Half day today!

Thankfully today is a half day, so we're just tying up some small things before the long weekend, sadly even though my new ajax'd poll is ready to go, we never go live with any major code changes on Friday's (unless something is busted), so it won't go up until Tuesday.
I noticed someone had been messing with the last poll that was up. Honestly I'm shocked it took someone that long to work out how poorly it was coded, and take advantage of that to skew results.

A couple posts ago I mentioned Team Stargate and the results, and chevron7 asked me the following:
Why is Team Stargate only open to residents of the US and Canada?

While I don't know a "for sure" answer to this, and I've never directly asked anyone in legal, I think it's a combination of cost and law.
We have to abide very strictly to certain rules when running sweepstakes and contests. Team Stargate is considered a contest, as prizes are awarded, and every country (and sometimes state) has different laws governing these things. The marketing people who created Team Stargate have limited budgets (smaller than I'd imagined actually) and can't spend the extra money to have the contest available to other countries.

I've worked with some other large companies in the past, and they had the same challenges with running contest and sweepstakes online. Nestle only ran contests for US residents (not even Canada) and Toyota was the same. These companies have the advantage of having offices worldwide, and those parts of the companies in other countries can run local contests.

That was a much longer answer than I intended, but I wish we could do more for other countries, being that I'm not from here, and ran into the same difficulties.

I know some out there spend a lot of time finding stuff we do wrong on the site (like naming files that aren't supposed to be live a little too obviously) I ask you to please remember there's are only 4 of us.. and we can only spend a small amount of time on the Stargate site. Compassion please!

BFN!