Why aren't Cubans, Quebecois, Saudis, Syrians allowed in Google Code Jam

http://code.google.com/codejam/faq.html#registration

by surine • 13 years ago

35 55 13 years ago

code.google.com

mryan• 13 years ago

> The Contest is void in Cuba, Quebec, Saudi Arabia and Syria > and where prohibited by law. Individuals and entities > restricted by applicable export controls and sanctions > programs are ineligible to participate in the Contest

Some could perhaps be explained by export restrictions on crypto code, although I would expect to see some other countries (Iran) banned if that were the case.

Quebec has rather stringent data privacy laws - perhaps these are not compatible with Google's personal data storage policy.

p_l2• 13 years ago

Quebec's case is rather their laws regarding contests, lotteries etc.

Basically any contest from outside Canada won't give a damn about working all of those rules in (if it's even possible at all), so they are simply banned from essentially all international competitions of this kind :)

TheCoreh• 13 years ago

Since the competition is being held by a company outside of Quebec, do they need to abide to these laws at all?

HadiAsiaie• 13 years ago

> although I would expect to see some other countries (Iran) banned if that were the case.

I remembered several years ago Iranian was also banned from the competition, but after sometimes they allowed Iranian, but I think they don't give prize in the case of winning.

DanBC• 13 years ago

Quebec has weird laws about competitions.

(http://www.advertisinglawyer.ca/advertising.htm)

(http://business.financialpost.com/2011/09/08/why-many-contes...)

xradionut• 13 years ago

I was humorously assuming it was because almost all programming languages have key words in English.

The Imp of the Recursive in my head was imagining an alternate programming culture like a Quebec version of steam-punk.

mdellabitta• 13 years ago

I'm imagining a preprocessor now that requires you to prefix all language keywords with their French equivalents in a larger font.

erfou2• 13 years ago

there are some public and private institutions where we can't use an english keyword for our variables and functions name.....I'm not joking!!

Farox• 13 years ago

You're not too far off. Companies have to, with growing size, do more and more stuff in french. At large companies that aren't exempt you must have a french keyboard for example and code comments have to be in french.

gozmike• 13 years ago

Joke all you want, but I've witnessed the use of a modified Pascal compiler that recognized french keywords.

This was in a university-level intro to programming class...

daliusd• 13 years ago

As Eastern European I am a little bit satisfied that even reasonable Canadians do stupid things.

Still I hope they will reconsider this law.

sareon2• 13 years ago

Quebec? I don't see it happening. It has been like that for as long as I can remember. They can't even enter McDonald's contests like Monopoly. They have their own separate contests.

skrebbel• 13 years ago

Those crazy Quebecois are going to use the knowledge learned to nuke Toronto!

erfou2• 13 years ago

The crazies are the government, not US!

jherdman• 13 years ago

Ubisoft Montreal already has ;) http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/04/11/the-nostalgic-insanity...

PeterisP3• 13 years ago

USA corporations, including Google, have restrictions on paying money to residents of certain countries such as Cuba and Syria. Tough luck.

ronnyf• 13 years ago

Another example of Quebec being a totalitarian regime. A bit different from some others in this world though. A place where one can increase funding for a language Gestapo, who fines restaurant owners who don't properly translate pasta in their menu, while cutting social spending. All for the benefit of the residents. Go Quebec!

yen223• 13 years ago

Better post the French translation of this rant soon, or suffer the consequences :)

officemonkey• 13 years ago

I'll do it for him:

"Viva Quebec!"

camus• 13 years ago

At least they speak better french than french people themselves ... EDIT : i'm french.

guiomie2• 13 years ago

I dont agree. Unless you compare their (our) french to your Paris based backward french dialect.

D9u• 13 years ago

or anywhere that the contest is prohibited by law.

That's probably why.

xr093• 13 years ago

OK I'm a Cuban programmer and can tell you this measure sucks big time, if the blocked government wants anything from Google Code, Sourceforge or any other "restricted" place they have mirrors, nice people on other unblocked countries willing to help and as last resource a tor proxy will do. So this measure only asserts read-only access, nothing else. Actually US goverment looks stupid when do things like this, you can't stop software to spread all over the world it's nonsense.

Anyway I prefer Github, Google is not the cool company they used to be, now most of their products look like stripped-down copies of others.

#ifndef HUMOR

#def HUMOR

I think we on the "Evil Axis" should have our own code hosting platform.

Possible URL: http://evilhub.com

I'm thinking in projects like:

ak47-assembler

missile-launcher

dropbomb

spy-detector

nuclear-cad

whitehouse-boom-boom

familyguy-downloader (we love stewie too)

#endif

JPKab4• 13 years ago

Dude, you made my day. I'm pretty fascinated by my Gringo stereotypes of Cuba colliding with a programmer on HN.

I'm picturing a guy with a laptop, palm trees in the background, lots of antique cars driving on the street behind him, a brass band somewhere nearby, a pork sandwich on a plate. Please, please be wearing a Che/Fidel hat.

In all seriousness, I'm curious about the internet situation there. How's the bandwidth these days?

xr093• 13 years ago

You missed the "Havana Club" rum bottle and a mulatta. ;)

Well, the internet access is a delicate topic, lots of schools have it, government offices, but not much civilians yet, they say is coming soon, but the problem is they fear technology (old people mostly), they see it as a possible way of US Gov. and Miami oppositors to take control of our minds or whatever.

Old people have fears, they have their reasons, young people have ideas, we want to push forward. And is like that, some get tired of waiting for a change and go away to a more tech-savvy place, but is not an option for everyone.

The bandwith is better than 5 years ago and improving, it's not wideband but we can live with that.

Anyway, it sucks to have studied IT Engineering (so far, thousands of us http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Information_Scien...) to end up setting up printers and not creating awesome stuff, people in charge have no faith in knowledge products.

I realized a big truth reading Peopleware: The "Spanish Theory of Value" is killing us.

phowat• 13 years ago

I clicked the evilhub.com link out of curiosity and it redirects to a porn-youtube kind of site. Just a heads up to people browsing this from work.

xr093• 13 years ago

Damn, I had my hopes with that name.

caissy• 13 years ago

As a fellow french speaking Quebecer, this is because of the "Régie des alcools, des courses et des jeux", the main office regulating alcool, races and gambling.

In our legislation, if you are making a contest with the intent of giving away more than CAD$2000, you must get a licence from them[1]. Many companies just don't want to get their head in this.

The main reasoning behind this is to keep track of the contests and make sure that no one is trying to scam you.

[1] http://www.canlii.org/en/qc/laws/regu/rrq-c-l-6-r-6/latest/r...

JiPi3• 13 years ago

Exactly! As simple as that! This is why we are always (almost) excluded from any contests :)

psychopaf• 13 years ago

But we smoke Cuban cigars - legally ;)

Why aren't Cubans, Quebecois, Saudis, Syrians allowed in Google Code Jam

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