Why aren't Cubans, Quebecois, Saudis, Syrians allowed in Google Code Jam
code.google.com
code.google.com
(http://www.advertisinglawyer.ca/advertising.htm)
(http://business.financialpost.com/2011/09/08/why-many-contes...)
The Imp of the Recursive in my head was imagining an alternate programming culture like a Quebec version of steam-punk.
However, over many years, starting in late high school, I trained myself to speak in a more standard form of English to protect myself from the discrimination of the "hillbilly" stigma. This is my formal dialect, and I use it in business and in formal/sem-formal scholastic settings. My father was the one who encouraged me to do this. As a child, I noticed that he spoke differently when making business calls. He told me that, when "you are trying to make money, trying to learn to make money, or dealing with somebody who wants your money, you speak their language." This knowledge of using a non-native, standard dialect in business/government/education communications is extremely common, and is especially common amongst the mainstream African American community. The issue with AAVE is only when children are raised in broken families by parents who are too ignorant/disengaged/etc to teach children the standard, formalized dialect that every other ethnic group in America is expected to adhere to. I can't speak in a courtroom in my native dialect and be taken seriously, even if I'm in Charleston, West Virginia. (The exceptions to this are in identity politics. Lots of deep southern politicians use their native accent, and then there is the Charleston dialect, which uses proper grammar but drops the "r's", so is therefore acceptable in formal settings.)
My family is from Bangladesh, which separated from Pakistan (in an independence war), over language differences. Historically, those language differences were a proxy for the cultural marginalization of Bengalis within the Pakistani state.
So when we hear about the Quebecois requiring the use of French, and we think "oh those silly French Canadians" we have to remember that there is a lot more to language than just how people speak.
However, the Quebecois don't need to do what they are doing. They live in a modern nation with civil rights protections. Forcing people to use French is its own form of oppression.
A more cynical one would be that very few anglophones would ever vote "Oui" in a secession referendum. Therefore the Parti Québécois had motivation to make life as uncomfortable as possible for english speakers, hoping they'd give up and move to Ontario.
Probably both explanations have some amount of truth to them.
Any large company should have a policy document which states the absurd rules including installation of French software versions and use of French keyboards, hiring and e-mail policies. I believe the policies only apply to businesses with over 50 employees so you would not have encountered them in the public sector.
This was in a university-level intro to programming class...
Still I hope they will reconsider this law.
This is plain wrong. The McDonald’s Monopoly contest is held in all (participating) Canadian McDonald’s restaurants, including Quebec’s. Source: I live in Quebec.
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
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?
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.
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...
That's probably why.
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.
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 :)
Running a contest in a given jurisdiction is a form of doing business in that jurisdiction, and so of course the contest is subject to whatever regulations that jurisdiction applies to that activity (contests, in this case). Imagine if this were not the case, and anybody could avoid complying with local laws just by calling their activity a 'contest' and running it out of some foreign jurisdiction.
So, by saying people in Quebec can't play, Google is not required to abide the unusual laws that they have there around contests and lotteries.
This is not true. Contests must abide by any local laws or regulations in any jurisdiction they're run in. If you don't run the contest in Quebec (e.g. if you disallow Quebecois entrants) then and only then are you exempt from their laws.
Google are subject to Quebec's laws because they have offices there and a Canadian subsidiary. If these things weren't, they wouldn't have to abide by such laws. Even if Quebec said they had to, they wouldn't have jurisdiction.
This is not particularly new. What is new is the general belief I've seen in many people that "but I did it on the internet!" is a magical answer.
I seem to remember there are certain laws the British government thinks applies to foreign companies that have no ties to the UK but otherwise do business with British residents, but in the same breath says they have no way to enforce them.
Just as if you sell something to someone from Belgium over the internet, both your and their law applies.
Consumer could sue in Belgian courts but the matter of jurisdiction would arise and that's where the claim would fail.
But in Google Summer of Code case, if it's treated as 'work for hire' then the host country definitely has jurisdiction as the actual work happens there. And Google has subsidiaries worldwide (used for ad sales), so they can easily be targeted.
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.
"Viva Quebec!"