Newegg is currently running a sweepstakes and I was reading the rules and whatnot at the bottom and came across this line.

"CANADA RESIDENTS: Each selected winner resident will be required to correctly answer a time-limited skill testing question without assistance in order to be eligible to receive a prize or such prize will be forfeited"

...why? Have they had a history of technologically incompetent Canadians win then break the product or something?

Anyone have any insight on this?

Like all winners who live in Canada, the 17-year-old resident of Mississauga, Ontario, had to answer a math question to claim his prize. The question -- ostensibly a test of the winner's mathematical skills -- was typical of today's Canadian product sweepstakes: Multiply 90 by 2, divide by 6 and multiply by 12. The answer? 360, as in Xbox 360.
"I was not surprised with the question being simple, although I did ask for help to make sure I would not lose out on the prize," Abdul-Baki said in an e-mail interview. "I mean, everyone could make mistakes."
Canadians are routinely required to answer such mild brain teasers before collecting the kinds of giveaway prizes doled out to Americans without so much as a 2-plus-2. From McDonald's hockey trading cards to AOL Canada's Virtual Investor game, winners find themselves forced to exercise some elementary-school-level skills.
Myths regarding the origin of the skill tests abound. Abdul-Baki believed the question to be a real-world captcha -- a simple test designed to foil automated software bots from entering sweepstakes.
In reality, the test is a hack of Canada's legal code by the promotions business. Canadian anti-gambling law makes it illegal to sell chances to win a prize, so promoters always offer a free method of entering each contest, and task every winner with a skill-testing question. By doing the latter, they argue, the game is no longer one merely of chance but a contest requiring some skill.

This kind of explains it better than I would:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/01/72511


Seems kinda ridiculous from an outside perspective but makes sense to me. However, in China this is illegal altogether.

It's an old Canadian law. Something about can't give anything away for free or something like that unless it's a contest.

That is it. Thank you. That is why all i had to do was anwers a 2X3+6 answer to get my free fries.

Just for the young ones this was before we even had online gambling, and even before the internet. This was like this in the 1970's from what I rememeber. So this has nothing to do with bots or what ever you younglings call them now.