The left seat in an airliner has no better access to any control than the right seat, with the usual exception of the 'tiller,' which is only used to steer the plane during taxiing. Which is the last thing your neophyte pilot probably should be worrying about.

I think with "should we bail out wall street" you have already decided what the straw poll should return.

On the other hand, if you just open the bun up all the way and then close it back again *prior to* toasting, you achieve exactly the same thing without having to resort to chicken wire and bolt cutters. But I'm no mad scientist.

You have made the mistaken assumption that I as a consumer welcome calls from people I don't know who are interested in transacting business with me while I am in my own home. I do not. If you are not operating under this mistaken assumption when you call me, you are merely being rude. You can justify your rudeness by pointing out that none of your potential clients has told you beforehand that your interruption of his homelife is unwanted. This is something, of course, they can't do except by placing themselves on a 'do not call' list.

The telemarketer, to not think of himself as rude, must assume that all those who are not on such a list have in effect let it be known beforehand that they do not mind interruptions of their homelife. Obviously this is not the case. So telemarketers, on some level, know they are being potentially rude. What percentage of callers does a telemarketer think he has irritated by his calls? Surely a lower percentage than those who are actually irritated; after all, many people can hide their feelings, even from telemarketers. But call it 50%; a telemarketer irritates 50% of those he calls. Does a telmarketer balance the realization that he's been rude to 50% of the people he's called by believing that he's done a real service (or at least hasn't irritated) the other 50%?

Or does it have to even be 50%? Surely if 10%, or 5%, or even 1% of those I the telemarketer call realize some kind of benefit (and by that I mean end up giving the my company money), surely that's worth the rudeness the other 90 or 99% of those cold-called have to live through. By giving this 1% a valuable service, the frustration that all the other people who did not want the valuable service (who did not even want to *know* about the valuable service) go through is worth it.

And it's not like the irritation and frustration amount to much, anyway. Several seconds in a day, at most. Unless one counts all the *other* calls by other telemarketers that eat up time, and the amount of time after calls that people spend trying to push that irritated feeling into the background. But I am not my brother's keeper, so I can't really be concerned about the additive irritation my call creates. It's just not my problem.

And if I didn't call, if telemarketing didn't exist, how would potential customers know about my product? How would potential customers even know they have a *need* for the product? Is it even ethical to allow a rube, I mean a potential customer, to walk around, carefree, completely ignorant of the fact that there's this great product out there that would help him greatly in some way that he hasn't even thought about?
Because traditional advertising of products in the media just doesn't flush out the rubes, I mean potential customers, nearly as effectively as it used to. And it's so much cheaper to have a machine interrupt homelife in a zillion homes, looking for those who didn't even know they were lost, than it is to use traditional advertising; so much cheaper. And those lowered costs can eventually be potentially passed to the ignorant customers that we find over the phone. So you can see that any supposed rudeness derived from my unwanted interruption of people's lives, while regrettable, is vital to the overall economy. Also world peace. So it's win-win!

And that's how cognitive dissonance works.

One can justify one's existence in many different ways. I'm happy to see that at least one telemarketer has taken cognitive dissonance to an entirely new level. That's very healthy for him. Where my health is concerned, I'll continue to hang up on these people who've made a business case and livelihood out of the art of rudeness as soon as I recognize who they are.

"Now, if that’s because you’re from the states and your view on telemarketing is somewhat tainted from the wide array of unserious and unscrouplous companies doing it over there and lack insight in how the Swedish telemarketing world looks like, that’s a question I’ll leave for you to answer."

I think you can pretty much assume 99.99% of people on earth have no insight into the Swedish telemarketing world. Let that assumption guide your responses.

Flawed article. It takes a safety of flight issue and transforms it into a medical/empowerment/victimization issue. As both an airline pilot and a registered nurse, the thinly-veiled charge that this airline is somehow stepping on the civil rights of this mother and child disturbs me. The crew simply could not legally take off with the child unbuckled and/or poorly supervised. The fact that there are those who want to ignore this and transform this incident into something it's not both offends and depresses me.

Patrick just took the fun out of belittling the turtle man and southerners. But we still have the French!

It took me awhile to realize that was English instead of some odd language that sounded almost like English.

That reminds me of a similar completely-unlooked-for wonderfully good deed on my part, when I took out the garbage without being asked. The happy tears and thank-you's were all I needed to think about doing it again some day. IT'S ALL ABOUT MANAGING EXPECTATIONS, PEOPLE.

It looks exactly like a snake in the same way that a guy who's spray-painted the bald spot on his head looks exactly like he has hair.

To those who think it's the same as a snake: you'll never see one up close, so you can afford your ignorance. Be my guest. It's not a position that can be defended, though, beyond the "I have no idea what I'm talking about, I don't care who knows it, and I think it's stupid you know more about it than I do" defense.

But again, be my guest.

It's not a snake in the same way that a person born without arms or legs is not a snake. I hope that cleared it up for you.

Carl missed in his bid to regularly (or even irregularly) split infinitives.

I love the way it sounds like a stampede toward the end.

Of *course* you can judge when it's night by the outside cam. Night is when the sun isn't there. It's night all the time there right now. I suppose you can't judge when it's noon, but that's a whole different thing.