And what government instituted among men is going to destroy something so potentially useful—to them, of course, not to the citizenry.

Your ideas intrigue me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Maybe I'm alone here, but I won't use Evolution until it supports recurring tasks. And since that particular bug has gone unclosed for over eleven years, I'm not holding my breath. Well, not anymore.

Minors are not held—legally—to the same standard. This is for their protection. The legal presumption is that the judgment of minors is not as sound as adults', and that therefore they cannot be held accountable to the same extent as an adult would be. Basically, the law believes that minors are too dumb and easily-influenced to know what they're doing. (We can argue about whether that's a valid belief, but that's a different argument.)

That's not the same as being able to "say anything they please without consequence."

It would kill the legal economy. The shadow economy would blossom. Say I'm a widget vendor, and the tax is 20%. You want to buy a widget. So I tell you, "Sure, hedwards, tell you what: if you pay cash, I'll only charge you 10% tax." I then, of course, keep no record of the transaction and pocket the 10%. Calls for some creative bookkeeping, but nothing out of the ordinary as these things go.

You mean besides the fact that they're minors and not held to the same standard as adults?

I'll stipulate for the purpose of this discussion that, of the people who know what the MPAA and RIAA are and what they've done, most believe those organization to be (at least on their way to becoming) obsolete. You can infer my argument from my caveat.

I was going to mention aphophasis, but that'd just be silly; so I won't.

It's all about context. Sure, Google delists sites all the time—for trying to game its algorithm. De-indexing a site in retaliation for some unrelated action is a different ball of wax.

They could do that, but it would be an amazingly stupid move, I think.

Google gained traction in the search engine world largely because they have an algorithm which ranks sites such that—theoretically, at least—the top listing is, by some measure, the best. Sites stand or fall on their own merits, which means that users (who have the eyeballs which are looking at Google's ads) can trust Google to give them relevant sites. If Google were to stop indexing a site—even somebody like the MPAA—that destroys that trust.

I don't know how it stands legally in the US, but lots of places I've seen have signs saying it's company policy to ask for ID when you make a credit card purchase. I've been asked to show my ID once, ever, for a credit card purchase (oddly, at a place I frequent regularly, and the cashier more than likely knew me by sight). It's just too much of a hassle to check it for every customer that comes through, I suppose.

I do get asked for ID when I buy things with checks—although the only time I write checks is out of my health savings account for prescription drugs, so there may be something else going on there.