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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That still makes you look creepy as hell. Poor Michele.

This amounts to "Vote Blue, get Brown".

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).

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.

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.

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.