This is supposed to be a news site. An article should therefore have something NEW in it. There is absolutely nothing NEW about this.

Wow, they discovered HSM only 40 years after it was introduced. Amazing.

What have they done that is illegal?

Completely wrong. Amazon and everyone else were NOT free to offer the books for a lower price, that is the whole point.

In the normal wholesale model, the retailer and wholesaler negotiate a price for the retailer to by the goods. The retailer can then retail those goods for whatever price they want. If some retailer wants a 30% profit on the item, another retailer can take 20% and beat them on price. That is competition.

In a normal, non-fixed, agency model the producer and retailer negotiate the markup. The producer sets the retail price and gives the retailer a cut of it. If the retailer takes a smaller cut, then the retail price they sell for can be lower. That is competition.

What Apple and the publishers did was make it so that no matter how little cut another retailer would take, the retail price was never below Apples price, and they ALWAYS got 30%. There is no opportunity at all for another retailer to beat Apple on price, and Apple has absolutely no risk because they always get their 30%. That is about as uncompetitive as you can get.

Only if you are dumb enough to think that the price to the consumer is related to the cost of production. Cost of production may set the minimum that a producer will sell for. The actual selling price is what people will pay. Pretty simple, actually.

You can set your own prices however you want. What you can not do, and Apple did, is make it so all your competitors must raise their prices to match yours.

It is called 'being an employee'. You trade in the ability to get rich for the relative safety of a steady paycheck.

Britain had 999 30 years before the US had 911. Your grandfather may have had something to do with 911, but he did not 'invent' it.

But the owner of those APIs (Novell) says it is OK.

Oh please. The reason the FDA cracked down on colloidial silver manufacturers has NOTHING to do with the eeebil drug companies and EVERYTHING to do with the fact that there is no proper scientific evidence showing it is safe and effective. Is there some special reason colloidial silver should be exempt from this requirement?

So do the work required to get it approved by the FDA. Sure it takes a lot of money, but you're the ones claiming that the money and the ability to recoup it is of no importance.

First, I am not assuming anything, I am just reading their document.

It seems there are some recent developments you may not have heard of. These are called stairs, ramps, elevators, and escalators. These new technologies allow places like Chicago and Disney World to have magical transportation systems 20ft in the air, without having to ever come to ground level. Other cities are even starting to use these amazing new things to put transportation systems under the ground! You should check it out.

Also, in the still-unread document, they list projected costs, including $700M for tunneling, and $1B for land and permitting. Where do you get this idiotic 'for free' idea?

Hence the sentence that says there is a tunnel through the mountain.

Someone else who didn't bother to read the proposal, but knows all about it. The references to gas pipelines are about construction techniques, not layout. The thing is proposed to be built on pylons 20 to 100 feet tall. All those dips and valleys and hills and streams just went away. There is a tunnel through a mountain that is too high.

Now that I look at it more, that math is a big WTF. The 'A' in that formula is not in units of 'G's, it is in m/s^2. Since 1G is about 9.8m/s^2, the correct formula is 10.78 = (166)^2/r or r=(166)^2/10.78, or 2.5km.

Instead of just assuming you know what they are doing, and using bad math to prove them wrong, why not actually READ the document and see what they are ACTUALLY proposing?

Read more than 2 pages. Pages 44-50 show the details, including the turning radii and the deviations from I-5.

I think your math is off. According to their whitepaper, the turning radius at 1220km/h (339m/s) is 23.5km. Plugging that into your formula gives a centripetal acceleration of 4.9m/s^2, or 0.5g.

While they are mostly following I-5, they deviate when necessary to smooth the turns. That is one of the reasons it is built on pylons.