Why is seeking blood so important to you? "At least someone got the axe".

To quote a friend of mine: "I hope you'll treat yourself as harshly when the time comes."

Google stopped using third-party providers in at the least the US and Canada:

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/10/your-world-your-map.html

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/04/keeping-canadas-map-current.html

I've reported a half-dozen mistakes using the "Report a Bug" link, and they've all been responded to within a few days. Most of these have been of the form "Can't turn left", but one was of the "You think that street takes 10 minutes to drive along. It really takes 30, find better directions".

It certainly used to be true that updates took a while. In 2004 I reported a street missing and it took 2 years to see an update, and I really have no idea if the fix was related to my email or not. The new system has a check-box to notify when the report is received, and what the verdict is when it's processed.

If you've had a bad experience before the change, it's worth trying again.

(obDisclosure: I work for Google, but not on the maps teams)

I stopped drinking caffeine in high school when the perma-shakes set in. I was having somewhere near the equivalent of 30-40 cups over the course of a 19-20 hour day and getting about 4 hours of sleep in order to keep full time school, full time job, and a very active social life all going.

The shakes quit after about 3 days. The headache after about 2 weeks. And somewhere about 2 years later I no longer felt permanently exhausted.

The nice thing now is that I find I can stay awake as long as I need to as long as I don't have high-sugar foods or have any alcohol. I just catch up the next day with little or no problem. I can't imagine going back to caffeine. As a computer-geek, I think it would be hard to do it just in moderation. Everyone else around me has the perpetual can of Coke next to their mouse.