but privacy, as you note, is pretty close to the bottom since your car location is most certainly other people's business as soon as you take it on a public road.
This is absolutely false. People can look at your car, yes, but that doesn't mean everything that happens in and outside your car isn't private. I'd rather have freedom and privacy than safety, and you'd think everyone in a country that's supposed to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave" would agree with me. I don't want the government having control over my vehicle, and all software on the vehicle should be 100% open source, and all hardware should be open as well. No black boxes, and no proprietary garbage. There's just too much room for abuse, and in a free country, that's all it should take to oppose it.
First, it's pretty obvious that jeffmeden was talking about privacy in terms of the car's location, not "everything that happens in and outside your car". Your comment doesn't show that his point is "absolutely false" unless you completely misread what he said.
Second, everything you do involves a tradeoff of privacy, safety, freedom and a dozen other things. If you go outside you lose some privacy; if you get in a car and drive in public you lose some privacy and some safety. The idea that you can be some sort of privacy and freedom absolutist who never trades either of them for anything is just nonsense.
He's obviously just trolling. People (red blooded Americans, no less) are gobbling up cars with OnStar and similar systems that have clearly advertised features of vehicle tracking AND remote control, with no clear precedent that government meddling isn't taking place, and yet the world continues to spin on its axis and bald eagles even continue to soar above the trees. If the only meaningful way someone can think to express freedom is having an untrackable car, then I take pity on them.
Why does the FBI get involved? is it because the events span multiple states, or because the banks have so much clout? If this had happened to google or microsoft, for example, would the FBI get involved?
Simply put, the FBI is the investigator of last resort. Local law enforcement (even in large cities like NYC where JPMC is based) are woefully ill-equipped to investigate this sort of thing.
"The submitter notes that this V2V communication would include transmission of a vehicle's location, which comes with privacy concerns"
Hardly a secret is it? It's the chuffing big bit of metal about to slam into your vehicle. Look out the windows and there it is.
But presently, it becomes a secret again after the impact (a secret that can only be coaxed out of the skidmarks and dents) that apparently 33,000 people a year are worth dying to keep... There are many concerns with this (like how to keep it secure and reliable) but privacy, as you note, is pretty close to the bottom since your car location is most certainly other people's business as soon as you take it on a public road.
This conclusion you have is because you're paranoid.
Modern cars already have wireless communication attached to their security systems. Government mandated backdoors wouldn't require a wide-ranging communications network to work.
Actually you probably mean backdoors wouldn't require a *new* wide-ranging communications network to work... The OnStar system (and others like it) already have their own nationwide communication system (the cellular phone network) to allow law enforcement access to vehicle data, AND the ability to disable the vehicle remotely. And you know what? It's because people *want* that feature:
"Stolen Vehicle Slowdown is a prime example of a safety service that our customers rely on us to provide,” said George Baker, emergency services outreach manager, OnStar. “We have a strong relationship with law enforcement that has allowed us to refine our processes, promote teamwork and more quickly recover stolen vehicles for our subscribers.”
But seriously, lots of large companies don't think employees need mobile devices in the first place but employees who feel pressured to be high value contributors will do it anyway because they feel it gives them a leg up on the other employees. Paying 1,000 more phone bills isn't a tempting proposition for most large orgs, so there will be fallout from this.
I can't remember the last time I saw a payphone in the wild.
The ghetto. Seriously, you know when you are in a bad neighborhood when you see a payphone. Probably explains why so many people say things like "gee all the payphones are gone!" thanks to their relatively privileged existence. I'm not judging, but that's how the class system in the USA works.
Even worse, how is the money distributed? Who determines the "worth" of a web site or other online resource, and then allocates them their cut?
The current free-market system with sites supported by ads isn't perfect, but it's like democracy - Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
One can imagine (but probably not implement) a system where an ISP would maintain a "client access system" that signaled to compatible web sites that the user was willing to pay for content services. The signal would provide how much the user is willing to pay (to allow for ISPs to maintain different tiers) and the web site would, in return, defer ads and other annoyances for users who were willing to pay enough. Leave it up to the sites to say how much that threshold is, and leave it up to the ISPs to set the tiers and track the usage (like they dont do these two things already?) and lastly, divvy up the money. The free market still has a say in what sites are visited and what users are willing to pay.
But then the problems roll in: malware that forces site usage in the background. Sites that take your money but don't give a higher quality of service... And last but probably not least: users who have no idea how a system this convoluted works at all, and make very poor spending decisions with their capital.
"From now on you are NOT to use your personal cellphones or other mobile devices for any work purposes. You will not be reimbursed. Use a payphone instead, and present all receipts to accounting for prompt reimbursement. Thank you for your help as we prioritize our cost metrics and structure our teamgroups toward innovative human-centered investment"
Yeah, except the one guy who was paid to read the summary didn't.
What better way to have truly objective reporting, than editors who have no idea what's even in the story before they greenlight it! It's the ultimate in fair and balanced journalism.
My balls it is. The only place I've ever seen it as such is on slashdot, and here twice.
Want to see it in action? Look no further than the home page of the world's sixth largest bank: https://locator.chase.com/
Hover over "Business" and "Commercial" and you will note that their definition of those two classes relies on the MM suffix. I don't blame you for never having even imagined a context where millions of dollars was relevant, but you will find that it's a big world out there.
Moderation would work better if you could hear both sides. Let developers respond to a review like on Google Play.
Many people seem to use reviews as an alternative to contacting customer support. For legit problems there is some fairness in doing so. However there are times when a user is confused and the develop has no way to contact that user. It would also be useful for developers to respond indicating when a real problem is fixed.
Letting the developers worry about it seems like the only fair solution. Should there really be a market for apps that recreate other apps just a tiny bit better/shinier? If an app is really noteworthy, some venue outside the app store (blogs, tech news outlets, etc) will take notice and promote it.
Its not worse now than it's ever been in the past. Get the fuck over it
Everyone is waiting for this to be "Solved" just like 13 years ago, they were waiting for spam to be "solved" as the ratio of junk email to desirable email kept going up and up and up. Well, put everyone (just about) on the same email platform and presto, you have no more spam! A solution like that for trolling is perhaps forthcoming, but still a ways off. That doesn't stop people from sitting on their hands and wishing for it, though.
Reading comprehension is such a lost art these days. It was the H1N1 virus that caused the pandemic, which the Chinese scientists used in their research; not the results of the Chinese research that caused the pandemic.
From the cited article:
a team of Chinese scientists to create a hybrid viral strain between the H5N1 avian influenza virus and the H1N1 human flu virus that triggered a pandemic in 2009 and claimed several thousand lives.
For those challenged individuals, this sentence fragment should be parsed as:
(a team of Chinese scientists)... (create a hybrid viral strain) (BETWEEN) (the H5N1 avian influenza virus) AND (the H1N1 human flu virus that triggered a pandemic in 2009 and claimed several thousand lives).
There aren't enough modpoints, they should just let you edit TFS. Good thing the Slashdot moderators fact checked that juicy little detail. Apparently "Lasrick (2629253)" is beyond reproach.
I used to think so, and then I started paying attention to the screens of those around me while traveling (airports should be renamed for the most common activity there... "stareatyourphonefor90minutesports") and it's appalling. Among those aged 16-24 (guessing) I counted 2/3 of them have phones with shattered screens. Not just a hairline crack or two, I mean a huge bulls-eye shatter covering most of the face, observable from a good 20 feet away. And they text and twitter and snapchat like it's not even there. Modern phones are indeed durable, if only for their ability to keep all those glass pieces together and somehow not cut up the fingers of the operator. Amazing, really.
... the traces of cocaine that can be found on every single U.S. treasury note.
Presumably the cocaine traces are thanks to this exact smuggling operation; someone gets clean money from their bank, buys some coke, the bill gets handed up and up and up the drug hierarchy and ends up in Mexico to be used mostly to pay gun runners for premium US goods, which then ends up back in circulation in the US. I wonder if they could not only find the money but deduce what kind of drug ring is behind it...
I've found that MANY hotels (as of two years ago anyway) seem to only have a t-1 line (symmetrical 1.x mbps at 4am being my best speed tests).
Many hotels (or at least the company they pay to manage their network, like Windstream) have at least a slight sense of service management, and cap single hosts to about a T1 worth at any given time. These days a 1.44Mbit downstream would be crushed after 2 users tried to get on Youtube at the same time.
Southwest charges very little, and it's not even worth it. But us air charges 2-3x as much and is a decent value ($4/hour about on a cross country flight).
Its a joke on Southwest because they are busy piping DirecTV to all the passengers (as a paid advertisement for DirecTV service) so even if the backhaul isn't saturated, you will have to fight for bandwidth on the WLAN.
The unspoken assumption behind your comment (and much else on the page) is that it's important for 'open source' to be accepted by big business.
Why?
Because some things (for this thesis let's say it's a crypto algorithm) work much better when they are visible to all parties, and those with a vested interest commit themselves via development time instead of cash. If you need a good crypto algorithm and you pay a closed source company for it, either you or the company you paid had better employ an army of mathematicians in order to validate that the process is secure, otherwise it could have (probably does have) a flaw just waiting to be exploited. Your investment, as a business, can only go so far. With an open source solution, everyone can see the algorithm and offer their input on its efficacy.
Open Source is the ultimate economy of scale in the information business (driving cost per unit down while selling/utilizing more) so every business with even a modest investment in software should care. There are plenty of ways to innovate in closed ways (at least, ways proprietary to your company) while taking advantage of open source technologies. The problem (to expand on the original summary) is that most uninformed decision makers jump to the conclusion that if the software was developed for nothing, it's worth nothing and furthermore that anything they do with it will be worth nothing because their innovations will somehow get gobbled up by the open source monster, too. For someone who doesn't really add anything (companies trying to get by in niches, strongarming markets, exploiting cronyism, etc) there is plenty to fear. Meanwhile Google, Apple, Facebook, IBM, Cisco, etc would casually disagree (and gladly sell you some open source software).
The old Henry Ford saying goes (not that he necessarily said it) "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses".
Of course faster horses weren't an option. And what were the early cars, other than bare-bones "horseless carriages"? It's not as if the Model-T was a Ferrari in an age of wagons.
Consumers almost always choose "cheaper" when the price is significant. Designing the cheapest possible car, within the confines of the engineering of the day, seems like an obvious choice, and basically what they did.
That's based on the premise that the model T was less expensive than a horse (even after a few years of TCO) yet, they weren't... Consumers could have kept using horses, but chose to switch to cars in huge numbers because of other advantages (they could do things like travel farther distances, ignore daily maintenance, etc) that were not really obvious at the time. Sure, it's easy to look back and say "of course the car was popular, its *the car*" but that was not a sure statement in 1908, otherwise Ford wouldn't have been the only one in the USA doing it so cheaply/successfully for the better part of 10 years.
What specifically do you think was the "wrong question" and what do you think would be a "right question"?
To be true the issue is that they were inadequately specific questions and of an inadequate variety for regression, on top of a heaping dose of selection bias. Since you didn't post the questions, only the answers, I will go ahead and Jeopardy! it... "What is your Age?", "what is your gender?", "do you prefer slide-keyboards or virtual keyboards?", "essay portion worth 2/3 of your final grade".
Then there's the premise in your comment that the survey was "seeking out respondents who had used both a phone with a slideout keyboard and a phone with a virtual keyboard" which tells me that your survey may very well have gone in front of 10,000 respondents and found the 49 that even knew what a slideout keyboard was, skipping past the 9,951 that had never used one and were quite happy with their virtual keyboards. This is a bit of selection bias which will skew your statistics to the point of worthlessness.
What I wrote was: "Obviously that's too small of a sample to be very precise about the percentage of users that prefer slide-out keyboards (apart from the fact that Mechanical Turk users are unrepresentative of the general population in several ways), but it does mean that the near-extinction of slideout-keyboard phones in retail stores is probably not in proportion to what people actually want."
i.e., it was just a quick and dirty survey to show that the proportion of people who want slideout keyboard phones is not zero, like the stores are pretending that it is.
Don't use Mechanical Turk as a crutch; it's not that far from representative, and nonrepresentative samples are often just as useful, thanks to regression. The real problem is that you asked all the wrong questions. I suggest, if you want to gain *any* sort of ground on your quest to shake up the cell phone industry from the ground up by revealing what you think customers really want, is to read the Freakonomics books, and follow that up with a (well thought out) question to the authors. This sort of thing (mostly the situation where you insist on one thing via all available observations, when the opposite is true) is right up their alley. If you still think you are sitting on some sort of secret, start your own handset company, and get rich off of all the customers that are apparently being ignored.
Slashdot Mirror
but privacy, as you note, is pretty close to the bottom since your car location is most certainly other people's business as soon as you take it on a public road.
This is absolutely false. People can look at your car, yes, but that doesn't mean everything that happens in and outside your car isn't private. I'd rather have freedom and privacy than safety, and you'd think everyone in a country that's supposed to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave" would agree with me. I don't want the government having control over my vehicle, and all software on the vehicle should be 100% open source, and all hardware should be open as well. No black boxes, and no proprietary garbage. There's just too much room for abuse, and in a free country, that's all it should take to oppose it.
First, it's pretty obvious that jeffmeden was talking about privacy in terms of the car's location, not "everything that happens in and outside your car". Your comment doesn't show that his point is "absolutely false" unless you completely misread what he said.
Second, everything you do involves a tradeoff of privacy, safety, freedom and a dozen other things. If you go outside you lose some privacy; if you get in a car and drive in public you lose some privacy and some safety. The idea that you can be some sort of privacy and freedom absolutist who never trades either of them for anything is just nonsense.
He's obviously just trolling. People (red blooded Americans, no less) are gobbling up cars with OnStar and similar systems that have clearly advertised features of vehicle tracking AND remote control, with no clear precedent that government meddling isn't taking place, and yet the world continues to spin on its axis and bald eagles even continue to soar above the trees. If the only meaningful way someone can think to express freedom is having an untrackable car, then I take pity on them.
Why does the FBI get involved? is it because the events span multiple states, or because the banks have so much clout? If this had happened to google or microsoft, for example, would the FBI get involved?
Simply put, the FBI is the investigator of last resort. Local law enforcement (even in large cities like NYC where JPMC is based) are woefully ill-equipped to investigate this sort of thing.
"The submitter notes that this V2V communication would include transmission of a vehicle's location, which comes with privacy concerns"
Hardly a secret is it? It's the chuffing big bit of metal about to slam into your vehicle. Look out the windows and there it is.
But presently, it becomes a secret again after the impact (a secret that can only be coaxed out of the skidmarks and dents) that apparently 33,000 people a year are worth dying to keep... There are many concerns with this (like how to keep it secure and reliable) but privacy, as you note, is pretty close to the bottom since your car location is most certainly other people's business as soon as you take it on a public road.
This conclusion you have is because you're paranoid.
Modern cars already have wireless communication attached to their security systems. Government mandated backdoors wouldn't require a wide-ranging communications network to work.
Actually you probably mean backdoors wouldn't require a *new* wide-ranging communications network to work... The OnStar system (and others like it) already have their own nationwide communication system (the cellular phone network) to allow law enforcement access to vehicle data, AND the ability to disable the vehicle remotely. And you know what? It's because people *want* that feature:
"Stolen Vehicle Slowdown is a prime example of a safety service that our customers rely on us to provide,” said George Baker, emergency services outreach manager, OnStar. “We have a strong relationship with law enforcement that has allowed us to refine our processes, promote teamwork and more quickly recover stolen vehicles for our subscribers.”
The summary links to an article which has a link in it to the map which doesn't load.
What a waste of space. Why is this on Slashdot? Find a reliable source, and then post it.
Are you sure you're not censored???!!?!??!?!?!!1111zomg
But yes, the actual map is slashdotted
Why would that be better?
Bahahaha. Satire much?
But seriously, lots of large companies don't think employees need mobile devices in the first place but employees who feel pressured to be high value contributors will do it anyway because they feel it gives them a leg up on the other employees. Paying 1,000 more phone bills isn't a tempting proposition for most large orgs, so there will be fallout from this.
I can't remember the last time I saw a payphone in the wild.
The ghetto. Seriously, you know when you are in a bad neighborhood when you see a payphone. Probably explains why so many people say things like "gee all the payphones are gone!" thanks to their relatively privileged existence. I'm not judging, but that's how the class system in the USA works.
Even worse, how is the money distributed? Who determines the "worth" of a web site or other online resource, and then allocates them their cut?
The current free-market system with sites supported by ads isn't perfect, but it's like democracy - Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
One can imagine (but probably not implement) a system where an ISP would maintain a "client access system" that signaled to compatible web sites that the user was willing to pay for content services. The signal would provide how much the user is willing to pay (to allow for ISPs to maintain different tiers) and the web site would, in return, defer ads and other annoyances for users who were willing to pay enough. Leave it up to the sites to say how much that threshold is, and leave it up to the ISPs to set the tiers and track the usage (like they dont do these two things already?) and lastly, divvy up the money. The free market still has a say in what sites are visited and what users are willing to pay.
But then the problems roll in: malware that forces site usage in the background. Sites that take your money but don't give a higher quality of service... And last but probably not least: users who have no idea how a system this convoluted works at all, and make very poor spending decisions with their capital.
"From now on you are NOT to use your personal cellphones or other mobile devices for any work purposes. You will not be reimbursed. Use a payphone instead, and present all receipts to accounting for prompt reimbursement. Thank you for your help as we prioritize our cost metrics and structure our teamgroups toward innovative human-centered investment"
Boy are you in for a rude shock. Even a common place apendectomy has a mortality rate of about 2% last time I checked.
Have fun never having surgery for anything!!
You think the odds of surviving the appendectomy are low? Try surviving without one...
Yeah, except the one guy who was paid to read the summary didn't.
What better way to have truly objective reporting, than editors who have no idea what's even in the story before they greenlight it! It's the ultimate in fair and balanced journalism.
My balls it is. The only place I've ever seen it as such is on slashdot, and here twice.
Want to see it in action? Look no further than the home page of the world's sixth largest bank:
https://locator.chase.com/
Hover over "Business" and "Commercial" and you will note that their definition of those two classes relies on the MM suffix. I don't blame you for never having even imagined a context where millions of dollars was relevant, but you will find that it's a big world out there.
Moderation would work better if you could hear both sides. Let developers respond to a review like on Google Play.
Many people seem to use reviews as an alternative to contacting customer support. For legit problems there is some fairness in doing so. However there are times when a user is confused and the develop has no way to contact that user. It would also be useful for developers to respond indicating when a real problem is fixed.
Letting the developers worry about it seems like the only fair solution. Should there really be a market for apps that recreate other apps just a tiny bit better/shinier? If an app is really noteworthy, some venue outside the app store (blogs, tech news outlets, etc) will take notice and promote it.
Its not worse now than it's ever been in the past. Get the fuck over it
Everyone is waiting for this to be "Solved" just like 13 years ago, they were waiting for spam to be "solved" as the ratio of junk email to desirable email kept going up and up and up. Well, put everyone (just about) on the same email platform and presto, you have no more spam! A solution like that for trolling is perhaps forthcoming, but still a ways off. That doesn't stop people from sitting on their hands and wishing for it, though.
http://thebulletin.org/making-viruses-lab-deadlier-and-more-able-spread-accident-waiting-happen7374
Reading comprehension is such a lost art these days. It was the H1N1 virus that caused the pandemic, which the Chinese scientists used in their research; not the results of the Chinese research that caused the pandemic.
From the cited article:
a team of Chinese scientists to create a hybrid viral strain between the H5N1 avian influenza virus and the H1N1 human flu virus that triggered a pandemic in 2009 and claimed several thousand lives.
For those challenged individuals, this sentence fragment should be parsed as:
(a team of Chinese scientists) ... (create a hybrid viral strain) (BETWEEN) (the H5N1 avian influenza virus) AND (the H1N1 human flu virus that triggered a pandemic in 2009 and claimed several thousand lives).
There aren't enough modpoints, they should just let you edit TFS. Good thing the Slashdot moderators fact checked that juicy little detail. Apparently "Lasrick (2629253)" is beyond reproach.
Modern phones are extremely durable.
I used to think so, and then I started paying attention to the screens of those around me while traveling (airports should be renamed for the most common activity there... "stareatyourphonefor90minutesports") and it's appalling. Among those aged 16-24 (guessing) I counted 2/3 of them have phones with shattered screens. Not just a hairline crack or two, I mean a huge bulls-eye shatter covering most of the face, observable from a good 20 feet away. And they text and twitter and snapchat like it's not even there. Modern phones are indeed durable, if only for their ability to keep all those glass pieces together and somehow not cut up the fingers of the operator. Amazing, really.
... the traces of cocaine that can be found on every single U.S. treasury note.
Presumably the cocaine traces are thanks to this exact smuggling operation; someone gets clean money from their bank, buys some coke, the bill gets handed up and up and up the drug hierarchy and ends up in Mexico to be used mostly to pay gun runners for premium US goods, which then ends up back in circulation in the US. I wonder if they could not only find the money but deduce what kind of drug ring is behind it...
Last sentence. Semicolon, not comma.
hooked on semicolons; semicolon addict!
I've found that MANY hotels (as of two years ago anyway) seem to only have a t-1 line (symmetrical 1.x mbps at 4am being my best speed tests).
Many hotels (or at least the company they pay to manage their network, like Windstream) have at least a slight sense of service management, and cap single hosts to about a T1 worth at any given time. These days a 1.44Mbit downstream would be crushed after 2 users tried to get on Youtube at the same time.
I've found this matches my experience flying too.
Southwest charges very little, and it's not even worth it. But us air charges 2-3x as much and is a decent value ($4/hour about on a cross country flight).
Its a joke on Southwest because they are busy piping DirecTV to all the passengers (as a paid advertisement for DirecTV service) so even if the backhaul isn't saturated, you will have to fight for bandwidth on the WLAN.
France, US, Columbia, and Panama. Jungle diseases of workers was a huge problem at beginning.
What they dug the panama canal with:
http://www.corbisimages.com/im...
Modern version:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
See your mistake?
WTF? They dug the canal with rigs like this (posted in anther reply): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And to be true, the current equivalent is this beast: http://ritchiespecs.com/specif...
A pretty stark comparison but the Panama canal was not dug (the bulk of it anyway) by hand.
The unspoken assumption behind your comment (and much else on the page) is that it's important for 'open source' to be accepted by big business.
Why?
Because some things (for this thesis let's say it's a crypto algorithm) work much better when they are visible to all parties, and those with a vested interest commit themselves via development time instead of cash. If you need a good crypto algorithm and you pay a closed source company for it, either you or the company you paid had better employ an army of mathematicians in order to validate that the process is secure, otherwise it could have (probably does have) a flaw just waiting to be exploited. Your investment, as a business, can only go so far. With an open source solution, everyone can see the algorithm and offer their input on its efficacy.
Open Source is the ultimate economy of scale in the information business (driving cost per unit down while selling/utilizing more) so every business with even a modest investment in software should care. There are plenty of ways to innovate in closed ways (at least, ways proprietary to your company) while taking advantage of open source technologies. The problem (to expand on the original summary) is that most uninformed decision makers jump to the conclusion that if the software was developed for nothing, it's worth nothing and furthermore that anything they do with it will be worth nothing because their innovations will somehow get gobbled up by the open source monster, too. For someone who doesn't really add anything (companies trying to get by in niches, strongarming markets, exploiting cronyism, etc) there is plenty to fear. Meanwhile Google, Apple, Facebook, IBM, Cisco, etc would casually disagree (and gladly sell you some open source software).
Of course faster horses weren't an option. And what were the early cars, other than bare-bones "horseless carriages"? It's not as if the Model-T was a Ferrari in an age of wagons.
Consumers almost always choose "cheaper" when the price is significant. Designing the cheapest possible car, within the confines of the engineering of the day, seems like an obvious choice, and basically what they did.
That's based on the premise that the model T was less expensive than a horse (even after a few years of TCO) yet, they weren't... Consumers could have kept using horses, but chose to switch to cars in huge numbers because of other advantages (they could do things like travel farther distances, ignore daily maintenance, etc) that were not really obvious at the time. Sure, it's easy to look back and say "of course the car was popular, its *the car*" but that was not a sure statement in 1908, otherwise Ford wouldn't have been the only one in the USA doing it so cheaply/successfully for the better part of 10 years.
What specifically do you think was the "wrong question" and what do you think would be a "right question"?
To be true the issue is that they were inadequately specific questions and of an inadequate variety for regression, on top of a heaping dose of selection bias. Since you didn't post the questions, only the answers, I will go ahead and Jeopardy! it... "What is your Age?", "what is your gender?", "do you prefer slide-keyboards or virtual keyboards?", "essay portion worth 2/3 of your final grade".
Then there's the premise in your comment that the survey was "seeking out respondents who had used both a phone with a slideout keyboard and a phone with a virtual keyboard" which tells me that your survey may very well have gone in front of 10,000 respondents and found the 49 that even knew what a slideout keyboard was, skipping past the 9,951 that had never used one and were quite happy with their virtual keyboards. This is a bit of selection bias which will skew your statistics to the point of worthlessness.
What I wrote was: "Obviously that's too small of a sample to be very precise about the percentage of users that prefer slide-out keyboards (apart from the fact that Mechanical Turk users are unrepresentative of the general population in several ways), but it does mean that the near-extinction of slideout-keyboard phones in retail stores is probably not in proportion to what people actually want."
i.e., it was just a quick and dirty survey to show that the proportion of people who want slideout keyboard phones is not zero, like the stores are pretending that it is.
Don't use Mechanical Turk as a crutch; it's not that far from representative, and nonrepresentative samples are often just as useful, thanks to regression. The real problem is that you asked all the wrong questions. I suggest, if you want to gain *any* sort of ground on your quest to shake up the cell phone industry from the ground up by revealing what you think customers really want, is to read the Freakonomics books, and follow that up with a (well thought out) question to the authors. This sort of thing (mostly the situation where you insist on one thing via all available observations, when the opposite is true) is right up their alley. If you still think you are sitting on some sort of secret, start your own handset company, and get rich off of all the customers that are apparently being ignored.