I once wanted to move to Finland
Nokia was doing their "recruit slave labor" thing through my coop program, and I figured it would be fun to spend 8 months of my coop term in perma-darkness. Finland is also very close to Sweden, on the grand scale of things (which also puts Winnepeg close to Vancouver, and the Sun close to Jupiter!) and Sweden just hit my news radar.

A young Swede, Jonas Nilson, bought World of Warcraft: Collectors' Edition. Once he got home, he was quite angry when he discovered that he actually needed the Internet to play WoW. After pulling a cable into the living room to his laptop (yes, laptop), he got another surprise: the monthly fee. Finally the 12+ PEGI rating didn't really match with the Blizzard site, which said 18-year-old. So he calls the shop (Elgiganten) to get a refund, which they rejected.

This prompted him to complain to the Consumer Association, which ruled in favor of Mr. Nilson. The result was a prime spot in the Swedish TV-show Plus, which conclusion was that "a monthly fee in computer games is just a clever way to get people's money" and that consumers should "watch this latest trend in computer gaming carefully".

I must say, it took a second or two for the magnitude of this to sink in. The news story about this goes through various reasons why this is dumb, but in essence, it's because Swedish youths who have names that rhyme with Wilson have neither learned to read writings on computer game boxes, nor know anything about what they buy with their precious moneys. I can't really fault them for that--there are many people this side of the big A that do the same thing--but for the consumer rights folks to take it all at face value and not bother to do any checking up on this is just sad.

If it weren't for the bikini teams, ultra-super-mega-high speed internets and the fjords, I would never even go to Sweden, let alone have anything to do with their public interest groups. But those three things pretty much redeem them for a lot of things.  ¶ 3:06 p.m.