if *you* don't do so, but this is hardly criteria for something being censorable, in my mind.
Personally, I think they should require the.xxx domain for any site above basic nudity, just to make things simple, but what do I know, I'm not a senator.
Bad technical solution. Imposes global ethical standard on Web (*this* is for adults, *this* isn't), whereas bare breasts are considered okay by the Brits, girls in bikinis considered okay in the US, and girls outside of a burkha considered obscene in Saudi Arabia.
The only reason there is any push for a.xxx TLD is because it would be lucrative for the name registrars.
Nothing wrong with content rating, on the other hand, to indicate in a standard format that something contains bare breasts (and then let the client ISP/filtering software/whatever decide whether the content is acceptable). There are systems in place to do that today (and that provide better-than-domain-level-granuarity). They just don't get much press because the registrars *really* want the money from another TLD.
And for you to say it is okay for a child to watch it, that makes you a pedophile....boy, confusion about the phrase "pedophile" is almost as bad as "steal/infringe on copyright".
A pedophile is someone who is sexually attracted to children. That's it -- not someone who has abused children, who has committed sexual crimes, who has liberal sexual values, or anything else. There is certainly no need to be sexually attracted to children to feel that children should be able to watch porn.
You belong in jail, or at the very least, to be registered with a sex offender database. You want children to watch porn, how sick are you??
*I* happen to agree with the guy (and not even just with porn, but with censorship in general). I think that life would be a lot better if, instead of trying to censor content, parents just explained content and their feelings on it and *why* those feelings exist. Your kid is almost going to see porn, no matter how hard you try to avoid it. I think that inculcating an approach of "I have to hide this from my parents" is much more damaging than anything that the porn exposure is going to do. I always felt that I could always talk about *anything* with my parents, and I placed a great deal of value on the point.
That is B.S.. If you know anything, most catholics register as democrats. Maybe the baptists are more republican. But as a group, they don't vote for just one side or the other. Or are you talking about lutherans?
The real issue the guy has is with conservative social values, which *do* follow a "hiding this is the best idea" approach. He's just lumping together Republicans (which *do* tend to be more conservative) and Christians (there are decidedly liberal Christian faiths, but the ones that get the most political exposure, like Southern Baptists, have conservative social values). That isn't all that correct, no, but it's pretty hard to otherwise nail down exactly the amorphous blob of people who want to censor content that they consider immoral. FWIW, I suspect that Muslims would be even more opposed to pornography, in general, than would Christians.
Maybe sex is something that should be nervous and new and wonderful when you meet the one person who you want to be with forever.
Maybe. It's one possible approach. I don't see any particular argument for one way being definitely superior to the other -- both of you two are running on emotional arguments. He's gotten angry with and had bad experiences with conservatives, so he's raging on repressive types, and you've clearly been taught that a no-sex/sex with one person who you marry and never leave approach is the acceptable route, so you're raging on what you see as bad. Neither one of you have stated much by way of benefits.
I tend to think that having some sexual experience, assuming associated potholes (STDs, pregnancies, etc) are avoided (which is not necessarily a given assumption), is not necessarily a bad idea just on the same grounds that knowledge is generally a good thing to have. [shrug]
Maybe sex is a choice a 14 year old can not make, because they don't have the maturity to understand what it means. Maybe if sex is something sacred, then the divorce rate and infidelity would not be so high.
He was talking about porn, not having sex. There's quite a difference.
You are what is wrong with this world.
You *feel* he is because you've had so much negative stimuli associated with the ideas he's propagating. However, simply asserting this isn't going to do anything. If you are clearly correct, you should be able to make a supported argument in favor of what you're saying. I don't think that you can do this, given how much back-and-forth there is over the issue -- otherwise, this would have been settled a long time ago.
And the next thing we will see is beastiality becomming normal.
[shrug] Maybe. It is legal and practiced in some European countries, like Swe
She is being subjected to things the guy wouldn't be subjected to if he had the choice;
Men get used to seeing the women do everything the man wants, on command, and this can carry over into their own sexual encounters, and;
Porn is traditionally the blond, busty female; how do redheads feel when they know their boyfriend is watching a stacked blond?
Depends upon the type of porn.
Most media that I can think of has very different roles for men and women; just about any action movie fits this point, but we provide action movies for children, so there is clearly some dividing line other than this. It can't be some helpless woman being grateful for Arnie clubbing the heck out of a bunch of guys.
One additional point WRT the stacked blond; would it bother you if your girlfriend was watching porn containing men that look different from you? I do agree that people should be willing to reverse the situation, and that it's hypocritical if they can't cope with the reverse.
I've been a pornography addict for almost ten years.
Okay, *that* can be an issue -- but addiction to *anything* is of concern. I was just reading an article about a woman who was addicted to buying baby clothes on some baby website. She spent huge amounts of money on it, and just couldn't stop. My thoughts would be that addiction is what we want to avoid, rather than pornography.
Why on earth can't someone set up a large, offshore liner in international waters, right outside of US waters, and boat people out to it? Then they could provide drugs, prostitution, whatever, onboard without issues of legality.
As long as said activities don't happen within US jurisdiction, I don't see what the problem would be.
However I don't see how they can introduce a tax on fairly low key ranches in the middle of nowhere, that people goto willingly, in the name protect "the children" or for any moral reason.
Because there are people who do things like read Jack Chick or pay attention to other conservative whackjobs, and believe what they say. It's not a pragmatic argument, it's an ideological one.
Well, the origins of "freedom of speech" in the US were "freedom of political speech". It just got expanded a bit. However, since political speech is exactly what the PRC is interested in squelching, it's still relevant.
There's a couple assumptions you'll have to go along with me on, though.
(Ass.1) That an organized society is better (more productive, more able to deal with various problems, and so forth) than a collection of unorganized individuals.
(Ass.2) That the cost of collapse of a society is extremely high, and that it is strongly preferable to avoid this.
So now, we can extrapolate a bit:
Given Ass.1, we want a society. Given Ass.2, we want it to be stable. So one of the most important characteristics of a society is that it be stable.
Societies can self-correct out of downward spirals. For example, suppose a military coup results in an unpopular dictator -- he can be ousted as he makes people more and more desperate and angry.
Freedom of speech is a simple and valuable characteristic in a society that allows popular removal of its leaders (such as by vote each four years, as in the US), because it allows awareness of problems someone has identified in a leader to spread. If someone can figure out that George Bush is starting an insane economic plan that will destroy the country in less than ten years, they can spread word about it. The alternative would be to keep the masses, which control the government, unaware of problems coming up, and could allow a leader to cause a country to make actions that would generally disadvantageous, but advantageous to the leaders.
So free speech helps allow society to self-correct and avoid crashing.
This is also why we have the freedom to keep and bear arms in the United States, incidently. It's another mechanism to retain societal stability, though oriented towards more drastic problems. The idea is that no unpopular ruler can seize power because there are many people with guns that would shoot the people supporting him. Since someone knows that their unpopular coup will be put down, they will not engage in it in the first place.
This pretty much covers why freedom of political speech is important.
Pure freedom of speech also has some other benefits -- in general, assuming rational agents (which we aren't, but we try to approximate them), more knowledge is better, and speech allows the spread of knowledge.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, any project that could use Qt could use GTK+ instead, which is *also* cross-platform, supports "OpenGL addons etc", but doesn't impose a tax to TrollTech.
[shrug] Okay, I'll amend my statement to "I needed to do class diagrams, haven't needed to do anything else with UML, and for that, I found Dia to be a superior tool."
I don't think I've seen NANOG buzzing this much about one topic since the infamous Verisign .com wildcard.
This kind of turned into a worst-case PR situation for Cisco -- they screwed up on their product, they tried to cover it up, and then they hassled the guy that released the information.
That said, I think Apple is giving in to the inevitable here.
That's because Apple was *wrong* before. Don't get me wrong, I think that they did a heck of a lot of things right way before anyone else was trying to do them. I also think that when they *started* their interface, one button was a great idea -- people were intimidated by computers, didn't know what mice *were*, much less how buttons on them worked. The problem is that Apple repeatedly refused, over the years, to admit that trying to force a *one button* mouse on a populace that had become used to two button mice was a stupid idea.
Apple seems to be much more appealing these days in that they're willing to admit that some of their decisions in the past were bad (PowerPC started out as maybe being a good idea, but turned out to be a bad idea). If what they're trying to do is become another Dell but try to put out superior products with good industrial design (and the PC world has been essentially dead WRT industrial design, especially for such a fast-paced industry), then I might be interested in Apple again.
Class diagrams.
LaTeX's output is phenomenal (you can always tell a Word document from LaTeX output pretty easily), but the syntax really sucks.
One thing that might help would be better perl-style error reporting, but it's just very nasty to do some things...start creating a complex document and you figure out that various packages do not interact all that well (well, *this* table package can do foo, and *this* table package can do bar, but....). There have been a bunch of times that I know *what* I want to do, but not *how* to do it.
Really? Doing UML with Visio was the major factor in making me like Dia. It takes for bloody ever to create UML in Visio.
But with an open specification.
The complaint about Win* devices is that they removed the standard interface to their hardware-based predecessors without providing a standard interface replacement.
(Also, a modem is generally operating much of the time, a printer only some of the time, and a WinModem required a driver because it had to operate in real time -- I'm talking about using a microcontroller for the real time work, so no drivers, just userspace programs.)
Fusion research requires continued experiments with large quantities of matter imploding at high velocity.
You've confused "fusion research" with "bored grad students".
You do have to admit that China's firewall does cast a bit of a pall over the Internet.
Lots of fundamentalist Christians don't like Islam, but we still wish they'd just deal.
You know, *every time* Markoff's name has drifted across my senses, it's in connection with him blowing something out of proportion and generally smearing someone in the process. Why the heck is he still on the NYT staff? Are there literally no tech writers that are more than half-assed, or does the NYT just like alarmism?
Useless lump of plastic sold for $200K. What a twit. Someone, somewhere, someone has their priorities all wrong.
Maybe that person has useless heaps of money in a bank account somewhere and said plastic produced more happiness than the $200K could otherwise.
Yeah... how about a 'something like that' that doesn't violate the laws of physics.
Hmm...what if, say, UV caused a reaction (which could only continue for so long) that caused the thing to give off visible light?
I mean, yes, it's stretching and I'm sure it's not actually what they did, but I'm not sure that it's impossible to do something like that. I guess it wouldn't really be "reflection" then...
That is a damn useful idea for a script. I've seen a lot of silly-and-not-that-useful ideas, but a up-to-the-minute currency conversion on pages (I never really know how much a pound or a euro is in dollars) would be awfully handy.
Maybe just a rollover popup...
I am wondering how this helps over freshmeat's rating system?
Why, in a modern day and age, do we have to still have people like this, like freshmeat, and so forth, *still* rating software based on a simple, global, scalar metric?
One of the *best* things that computers can do versus noninteractive tables of ratings is to produce a customized rating!
So, if we have a big "web" of entries, and I rate foo better than baz, and baz better than bar, then someone else can come along and if *they* tend to rate things similar to the way I rate them, my ratings will be one of the more influential indicators in what the ratings generated for them are.
This takes into account the fact that there isn't, say, one *best* FTP client. Okay, some are more completed than others, but no matter how you look at it, there are going to be GNOME people that like gftp, console people that like lftp, and people that like whatever KDE people use for FTP. One isn't *better* than the other, unilaterally -- it's the fact that there are different types of people, that the *person* should also be able to affect the output.
There are a few cases where people are already doing this. Everyone and their brother seems to have caught onto this for music, because everyone recognizes that music tastes are subjective. But because of the "magazine ratings" of yesteryear, the sorts of accolades that people can slap on their packaging and website (4.5 from MacUser!), people are still stuck in this "one rating for everyone" mindset, which is just silly.
What I'd like to see is someone taking a "rate.com" or something like that domain, and letting people freely create entries for items, and let people freely create accounts, and let people provide partial orderings "I like this better than this". Start out with something silly and immediately appealing, like porn preferences ("Have our engine locate the porn that you're most likely to prefer") and music preferences. Then start adding things like software. And, in the process, you gain a *hell* of a sweet preferences database for banner ads at the top. Heck, you could pull a Google -- do such a good job of choosing ads that they're actually useful instead of being an irritant.
Yes, well, see, here's the problem.
PDF/JPEG/PNG and so forth are already present in the HTTP headers. HTML/4.0 and CSS/2 are where the problems come in -- no brower is going to be perfectly compliant with the standard, so these headers will be wrong.
What *might* be reasonable is to have another stage of translation (I'm sure someone's done this, since it's pretty obvious). Write your CSS/2 and non-CSS/2 pages. Still have the browser send the user-agent. Have a database, periodically updated automatically, of the supported features of each user-agent. Then generate your own HTML/4.0 and so forth text.
Doesn't apply. That's trying to smuggle drugs into US borders and being stopped before entering US waters. I'm talking about not letting them enter the United States at all.
But seeing Halle Berry in leather lingerie running around in the latest pop movie *is* what sex is all about?
but I don't partake in interracial gangbangs, facials, or S&M
Gangbangs may not be common, but many people *do* engage in oral sex or (especially light) BDSM. It's fine if *you* don't do so, but this is hardly criteria for something being censorable, in my mind.
Personally, I think they should require the .xxx domain for any site above basic nudity, just to make things simple, but what do I know, I'm not a senator.
.xxx TLD is because it would be lucrative for the name registrars.
Bad technical solution. Imposes global ethical standard on Web (*this* is for adults, *this* isn't), whereas bare breasts are considered okay by the Brits, girls in bikinis considered okay in the US, and girls outside of a burkha considered obscene in Saudi Arabia.
The only reason there is any push for a
Nothing wrong with content rating, on the other hand, to indicate in a standard format that something contains bare breasts (and then let the client ISP/filtering software/whatever decide whether the content is acceptable). There are systems in place to do that today (and that provide better-than-domain-level-granuarity). They just don't get much press because the registrars *really* want the money from another TLD.
And for you to say it is okay for a child to watch it, that makes you a pedophile. ...boy, confusion about the phrase "pedophile" is almost as bad as "steal/infringe on copyright".
A pedophile is someone who is sexually attracted to children. That's it -- not someone who has abused children, who has committed sexual crimes, who has liberal sexual values, or anything else. There is certainly no need to be sexually attracted to children to feel that children should be able to watch porn.
You belong in jail, or at the very least, to be registered with a sex offender database. You want children to watch porn, how sick are you??
*I* happen to agree with the guy (and not even just with porn, but with censorship in general). I think that life would be a lot better if, instead of trying to censor content, parents just explained content and their feelings on it and *why* those feelings exist. Your kid is almost going to see porn, no matter how hard you try to avoid it. I think that inculcating an approach of "I have to hide this from my parents" is much more damaging than anything that the porn exposure is going to do. I always felt that I could always talk about *anything* with my parents, and I placed a great deal of value on the point.
That is B.S.. If you know anything, most catholics register as democrats. Maybe the baptists are more republican. But as a group, they don't vote for just one side or the other. Or are you talking about lutherans?
The real issue the guy has is with conservative social values, which *do* follow a "hiding this is the best idea" approach. He's just lumping together Republicans (which *do* tend to be more conservative) and Christians (there are decidedly liberal Christian faiths, but the ones that get the most political exposure, like Southern Baptists, have conservative social values). That isn't all that correct, no, but it's pretty hard to otherwise nail down exactly the amorphous blob of people who want to censor content that they consider immoral. FWIW, I suspect that Muslims would be even more opposed to pornography, in general, than would Christians.
Maybe sex is something that should be nervous and new and wonderful when you meet the one person who you want to be with forever.
Maybe. It's one possible approach. I don't see any particular argument for one way being definitely superior to the other -- both of you two are running on emotional arguments. He's gotten angry with and had bad experiences with conservatives, so he's raging on repressive types, and you've clearly been taught that a no-sex/sex with one person who you marry and never leave approach is the acceptable route, so you're raging on what you see as bad. Neither one of you have stated much by way of benefits.
I tend to think that having some sexual experience, assuming associated potholes (STDs, pregnancies, etc) are avoided (which is not necessarily a given assumption), is not necessarily a bad idea just on the same grounds that knowledge is generally a good thing to have. [shrug]
Maybe sex is a choice a 14 year old can not make, because they don't have the maturity to understand what it means. Maybe if sex is something sacred, then the divorce rate and infidelity would not be so high.
He was talking about porn, not having sex. There's quite a difference.
You are what is wrong with this world.
You *feel* he is because you've had so much negative stimuli associated with the ideas he's propagating. However, simply asserting this isn't going to do anything. If you are clearly correct, you should be able to make a supported argument in favor of what you're saying. I don't think that you can do this, given how much back-and-forth there is over the issue -- otherwise, this would have been settled a long time ago.
And the next thing we will see is beastiality becomming normal.
[shrug] Maybe. It is legal and practiced in some European countries, like Swe
Either the woman is doing all the work;
She is being subjected to things the guy wouldn't be subjected to if he had the choice;
Men get used to seeing the women do everything the man wants, on command, and this can carry over into their own sexual encounters, and;
Porn is traditionally the blond, busty female; how do redheads feel when they know their boyfriend is watching a stacked blond?
Depends upon the type of porn.
Most media that I can think of has very different roles for men and women; just about any action movie fits this point, but we provide action movies for children, so there is clearly some dividing line other than this. It can't be some helpless woman being grateful for Arnie clubbing the heck out of a bunch of guys.
One additional point WRT the stacked blond; would it bother you if your girlfriend was watching porn containing men that look different from you? I do agree that people should be willing to reverse the situation, and that it's hypocritical if they can't cope with the reverse.
I've been a pornography addict for almost ten years.
Okay, *that* can be an issue -- but addiction to *anything* is of concern. I was just reading an article about a woman who was addicted to buying baby clothes on some baby website. She spent huge amounts of money on it, and just couldn't stop. My thoughts would be that addiction is what we want to avoid, rather than pornography.
Why on earth can't someone set up a large, offshore liner in international waters, right outside of US waters, and boat people out to it? Then they could provide drugs, prostitution, whatever, onboard without issues of legality.
As long as said activities don't happen within US jurisdiction, I don't see what the problem would be.
However I don't see how they can introduce a tax on fairly low key ranches in the middle of nowhere, that people goto willingly, in the name protect "the children" or for any moral reason.
Because there are people who do things like read Jack Chick or pay attention to other conservative whackjobs, and believe what they say. It's not a pragmatic argument, it's an ideological one.
Well, the origins of "freedom of speech" in the US were "freedom of political speech". It just got expanded a bit. However, since political speech is exactly what the PRC is interested in squelching, it's still relevant.
There's a couple assumptions you'll have to go along with me on, though.
(Ass.1) That an organized society is better (more productive, more able to deal with various problems, and so forth) than a collection of unorganized individuals.
(Ass.2) That the cost of collapse of a society is extremely high, and that it is strongly preferable to avoid this.
So now, we can extrapolate a bit:
Given Ass.1, we want a society. Given Ass.2, we want it to be stable. So one of the most important characteristics of a society is that it be stable.
Societies can self-correct out of downward spirals. For example, suppose a military coup results in an unpopular dictator -- he can be ousted as he makes people more and more desperate and angry.
Freedom of speech is a simple and valuable characteristic in a society that allows popular removal of its leaders (such as by vote each four years, as in the US), because it allows awareness of problems someone has identified in a leader to spread. If someone can figure out that George Bush is starting an insane economic plan that will destroy the country in less than ten years, they can spread word about it. The alternative would be to keep the masses, which control the government, unaware of problems coming up, and could allow a leader to cause a country to make actions that would generally disadvantageous, but advantageous to the leaders.
So free speech helps allow society to self-correct and avoid crashing.
This is also why we have the freedom to keep and bear arms in the United States, incidently. It's another mechanism to retain societal stability, though oriented towards more drastic problems. The idea is that no unpopular ruler can seize power because there are many people with guns that would shoot the people supporting him. Since someone knows that their unpopular coup will be put down, they will not engage in it in the first place.
This pretty much covers why freedom of political speech is important.
Pure freedom of speech also has some other benefits -- in general, assuming rational agents (which we aren't, but we try to approximate them), more knowledge is better, and speech allows the spread of knowledge.
If you want a document, try the one on Wikipedia.