How is a disguised return 0 anything remotely resembling a good question? I highly suspect most people who are "unable to answer" are actually just misunderstanding the question, since it's phrased in such a bizarre way. The way you phrased it, I'm not even 100% sure that "return 0" is the answer you're looking for!

As far as I understood the document Google could have argued to have individual members of the class action dismissed based on qualifications after discovery concluded. The "in person interview" was just the initial requirement to join the class action and not a guarantee that they would remain part of it. The article I linked already mentioned 269 and that dropped to 227 in the bloomberg article linked by the guardian, so around a sixt no longer qualified for one reason or the other.

> leaves all the zero bits alone, changes all the one bits into zero bits, and returns the result.

Unless you have a weird integer implementation there is no way to avoid touching individual bits. So if( x ) x = 0; return x; is the best I can come up with.