2,058 karma · joined December 29, 2010
Sadly, this is the way of tech companies though - skimp on real customer service & replace it with one sided FAQ's and unanswered forms/emails. The only way out of these situations is to get into the public eye & force a response on their part.
At least according to the page I get when I try to log in, they still have the data: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40695?hl=en&ctx=c...
I don't disagree that Google was within their right to shutdown my account, but it seems silly that something I did at 19 has gone on this long.
I was never able to find out why the account was shut down, I'm guessing it was a ToS violation for something I did several months before I got banned (made 100+ gmail accounts with my invites, didn't use them for nefarious purposes though.) Just one day I couldn't log in and got an ambiguous page about account deactivation. No amount of emails or form filling ever earned a response from Google. That was it. Blam. Gone. Ever since then, I have not trusted Google with any data that I care about.
It would be nice if this tool worked for deactivated accounts.
Unfortunately, if you hand someone with poor money management skills a bunch of cash, they may end up with all of those luxury items & no food on the table.
The fact that they happen at all means the banks are not good at what they do, or they do it on purpose so they can distribute wealth to their desired parties.
I worked at an embedded system shop for 3 years and this was one of the things that irked me when I worked on code outside of what my team usually worked on. We had a filesystem, accessible with all of the standard C file API... but there was still a lot of stuff being put into this mystical NVM (usually user controlled settings) that then made things like hard resets hairy because even as a developer I wasn't sure what would be wiped when I flashed different software onto the device.
This may have just been bad practice, or a result of carrying over the idea of NVM after filesystems became available. But I don't know why anyone would try to propagate that practice these days.
The USA has some of their most brilliant crypto/security/intel guys working at the NSA. What happens with them when they are no longer getting paid? They go private I suppose. Is that in the best interest of the country? Or would it make more sense to reign in the NSA and declare the spying illegal, or some other less radical approach that keeps the good guys around and gives them something better to do than record every phone call and text we make?
I used the offline reading list so much for wikivoyage also - it was amazing!
If you're outside of Thailand, you can get a 60 day visa for about $30, and that can be extended a further 30 days once inside Thailand for another fee (I never did this, but I think it's around another $30.) The consulates in countries around Thailand are aware of people entering, leaving and getting a new visa, then re-entering. Certain consulates will almost always give the visa, some will deny if they see repeat visits - it really depends on the guy looking at the paperwork at the time sometimes.
For example, when I was there last year, the consulate in Penang, Malaysia was known to give back to back 60 day visas as long as you never did the 30 day extension. But they wouldn't give the multiple entry visas that basically give you the 60 days + 30 days extension each time you enter the country for 2-3 entries.
But now, wikivoyage is probably the preferred route. They've been adopted by Wikimedia after some drama with the company that owns wikitravel. wikitravel is now covered with ads and most of the editors abandoned ship for wikivoyage.
It's a great resource though! I have never owned a travel guide.