You might want to tighten that wording so as not to prohibit lawyers becoming judges, because having non-lawyers as judges is not going to improve things.

One to two thousand pounds would be the whole rhino, not the head. And if you're chopping off the head then you can use a chainsaw without worrying about destroying some of the end product.

You may or may not be pleased to know that this latest release of Unicode adds glyphs for volleyball and cricket.

what are you using @ for other than Rogue/Nethack ?

Back in days of yore, before Facebook messaging and Whatsapp but after bang paths, @ was an essential part of a quaint communications system called "e-mail". Some old fogies still use it. Now get off my lawn and go ask the person who (I presume) sold you that 6-digit uid for a history lesson.

No, it's because those words aren't in /usr/share/dict/words. I started with a much larger list of characters, and filtered it down before posting to just those which actually matched something. The û is for croûton, croûton's, croûtons.

I would have said that even English requires diacritics to support some of its loanwords.

grep -E "[éóèâêûäöñç]" /usr/share/dict/words | grep -v "[A-Z]" | wc
        174 174 1720

Some of those strangers are interesting people. You can talk to ... a completely different dozen on the way home from work.

Just to be clear: you're talking in general about cities, right? Talking to strangers on public transport in London is extremely counter-cultural, with the exceptions of checking that you're on the right train and complaining about delays.

Silicon Fen in Cambridge has also existed for decades already. Dundee's biggest advantage over Cambridge might be that it's too far to commute to London: Cambridge is already part commuter town, which is putting pressure on housing.

It's anyone's guess why Cameron chose London as the UK's tech hub

Not really. Like many others of his class and professional background, he only occasionally remembers that there's life outside the M25.

For example, one must apply to the Ministry of Communication to be accepted into the UIC

Shock horror! You don't become a member just by putting MUIC on your business cards! I bet that you don't get admitted to the ACM without applying either.

A CS degree is required (sorry Bill Gates).

If the submitter (presumably the author of the blog from the second link) had actually read the two-week-old comments in the first linked page then they would see that this isn't true. A CS degree is sufficient, but not necessary: the statutes clearly say that membership is open to professionals in other areas "with experience in support activities for the IT sector". So basically that's about the same as e.g. the venerable British Computer Society.

UIC members must be Cuban, while ACM has chapters in 57 nations

I don't see any nationality requirements in the statutes. It just seems to be a standard national professional body. And it hasn't even formally come into existence yet, so how would it have tentacles spread across the globe?

The only thing which seems to be both accurate and potentially upsetting to some people is the political side: that the application form asks about membership of political organisations, and one of its objectives relates to defending the Revolution. But that's completely unsurprising to anyone who knows anything at all about Cuban society, and it's a bit rich that someone from a country which propagandises primary school children by making them recite a Pledge of Allegiance every day (have you seen George Takei talk on the Daily Show about having to do this in an internment camp for Japanese Americans?) should complain about it.

(If I've just fed a troll, then I apologise to the Internet at large).

Unless you consider "Hope that you don't piss the gods off" to be a guiding philosophical principle, that's still a fairly restrictive definition of religion. Consider, for example, Roman religion: it provided structure to daily life, but was largely orthogonal to the philosophical guidance of schools such as stoicism and epicureanism.

And who knows how many more forgotten samples are out there?

How about parents who smoke in the house? You can prove that by checking conicotine levels in the kid's urine.

Only once you've ruled out consumption of tomatoes and aubergine.

The borked CSS for the account options makes it hard to check (although I can't obviously see the filters anywhere), but I'm pretty sure that I had polls disabled. Posting polls as stories seems to bypass that option.

Whoosh!