In my experience, Google does not offer good support. They're primarily engineers, and engineers typically have no sense of the needs of anybody else but themselves. Remember, you're the product, not the customer. They are assuredly not a "decent" vendor by any means. They're a tolerated vendor, and not because they're necessarily such great products, but tolerated only because there's no one else.

Rather than any conscious decision to deny you support, the woes you experienced was probably a result of that prevailing corporate mentality. Don't ever count on Google for support. Some of their engineers may be helpful, but there's no corporate policy and in particular, no corporate culture of thinking of their users.

IEEE is an engineering journal, not a scientific one. These are two completely different fields, with two completely different mindsets. If you don't know the difference, I'll give you a hint: one is binary and the other is not.

FTFY

No. GP is actually a limited, unreliable, and gimmick-heavy choice.

If you did this every time, you'd be identified as the guy who runs his code through Google Translate prior to release.

Non-normal behavior is the most easy to single-out. In order to avoid detection, you basically have to become noise. And if you're the only one, then even that is a pattern.

Sure, you could run some things through Google Translate and leave some things alone, but that'd be the equivalent of having two online personas.

It's 50,000.

Or for the study, the 12 people who code exclusively in assembly.

Well, the constant talk of snow has conveniently sidelined all news on Sheldon Silver's corruption scandal.

You forgot to take something into account: People in the Northeast are used to snow. Lots of it. Some are better prepared than others, but nobody lives here thinking that it'll snow once every decade. 6 inches is nothing. Hell, 12 inches is a bad storm, but nothing to write home about.

The forecasters were going off about 3 feet, 36 inches, total. They also kept saying, from Monday afternoon to Wednesday, which is big, but certainly manageable, and far more manageable than say, a storm blowing by dumping 16 inches in an hour before leaving. Either somebody forgot to do the math, or they decided to pick up the 36 inches number and call for mass panic.

Yes, people should've gone home early and stayed off the highways. Yes, people should've prepared with extra dry food and water. But no, mass transit didn't need to be shut down. No, the roads didn't need to be closed. No, things shouldn't have been forcibly grinded down to a halt.

It was a disproportionate response for very little risk. The wind was a bigger cause for concern than the snowfall, but wind can't shut down mass transit and close off all the roads and create a big sensation that, if it panned out, would've paid off big for the media. But the way the news channels treated it, you would've thought everybody borrowed a page from CNN's playbook. Which is to say, they were completely irresponsible. Where's MH370 again?

And by your logic, you shouldn't go outside whenever there's a thunderstorm, because you might get hit by lightning. Or worse, you might get hit by the storm surge and be washed out to sea. Sorry, I don't buy it. You might enjoy cowering in fear every time something unusual (and this wasn't even unusual to boot) happens, but we're supposed to be pretty damn resiliant in the Northeast. And this response just smacks of cowardice to me.

Jelly is the natural end-product of bourbon.

That's already been the case. It's just not the perception.

There is no left, or even left of center in the U.S. There's only right and far-right.

FBI 1 was under Hoover. FBI 2 was post-Hoover. And FBI 3 is neo-Hoover.

A phone is not a tablet. For most people, phones get replaced once every two years. While tablets are not like computers who have a lifetime of upwards of 7 years, they're in between, around 4 or 5.

And the developer base is different too. The moment Vista came out, people began migrating their applications off XP. But developers were until fairly recently still developing with Gingerbread in mind.

Yeah, Guinness was the asshole who refused to play Obi-Wan as some crazy wizard character that Lucas wanted Obi-Wan to be.

I'm certain the world was worse off for it.

Take that a step further:

You exceeded the posted speed limit by an average of $Z MPH over $W minutes. You were an average of $V distance from another vehicle over $U minutes. You accelerated at intersections $T times. You short stopped $S times.

It'd be easy to build up a driving profile based on GPS data. In fact, insurance companies already do it.

You bought into that pile of marketing dog shit?

Reality is closer to land of the diminishingly-freer, home of the cowardly and ignorant but loud.

We're still freer than most countries (for example, we have hate crime laws, but no hate speech laws) and without a strong American traditional culture, more tolerant, which is freedom in a different sense. But we're not that much freer, and we're losing what we have little by little.