What, the generic Windows driver wasn’t good enough…?

NP. Yes ABS is designed to avoid exactly that issue, essentially by implementing in a mechanical way what drivers used to do manually - pumping the brakes etc.

They’re “brakes” and it’s “braking”. Yes, I know the previous commenter got it wrong as well.

The usual problem with slamming on the brakes is that it causes the wheels to lock up and slide instead of slowing the vehicle down.

The way politicians and the political system nakedly serves the needs and interests of corporations and the wealthy, and not the average individual.

The way that the price you’re quoted invariably gets bumped up by various taxes.

The insane system that is tipping, including the fact that a lot of workers are so underpaid that they rely on tips to get by.

The incessant adverts on TV for medical products, particularly prescription drugs.

Relativity only applies to local reference frames and not to the recession rates of cosmologically distant objects.

I can’t find any reference that says it’s moving away from us at twice the speed of light, which would violate Relativity. The fact that it is further away from us in light years than the age of the universe in years, is due to the fact that the space itself is expanding.

It doesn’t. Gravity is caused by mass not spin. The planet’s rotation about it’s own axis will create a centrifugal effect that offsets gravity, but the effect is negligible for anything rotating as slow as planets.

I studied Relativity at university as part of combined Physics/Maths degree, but please feel free to continue entertaining us with your popular magazine-based learnings.

If the gravity were strong enough and the source close enough then the tidal force would absolutely be strong enough to simultaneously crush you and rip you apart. The same effect gives rise to tides on this planet, hence the name.

I was thinking of the Equivalence Principle:

the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass, and Albert Einstein’s observation that the gravitational “force” as experienced locally while standing on a massive body (such as the Earth) is the same as the pseudo-force experienced by an observer in a non-inertial (accelerated) frame of reference.

I think General Relativity is based on the idea that a frame of reference that’s in freefall is equivalent to one that in a gravity free region of space (at least that was one of Einstein’s Gedankenexperiments that led him to his theory of GR).

Having said that, in reality a sufficiently strong gravitational field will cause a tidal effect, which will crush you along one axis and pull you apart along another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Leah_Betts

This one, every time. Imagine buying a product or service for an agreed price, and then being guilt-tripped into having to pay 20%, or more, on top because the owners don’t pay their staff enough salary to survive on. It should be fucking illegal. Pay your staff a proper salary and charge your clients the price you published on your menu/price-list etc. Running a business isn’t a god-given right, and if you can’t do it without screwing your employees over, then you’re not capable of running a business period. You should bugger off and let someone who is capable, and who isn’t an empathy vacuum have a go.

That was my initial reaction at first as well. However as far as I can tell, natural products are not patentable, unless the product in question has been modified, manipulated etc, to produce something that is deemed to have been significantly changed.

So, in the US, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that human DNA, being a naturally occurring product, cannot be patented. However, it also ruled that complementary DNA, essentially DNA that has been extracted and then modified in a lab, can be patented.

Thanks for clarifying. Although I don’t agree with your doctor friend from an ethical standpoint, the point about natural products not being patentable is an interesting one and hadn’t occurred to me before.

Medicine is any substance that has a demonstrable healthcare effect (demonstrated through double blind tests and not some rando’s anecdote). That includes natural substances.

To put it another way, medicine and natural substances are not two mutually exclusive (i.e. disjoint) sets, as you and/or your doctor friend appear to be implying.