Standard Oil and Bell says otherwise, in different ways.

The first one is just a matter of "are you big enough, ruthless enough and no rules stop you, you can get rid of competition that way".

The second one - Bell - is interesting. For some services, like telephony, if you don't have government regulation you will get a natural monopoly. The phone companies would earn more money if they merged - no need to ever compete on price, or duplicate infrastructure. The price would be based on the value to consumers, not on the marginal cost of providing it as in a perfect market. And competition would be hard to come by - refuse to receive and make calls to this network. Knowing this, a competetive network would never appear in the first place.

That statement requires you to define "better". An LP, with all its limitations (a CD can contain all the information on the LP, and more), can still sound better to someone who likes that particular distortion. Or has a deeper experience because of the entire ritual of listening to an LP, caused by other limitations - cleaning it before playing, listening to the entire record in the sequence the artist/producer wanted it, look at the cover etc.

Most of the point would be to go from MP3 or AAC to lossless. While a 320 kbps mp3 made today will sound far better than a 128 kbps mp3 made fifteen years ago, it still a lossy algorithm that tries to remove sound most people will miss the least. That doesn't mean it's not gone.

Going from CD quality to 24/96 would be another matter, and not likely to bring much, if any, benefit.

A virus isn't living in the first place.

The owners agreed with Cook - the right wing loonie didn't get support from the rest of the shareholders. Which makes sense, as Apple needs not only to have the current premium products associated with its brand, but align with its potential customers - and above all, avoid really bad associations. Or just being boring.

Image is very important for premium brands - and that's what the majority of the shareholders wants Tim Cook to continue to cultivate, alongside its innovation focus.

What about Windows Phone? Just because you haven't seen one, it doesn't mean they don't exist. People who thought the same about unicorns have been proven wrong.

Another big advantage: Since you don't have to enter it as often, you can use a password rather than a pin. I exchanged my 4 digit pin code for an alphanumeric password of length 9 after I got a 5s. Thus, it has increased safety for my phone.

Indeed. The "price of Kinect" now is probably around 200$. Without the Kinect, the consoles are very similar - except for the XBox One being slower. Thus, if there was no Kinect they'd have to set the price be quite a bit lower than the PS4.

"Patents"..

As far as insurance goes - you only need to have liability insurance. If you want to insure your car for theft and damages, that's voluntary - but being able to pay for damages caused by you isn't. And as Norway is a rather small country, rather than a federation of states, expect it to have information and powers that you'd usually think would would be separated by "federal" and "state". You get a sticker every year showing that the yearly road fee is paid, and that liability insurance is OK.

Wealth tax has some bad side effects - like most taxes - and fortunately, the new government is working towards removing it. However, the Norwegian tax system is in general more sane than the US system - lower rates and less loop holes - so it isn't all bad. And more importantly, Norway has a healthy budget surplus - the key to any sane tax cut.

The car must be registered and insured. Also, Norway has a wealth tax and you'd have to list it there. Of course, you could try to find a way around all of these but the harder you try, the more likely they'd get for money laundering etc. instead if they actually caught you.

Apple's Time Machine can use full disk encryption. You need a password/passphrase to be able to read from the disk later, which is rather useful. If someone steals my iMac and my onsite backup, they can not access any data - the system, as well as the backup, are both encrypted.

Verbing weirds language.

Mandela was removed from the US terrorist list in 2008. However, he had been able to travel in and out of the US the entire time - and had even received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George Bush in 2002 - so this looks more like an oversight than anything else.

The reason is not the recoup the development costs - the reason is Price Discrimination: The ability to charge a different price in different markets. The optimal price for Windows in the US is much different than the optimal price for Windows in China - and if you can charge different prices here, Microsoft will make more money. Restricting language change is one mechanism to avoid Americans paying Chinese prices.