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Interestingly, there was a competent escape the same day - the Comte de Provence, later Louis XVIII, made it successfully to the Austrian Netherlands with his wife, having taken the option of using a light, fast carriage that Louis XVI declined.
Louis's other brother, the Comte d'Artois (the future Charles X) was already outside of France, having left on 17 July 1789 in reaction to the Bastille.
3.18- The Flight to Varennes
In June 1791 the royal family tried to escape from Paris, but they were busted while passing through Verennes. Direct Link: 3.18- The Flight to Varennes Sponsor link: lynda.com/revolutions [Update: Well that's a new one. Accidently selected last week's episode during the final mastering process...
One way of looking at the lump of labour fallacy is that the amount of employment is proportional to the amount of consumption, so adding people won't affect the unemployment rate, as you're adding consumers at the same rate as workers.
Having established that consumption is proportional to employment, we find that the ratio is determined by productivity - if one person's consumption can be filled by less than one person's labour, then not everyone will be employed - initially, improvements in productivity allow people to retire, children to extend their education and working weeks to drop, but, eventually, you have to either increase consumption (which, you may have noticed, we're not doing because pcGDP isn't growing) or you have to increase unemployment.
The fact is that there aren't enough jobs to go around. Wouldn't society be much healthier if work was a choice? People who don't want to work would stop trying to get jobs, so people who do want to work would face less competition, making it easier to get one.
The problem of workshyness
Imagine the following scenario. A man is hopelessly in love with Alison King. Every lonely night he watches repeats of Corrie, pining for his dream woman. A friend then says to him: "why are you wasting you life wanting the impossible? Why not settle for a lesser woman? You'll be happier than yo...
I think there's a big difference, not just in the mens rea of the reckless tackle and the deliberate biting, but also in the risk-acceptance of the victim.
When you go onto a football pitch, there is a chance you could be fouled, a risk you have chosen to accept.
If you get bitten, then that's completely outside the basis of the game.
In my opinion, the question is not the sporting penalty that should be applied, but the criminal one.
A reckless tackle is part of the game. There's an agreed, accepted sporting penalty; the victim consented.
Biting isn't. It's entirely outwith the game. It belongs in the criminal courts as a charge of Assault occasioning actual harm. Given the circumstances, he'd get some sort of community order (it's category 3, as it's neither that much damage, nor premediated, and he has quite a lot of mitigation being a first offender, etc)
Mens rea is normally a question of three parts: culpability (premediated-intentional-knowing-reckless-negligent-accidental), responsibility and depravity; Suarez is more depraved than the reckless tackler, and thus the mens rea is higher, he's also more culpable, being intentional, and more responsible, as a reckless tackle is relatively unlikely to break a leg, where a bite is pretty certain to remove part of someone's ear.
On disgust
Some of you might find it distasteful to make a link between the Boston bombings and Luis Suarez. But this is precisely the point, because there is indeed a link, and it highlights a difference between two different moral perspectives. In Suarez's case, many pundits are calling for him to be ban...
I've seen a really good threaded format on the web: SBNation.
You have to be logged in for it to work, but it does the thing that all threaded formats have to do: read/unread status.
When I'm logged in to podiumcafe (their cycling site), I can just hit Z to advance to the next unread comment. It could do with thread/subthread kill (ie the ability to block off a tangent) but that wouldn't be hard to add. And it can deal with large volumes of comments posted over very short periods of time.
Thousand+ post threads are not easy things to make manageable. SBNation is the first architecture I've seen that comes close.
Web Discussions: Flat by Design
It's been six years since I wrote Discussions: Flat or Threaded? and, despite a bunch of evolution on the web since then, my opinion on this has not fundamentally changed. If anything, my opinion has strengthened based on the observed data: precious few threaded discussion models survive on t...
Tablets and smartphones can already drive a decent screen (lots of them have HDMI out, iOS can use AirPlay), but it's going to take some reengineering to be able to use the tablet as the input device and the big screen to see what you're doing. You might decide that you don't need a mouse any more - and you can use the tablet for some basic text entry, too. You could certainly do a powerpoint presentation with an iPad as your input and a decent monitor as output, for example, provided the software had a desktop mode as well as the tablet mode (I wonder if Windows 8 will move in that direction).
I can't see anyone ever wanting to input large amounts of text without a keyboard with some travel on it, though. RSI is bad enough with an ergo keyboard on a proper desk. Even laptops make it worse, and what it's like doing large amounts of data entry on an iPad doesn't bear thinking about.
That means that any creative activity that requires large amounts of text also requires a real keyboard - which includes programming, of course. There are some other jobs that are text-heavy: lawyers, for example, but perhaps the best example of all are writers. If you read any blog by a novelist, you will endlessly read about them managing their RSI to get enough words into the computer.
The PC is Over
MG Siegler writes: The PC is over. It will linger, but increasingly as a relic. I now dread using my computer. I want to use a tablet most of the time. And increasingly, I can. I want to use a smartphone all the rest of the time. And I do. The value in the desktop web is increasingly an ...
That still makes you look creepy as hell.
Poor Michele.
Amber Benson, Meghan Camarena, and Michelle Boyd join me for GLOOM on #Tabletop
This week's new episode of Tabletop is online for your happy funtime enjoyment: If the embed isn't working, or you want to see this in glorious SUPER MEGA HD, I've got you covered, because I love you. A few notes: * We have no control over the ads that run during Tabletop, so it's likely that y...
This amounts to "Vote Blue, get Brown".
Tory members reject idea of LibCon pact
In the latest ConservativeHome survey we asked "What best describes your attitude to the prospect of a Liberal Democrat/ Conservative pact in government?" The result is summarised below: I'm in the unacceptable camp for the reasons set out here, particularly PR. This is one of the big problem...
Cameron could push PR through as a concession with an argument something along the lines of "we give them PR and we get X Y Z in return" - or even the argument of Disraeli in 1867 - that Tory PR would "dish the Whigs" (well, Labour, in this case).
Tonight's polls
7pm: Populus for The Times: Tim Montgomerie 8pm: YouGov for The Sun: 10pm: ComRes puts Tories 9% ahead.
Adam Boulton was the guy who threatened to empty chair any leader that didn't turn up; if the debate did it, then Boulton did the debate.
Lib Dems overtake Labour in new YouGov/Sun daily tracker poll
The results of the YouGov daily tracker poll for tomorrow's Sun have just been released: Comparisons are with the YouGov poll released shortly before last night's debate. UK Polling Report's swing calculator suggests that these figures, on a universal national swing, would actually make Labour...
Remind your mole that they didn't actually register wilwheatonstinks.com .org and .net and they will probably be porn sites if they don't.
Many Bothans died to bring you this...
I'm in Canada, working on Eureka, so I couldn't watch the previews CBS put online for The Wheaton Recurrence. Using all of my Evil Wil Wheaton powers, I contacted a sympathetic mole deep within the CBS Fortress of Power and got my hands on this preview.* I'm sorry I had to disable embedding, but...
I know you're commenting on Cory Doctorow as the starter of DRM-free e-books, but there's a pro publisher doing it too - been doing it for a few years as well: Baen Books.
It's been so successful that they've spun off the e-publishing bit to a separate business at http://www.webscriptions.net/ and, as far as I can tell, they do all the nasty work with ebook formats so your book looks nice on every device going, and they are happy to deal with small indie publishers, too - they have several up there.
just paint what you see
Five (Three sir!) Three quick Sunken Treasure items: 1. I was interviewed for the Lulu blog about the book. Fun fact: It was while I was writing the answers for this interview that I sent Twitter the fateful question about $5 DRM-free PDFs. I finished my answers and sent them back right before I...
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