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!

FWIW, the Spanish-language version of the last link has much better pictures than the English-language version.

The "loophole" that Amazon has been using is nothing more than the EU single market, in all its glory, exactly as it was intended to be used. ...

When the EU and its predecessors were being set up, governments were all super keen to establish this sort of single market because they saw it as a way to allow their own home-grown champion companies to expand, by selling to people elsewhere on the continent.

You're contradicting yourself. Was the single market set up so that national companies could start selling to other EU countries with minimal red tape, or so that multinational companies could pick a country and negotiate with its tax authorities prior to setting up a "headquarters" which consists of a P.O. box? And if it was the latter, why is the Commission investigating whether the arrangements negotiated between various companies and the Luxembourgeois tax authorities constitute illegal state aid?

Here in Spain elections are always on Sunday. (In fact, we have elections tomorrow). However, I don't imagine that that would be very popular with certain constituencies in the southern U.S.

The headline exaggerates, anyway. The e-mail doesn't contain a Top-Secret "Brexit" Plan: merely the top-secret fact that the bank is going to be working on a "Brexit" plan. It's neither a surprise that they're doing this, nor a surprise that they want to keep it secret: the finance ministers of certain other European countries were already offended by the Bank of England having a Grexit plan.

You seem to have made the easy but very big mistake of believing Braveheart to be historical. There are some bits of history mixed into the plot to support the illusion, but there are also massive errors of fact, and that is one of them. (Don't get me started on the chronology...)

I just disable JavaScript. Works beautifully at blocking ads on the sites I visit from my smartphone.

(I like the English "not proven" wording better)

It's only a side point, but for what it's worth that's a possible verdict under Scottish law, not under English.

The tree is willow, but I understood that Hippocrates used its bark rather than its leaves.

You give the impression of not having read more than the first sentence of the post you replied to.