Apple is over 30 now. Of the four examples given in the OP only one might qualify as real innovation.

True this. Ironically, if we had a government that was actually responsive to us we would most likely have brought it down by now.

This is what I've found to be frightening about his work. I 'get' a lot of it. No drugs, no altered states. It just makes sense to me.

This worries me sometimes.

Seconded. I'd mod you up if I could. If this does pass we'll essentially be nationalizing the newspapers. Didn't we decide that that was a bad idea with the phone company? Of course, given how that turned out I'm not certain if that's a condemnation or an endorsement.

We could certainly do worse than the BBC though and we likely would.

I do suspect the demographics you use here though. I don't really see that much difference between the age groups.

Probably true. It has become a media society and it has yet to fully grasp the consequences of that.

Ahh, yes, and I could have said they're people once more and made a chorus line.

Blah.

No. What we need is a dose of reality. The police generally aren't abusive thugs and they aren't paragons either. They're people and people and people sometimes abuse power when tempted to do so. The problem is the attitude we seem to have that there can be only two sides to every problem. Either you are for police power or for the criminals, or so the 'thinking' goes. As long as we have that choice we'll go for police power even past the point where it's really wise to do so.

They come from both sides, in my experience. They just tend to focus on different targets in the early stages. True leftists do in fact defend civil liberties as do true conservatives, unfortunately it's quite likely they both may be a minority in their own movements.

This is true, and it is, in fact, a significant part of what drove people away from the left in the 70's and 80's. Tolerance is fine and good but tolerating people who view tolerance as weakness to be exploited in any and all ways available is unwise.