practice your lock-picking while you watch TV, for example."

No sport is complete without a competitive element, so at Toool meetings, members pick locks against the clock.

The club has a set of 26 competition locks, and members can attempt any of them as many times as they like, with the fastest times for each lock recorded on a leader board.

For elite door hardware sportsmen there's also the annual Dutch Open championships where top lock pickers from the Netherlands, Germany, Britain, France and even countries as far-flung as Australia and the USA compete to open a particular lock in the fastest time.

The tables at Toool's stall at the recent Hack in the Box hacker convention in Amsterdam were strewn with locks of all shapes and sizes, including ones that haveWas the French Revolution a success or a failure for France?

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Introduction

Was the French Revolution a success or a failure for France? To answer this question, we must first define the revolution itself. French Revolution (1789-1799) is traditionally known as the long struggle of the French public against the pre-existing Ancien Regime and all injustices associated with it. It is also described as the battle between the new ideals of enlightenment and democracy against the old authority of the divine right of the king. In my view, these definitions are at once inadequate and misleading. For one thing, while the ideals of enlightenment and the teachings of the 'philosophes' gave impetus to the cause, the ideals were certainly never the actual triggerant of the revolution. The