You can't put a restriction or surveillance on any citizen without court order.
This right is protected by every EU country constitution.
Sure you can. It depends entirely upon the definition of "surveillance", and also whether or not a government bothers to enforce its own Constitution. Furthermore, as is happening here in the U.S. with increasing regularity, "Constitutional exceptions" can be granted. Don't depend upon government following its own rules. That's gotten more than one country in trouble.
You said this was a fair compromise; I say it is not, because at the end of the day it will still affect non-infringing uses and it will not just affect individuals who are accused of infringement. The copyright lobbyists come in demanding that we cede Internet freedom because they do not know how to deal with the vast amount of copyright infringement that occurs on the Internet, and we are supposed to believe that ceding any amount of our freedom to them is a fair compromise? It sounds more like the copyright industry gets more power, and everyone else loses their freedom -- how is that a compromise?
That is correct. What the GP fails to understand (or perhaps understands all too well) is that we aren't dealing with enlightened capitalists here, in fact we aren't dealing with enlightened anything. The copyright cartels (that is, the major copyright holders, the ones who rip off their customers and artists alike to the tune of billions of dollars every year, and fund RIAA/MPAA/CRIA-like groups worldwide) are organizations who must be resisted at every turn, on principle. That's because they are no more than criminal gangs who do not care who gets hurt, what social and economic harm they cause, as long as they get their way. Their efforts for the past few decades alone have proven that to the nth degree. These are bad people. Period. End of statement. Compromising with them is like compromising with terrorists: it only ends well for the terrorist.
The arrogance of these corporations is just beyond belief: they act is if they are some multinational treasure that must be preserved at all costs. They are not. Matter of fact, if you want a shining example of overarching corporate greed, you need look no further. What makes them so dangerous is that they are willing to spend enormous sums to buy any government, any elected or unelected official, if it offers even the slimmest possibility of regaining control of content distribution. That's really what we should be up in arms about, this idea that corporations should be allowed to influence public policy-making and rewrite core elements of multiple legal systems. Reese said it best: "It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop." These guys are out to terminate any last vestige of logic or reason in copyright.
Personally, I think it's high time that the entire notion of copyright and its legitimate function in society (any society) be revisited. Certainly here in the U.S., copyright law has turned into an abomination rivalled only by our equally drain-bamaged patent system. I do not know what the EU's stance on copyright is, insofar as why it is suffered to exist in the first place, but in the United States our Constitution mandates that it is to "promote the advancement of the useful arts and sciences." Yes, you've all heard that quote before, but I believe it demonstrates the disconnect between what the supreme law of our land requires of copyright, and what it is actually doing to us now. And this all occurred because a corrupt Congress, at the behest of certain corporations (many of whom aren't even based in the U.S.) turned copyright into a protectionist nightmare.
Granted, this discussion is about Europe, but what I want everyone to understand is that it is the same organizations that are behind all of this. Vivendi, Universal, BMG, Disney and the rest of the big boys. These multinational operations are doing their level best to impose a restrictive copyright regime over as much of the globe as they possibly can: if that manages to retard progress, limit the utility of the Internet and cost taxpayers billions... well.
There is no compromise possible with these people. Look at what is before our Congress right now, with SOPA and the Protect-IP acts (and let us not forget ACTA.) Do you really want that crap promulgating itself to Europe? Because if it succeeds here, I guarantee our government (under the mind-altering influence of big media's bribe money) will be strong-arming Europe to support similar regulation. Guaranteed.
eah the government is dysfunctional, no dispute there, and it took the coordinated efforts of both parties (really a single Statist Party with two factions) to make it that way. After you keep trying one thing hundreds of times and it keeps failing over and over again, it's time to try something different.
True. And the definition of a fanatic someone who sticks to his guns... whether they're loaded or not.
Bushels of these fanbois are known to make nearly every discussion they participate in unbearably annoying for people who don't give a fuck about what logo is on their hardware as long as it gets the job done.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Some of my friends are diehard Apple users, and we've just had to learn to agree not only to disagree, but to simply not discuss Apple products at all. Kinda like politics and religion, when you get right down to it.
You, sir, *totally* failed at reader comprehension!
JWW said, in a nutshell, that Google should buy a label. Not the RIAA.
No, you failed. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. The GP said:
Why shouldn't Apple, Google, and Amazon get their OWN recording artists and cut out the completely and utterly useless RIAA middlemen?
My point is that the RIAA their ilk are not the middlemen, nor are they in charge of the middlemen. Quite the opposite in fact: they are just so-called "industry trade groups", collections of litigious fucks whose only real job is to promote the label's twisted view of copyright, lobby various governments for special favors, and sue their customers into oblivion. The music studios (who are the actual copyright holders, not the RIAA) are, in fact, the middlemen.
That said, I agree with the GP. Somebody with some semblance of scruples needs take over this industry. And I don't mean the likes of Apple Computer or Amazon either: neither of those outfits is any better than the existing "middlemen."
You'd be paying about 12$ to store a couple of bits in the cloud.
Rackspace is offering cloud storage for something like 15c per gigabyte. Storage is not the issue. Bandwidth is not the issue (especially if a Torrent-like swarming protocol were implemented for music distribution.) The issue is a once-dominant oligopoly that hasn't come to terms with reality.
It's beginning to down on your average music buyer paying ten or twelve bucks for a few megabytes of data and ending up with nothing but a few files on disc is a rip off. People were more vulnerable to overcharging when they were receiving a nice plastic jewel case with a shiny plastic disc inside. But now the vast array of middlemen, suppliers, and music stores has all but disappeared in favor of a bank of FTP servers. And those are dirt cheap, comparatively speaking.
Another problem is that artists sign up with one label, and end up with another. Did all the artists who signed up with Rykodisc agree to having their songs owner by Warner?
Yes, if they didn't have their own lawyer go over the fine print first.
Just because a person has a Russian last name does not make them an oligarch. According to wikipedia: "Born in the Soviet Union, he attended University in Moscow. He emigrated with his family from Russia to the U.S. in 1978, and received a masters in computer science from Columbia University and an MBA degree from Harvard Business School in 1989. In the West, he is known as Len Blavatnik."
That is hardly the profile of an oligarch. Sounds more like an American who made it big. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_oligarch).
True. But then again, he wasn't born here so that makes him a Russian Oligarch. Or something.
The World Wide Web is, and always was. But then again, the Web is just a specific set of protocols designed to serve the browser. The Internet itself just schleps packets from here to there, and there's a hell of a lot more stuff on the Internet than your browser will ever see.
Why shouldn't Apple, Google, and Amazon get their OWN recording artists and cut out the completely and utterly useless RIAA middlemen?
While I agree with your point, keep in mind that the RIAA and the content cartel that funds them are not the same thing. The RIAA in the U.S., the CRIA in Canada, and similar front organizations worldwide are just attack dogs: lawyers paid to do what their lords and masters tell them to do. The RIAA is not a middleman: the likes of Universal, BMG, Vivendi and others are the middlemen.
Well, they wouldn't be in that position if they'd tried actually innovating over the last decade instead of running around shrieking about piracy. Instead they let another company monopolise their newest distribution channel.
If they want a strong competitor to Apple, they're going to have to play nicely with others and somehow beat Apple on prices or features, neither of which they're likely to let Google do.
They wouldn't be in that position if they'd had the wit to realize that the end of the shiny-plastic-disc era was upon them, and had worked with Shawn Fanning and Napster rather than suing them into oblivion. They had their chance to seize control of content distribution on the Internet... and blew it. And what happens when industries miss opportunities like that is that they die. Unfortunately, like SCO, like every zombie flick ever made, these guys just keep coming back and causing even more damage because they still don't get it.
There's a feeling of insecurity that comes from confronting the fact that other people know a lot more more than you do about how the world works
Yep. And the proper geek reaction to that is to perceive said individuals as a. worthy of knowing and b. having useful knowledge or ideas that should be absorbed.
That is how to look at someone who maintains knowledge or skills that are outside or beyond your own. Fear and derision are the province of truly tiny minds, regardless of their native intelligence. The sad thing is, most people are capable of a lot more than that for which they give themselves credit.
THAT is why I will never use an iPhone or anything else Apple produces. A culture that celebrates ignorance is contemptible. A person who wears technical incompetence like a medal of honour is a moron.
My dad is hopeless with computers, but he's an artist with an arc welder. When I was a young man it was obvious to me that he was quietly disappointed with my incompetence at welding. I wasn't proud of it; I practised till I was merely not very good. Years later, I see dad feeling incompetent with his computer and I tell him "Forgive me if I sometimes sound exasperated. I'm sure you feel the same way watching me butcher a welding job."
You can't be good at everything, but a lack of skill is never commendable.
It was that way between me and my father with math. He was also always better with computers than me as well. So yeah, I was a continuous source of exasperation.
I find the boss's ass claim on the line is usually less of a percentage compared to mine. Then add the ripple effect to business decisions, I'm the one tossed around the most by bad decisions made higher up.
Yes, well, that's business as usual. But at least, if you have his fuck-ups properly documented (and make sure he knows that you have him by the short and curly) it can make the difference between a black mark and an updated resume, if you know what I mean.
The problem is, there are too many powerful entities (Gates, Ballmer, Hell & Co, for one) who see a strategic advantage in continually resurrecting this particular corpse.
The McBride of Frankenstein?:)
Well, if you consider Microsoft to be an unstoppable abomination that stumbles around crushing everything in its path, all the while moaning, "Linux... baaad!" then yeah. Pretty much.
For me it demonstrates a serious problem, in that a complainant who has no evidence to back up their claims is permitted literally years to gobble up time. There should be a mandatory one week preliminary hearing in such a case where both sides have to provide a reasonably large body of their evidence, and if they cannot, the case is dismissed. If you have evidence, you should be able to summarize it in the space of a week.
Depends. One week simply might not be enough time to determine the merits of a case that involves thousands of pages of contracts and involves multiple facts of the law. If SCO had happened to be in the right, we'd would have wanted them to have every chance of success.
Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that the legal system doesn't have any real defense against large-scale corporate abusers. The can bury their opponents and the court in paperwork. At a certain point, though, I agree. Enough is enough.
In 100 years when Linux rules all, the name SCO will be uttered in hushed tones like an unmentionably profane word, told to naughty children by mothers to warn them against Bad Things, and the generic name for products that burned into a black hole of public hatred... "did you see that BeegleSearch did a SCO?".
Time for the cricket bat to put this zombie down for good.
"You mean Valdemort?"
"Shhh!"
No doubt your right. Sort of a negative take on "Doing an Apple."
Broken? I don't know: we give everyone a chance to have their day in court... multiple chances even. You don't want justice (or whatever passes for it nowadays) to be too swift. But you're right: SCO had their chance, they blew it (because they were wrong) and they should just go away. Fact is, had they been left to themselves, they'd have been cremated years ago. The problem is, there are too many powerful entities (Gates, Ballmer, Hell & Co, for one) who see a strategic advantage in continually resurrecting this particular corpse.
I'm sure the Nazgûl are probably thinking "Oh, please. Not again!" right about now.
Nerd v. Goth v. Jock is not always something that a person controls, rather than something a person is.
People grow up to be who they are. I don't care whether they're a nerd or a goth or a jock or black or pink or Andorian. I care about whether they are generous, about whether they will have my back, about whether they have knowledge or spirit that lets us be more together than we each are separately, and about whether our personalities mesh.
Asking whether nerds are cool is just recycling the problematic classifications that got us here in the first place.
It's cyclic. When I grew up, being technically-inclined was respected: you had understanding that others did not, and even if you didn't follow all social norms to the letter you were tolerated, because if nothing else you were useful. At some point that changed: people with "book larnin'" were to be feared, derided, discouraged from pursuing their interests and encouraged to be more "socially acceptable."
That's problematic at best. Indeed, for any nation that wishes to maintain scientific and technological preeminence that is a terrible mistake. The citizens of this country need to wake up and realize that it's the nerds that brought us out of the caves, that it was the nerds that figured out how the Universe works, the goddamn NERDS who taught us how to build things that people in other countries would buy so that we could all be gainfully employed. Maybe when our entire industrial base collapses they'll begin to understand that mistreating the people in your society who have good minds and are actually capable of making something out of them is fundamentally stupid.
Fact is, the world has largely proven incapable of doing that very well, which is why so very many extremely bright and talented nerds came to the United States in the past couple hundred years: we would let them use their brains, create ideas, technologies and wealth, and not beat them up too much because they were different.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't put a restriction or surveillance on any citizen without court order. This right is protected by every EU country constitution.
Sure you can. It depends entirely upon the definition of "surveillance", and also whether or not a government bothers to enforce its own Constitution. Furthermore, as is happening here in the U.S. with increasing regularity, "Constitutional exceptions" can be granted. Don't depend upon government following its own rules. That's gotten more than one country in trouble.
You said this was a fair compromise; I say it is not, because at the end of the day it will still affect non-infringing uses and it will not just affect individuals who are accused of infringement. The copyright lobbyists come in demanding that we cede Internet freedom because they do not know how to deal with the vast amount of copyright infringement that occurs on the Internet, and we are supposed to believe that ceding any amount of our freedom to them is a fair compromise? It sounds more like the copyright industry gets more power, and everyone else loses their freedom -- how is that a compromise?
That is correct. What the GP fails to understand (or perhaps understands all too well) is that we aren't dealing with enlightened capitalists here, in fact we aren't dealing with enlightened anything. The copyright cartels (that is, the major copyright holders, the ones who rip off their customers and artists alike to the tune of billions of dollars every year, and fund RIAA/MPAA/CRIA-like groups worldwide) are organizations who must be resisted at every turn, on principle. That's because they are no more than criminal gangs who do not care who gets hurt, what social and economic harm they cause, as long as they get their way. Their efforts for the past few decades alone have proven that to the nth degree. These are bad people. Period. End of statement. Compromising with them is like compromising with terrorists: it only ends well for the terrorist.
... well.
The arrogance of these corporations is just beyond belief: they act is if they are some multinational treasure that must be preserved at all costs. They are not. Matter of fact, if you want a shining example of overarching corporate greed, you need look no further. What makes them so dangerous is that they are willing to spend enormous sums to buy any government, any elected or unelected official, if it offers even the slimmest possibility of regaining control of content distribution. That's really what we should be up in arms about, this idea that corporations should be allowed to influence public policy-making and rewrite core elements of multiple legal systems. Reese said it best: "It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop." These guys are out to terminate any last vestige of logic or reason in copyright.
Personally, I think it's high time that the entire notion of copyright and its legitimate function in society (any society) be revisited. Certainly here in the U.S., copyright law has turned into an abomination rivalled only by our equally drain-bamaged patent system. I do not know what the EU's stance on copyright is, insofar as why it is suffered to exist in the first place, but in the United States our Constitution mandates that it is to "promote the advancement of the useful arts and sciences." Yes, you've all heard that quote before, but I believe it demonstrates the disconnect between what the supreme law of our land requires of copyright, and what it is actually doing to us now. And this all occurred because a corrupt Congress, at the behest of certain corporations (many of whom aren't even based in the U.S.) turned copyright into a protectionist nightmare.
Granted, this discussion is about Europe, but what I want everyone to understand is that it is the same organizations that are behind all of this. Vivendi, Universal, BMG, Disney and the rest of the big boys. These multinational operations are doing their level best to impose a restrictive copyright regime over as much of the globe as they possibly can: if that manages to retard progress, limit the utility of the Internet and cost taxpayers billions
There is no compromise possible with these people. Look at what is before our Congress right now, with SOPA and the Protect-IP acts (and let us not forget ACTA.) Do you really want that crap promulgating itself to Europe? Because if it succeeds here, I guarantee our government (under the mind-altering influence of big media's bribe money) will be strong-arming Europe to support similar regulation. Guaranteed.
eah the government is dysfunctional, no dispute there, and it took the coordinated efforts of both parties (really a single Statist Party with two factions) to make it that way. After you keep trying one thing hundreds of times and it keeps failing over and over again, it's time to try something different.
True. And the definition of a fanatic someone who sticks to his guns ... whether they're loaded or not.
Bushels of these fanbois are known to make nearly every discussion they participate in unbearably annoying for people who don't give a fuck about what logo is on their hardware as long as it gets the job done.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Some of my friends are diehard Apple users, and we've just had to learn to agree not only to disagree, but to simply not discuss Apple products at all. Kinda like politics and religion, when you get right down to it.
A truly closed mind is a remarkable artifact.
We are in violent agreement that AMD's ownership claim wasn't disputed.
How does one "violently agree"? Is that like angry sex?
Automated turret
A propane flamer mounted underneath. Anyone tries to steal the thing gets his feet burned off.
a "Made in the USA" sticker.
Why would you say that?
You, sir, *totally* failed at reader comprehension!
JWW said, in a nutshell, that Google should buy a label. Not the RIAA.
No, you failed. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. The GP said:
Why shouldn't Apple, Google, and Amazon get their OWN recording artists and cut out the completely and utterly useless RIAA middlemen?
My point is that the RIAA their ilk are not the middlemen, nor are they in charge of the middlemen. Quite the opposite in fact: they are just so-called "industry trade groups", collections of litigious fucks whose only real job is to promote the label's twisted view of copyright, lobby various governments for special favors, and sue their customers into oblivion. The music studios (who are the actual copyright holders, not the RIAA) are, in fact, the middlemen.
That said, I agree with the GP. Somebody with some semblance of scruples needs take over this industry. And I don't mean the likes of Apple Computer or Amazon either: neither of those outfits is any better than the existing "middlemen."
You'd be paying about 12$ to store a couple of bits in the cloud.
Rackspace is offering cloud storage for something like 15c per gigabyte. Storage is not the issue. Bandwidth is not the issue (especially if a Torrent-like swarming protocol were implemented for music distribution.) The issue is a once-dominant oligopoly that hasn't come to terms with reality.
It's beginning to down on your average music buyer paying ten or twelve bucks for a few megabytes of data and ending up with nothing but a few files on disc is a rip off. People were more vulnerable to overcharging when they were receiving a nice plastic jewel case with a shiny plastic disc inside. But now the vast array of middlemen, suppliers, and music stores has all but disappeared in favor of a bank of FTP servers. And those are dirt cheap, comparatively speaking.
Another problem is that artists sign up with one label, and end up with another. Did all the artists who signed up with Rykodisc agree to having their songs owner by Warner?
Yes, if they didn't have their own lawyer go over the fine print first.
They need to Czech their work.
Yep, rather than just Russian it out the door.
Just because a person has a Russian last name does not make them an oligarch. According to wikipedia: "Born in the Soviet Union, he attended University in Moscow. He emigrated with his family from Russia to the U.S. in 1978, and received a masters in computer science from Columbia University and an MBA degree from Harvard Business School in 1989. In the West, he is known as Len Blavatnik." That is hardly the profile of an oligarch. Sounds more like an American who made it big. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_oligarch).
True. But then again, he wasn't born here so that makes him a Russian Oligarch. Or something.
Now a days internet pretty much is http.
The World Wide Web is, and always was. But then again, the Web is just a specific set of protocols designed to serve the browser. The Internet itself just schleps packets from here to there, and there's a hell of a lot more stuff on the Internet than your browser will ever see.
Why shouldn't Apple, Google, and Amazon get their OWN recording artists and cut out the completely and utterly useless RIAA middlemen?
While I agree with your point, keep in mind that the RIAA and the content cartel that funds them are not the same thing. The RIAA in the U.S., the CRIA in Canada, and similar front organizations worldwide are just attack dogs: lawyers paid to do what their lords and masters tell them to do. The RIAA is not a middleman: the likes of Universal, BMG, Vivendi and others are the middlemen.
not a giant player who dictates terms to THEM...
Well, they wouldn't be in that position if they'd tried actually innovating over the last decade instead of running around shrieking about piracy. Instead they let another company monopolise their newest distribution channel.
If they want a strong competitor to Apple, they're going to have to play nicely with others and somehow beat Apple on prices or features, neither of which they're likely to let Google do.
They wouldn't be in that position if they'd had the wit to realize that the end of the shiny-plastic-disc era was upon them, and had worked with Shawn Fanning and Napster rather than suing them into oblivion. They had their chance to seize control of content distribution on the Internet ... and blew it. And what happens when industries miss opportunities like that is that they die. Unfortunately, like SCO, like every zombie flick ever made, these guys just keep coming back and causing even more damage because they still don't get it.
There's a feeling of insecurity that comes from confronting the fact that other people know a lot more more than you do about how the world works
Yep. And the proper geek reaction to that is to perceive said individuals as a. worthy of knowing and b. having useful knowledge or ideas that should be absorbed.
That is how to look at someone who maintains knowledge or skills that are outside or beyond your own. Fear and derision are the province of truly tiny minds, regardless of their native intelligence. The sad thing is, most people are capable of a lot more than that for which they give themselves credit.
THAT is why I will never use an iPhone or anything else Apple produces. A culture that celebrates ignorance is contemptible. A person who wears technical incompetence like a medal of honour is a moron.
My dad is hopeless with computers, but he's an artist with an arc welder. When I was a young man it was obvious to me that he was quietly disappointed with my incompetence at welding. I wasn't proud of it; I practised till I was merely not very good. Years later, I see dad feeling incompetent with his computer and I tell him "Forgive me if I sometimes sound exasperated. I'm sure you feel the same way watching me butcher a welding job."
You can't be good at everything, but a lack of skill is never commendable.
It was that way between me and my father with math. He was also always better with computers than me as well. So yeah, I was a continuous source of exasperation.
I find the boss's ass claim on the line is usually less of a percentage compared to mine. Then add the ripple effect to business decisions, I'm the one tossed around the most by bad decisions made higher up.
Yes, well, that's business as usual. But at least, if you have his fuck-ups properly documented (and make sure he knows that you have him by the short and curly) it can make the difference between a black mark and an updated resume, if you know what I mean.
(*Pulls off ScrewMaster's mask*)
Captain Obvious! (*facepalm*) I should have known!
Hey, I already apologized for that. Deal with it.
multiple facts of the law.
Facets, dammit. Facets.. Where's the damn "edit" button when you need it.
The McBride of Frankenstein? :)
Well, if you consider Microsoft to be an unstoppable abomination that stumbles around crushing everything in its path, all the while moaning, "Linux ... baaad!" then yeah. Pretty much.
For me it demonstrates a serious problem, in that a complainant who has no evidence to back up their claims is permitted literally years to gobble up time. There should be a mandatory one week preliminary hearing in such a case where both sides have to provide a reasonably large body of their evidence, and if they cannot, the case is dismissed. If you have evidence, you should be able to summarize it in the space of a week.
Depends. One week simply might not be enough time to determine the merits of a case that involves thousands of pages of contracts and involves multiple facts of the law. If SCO had happened to be in the right, we'd would have wanted them to have every chance of success.
Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that the legal system doesn't have any real defense against large-scale corporate abusers. The can bury their opponents and the court in paperwork. At a certain point, though, I agree. Enough is enough.
In 100 years when Linux rules all, the name SCO will be uttered in hushed tones like an unmentionably profane word, told to naughty children by mothers to warn them against Bad Things, and the generic name for products that burned into a black hole of public hatred... "did you see that BeegleSearch did a SCO?".
Time for the cricket bat to put this zombie down for good.
"You mean Valdemort?"
"Shhh!"
No doubt your right. Sort of a negative take on "Doing an Apple."
Our legal system is truly broken.
Broken? I don't know: we give everyone a chance to have their day in court ... multiple chances even. You don't want justice (or whatever passes for it nowadays) to be too swift. But you're right: SCO had their chance, they blew it (because they were wrong) and they should just go away. Fact is, had they been left to themselves, they'd have been cremated years ago. The problem is, there are too many powerful entities (Gates, Ballmer, Hell & Co, for one) who see a strategic advantage in continually resurrecting this particular corpse.
I'm sure the Nazgûl are probably thinking "Oh, please. Not again!" right about now.
Nerd v. Goth v. Jock is not always something that a person controls, rather than something a person is.
People grow up to be who they are. I don't care whether they're a nerd or a goth or a jock or black or pink or Andorian. I care about whether they are generous, about whether they will have my back, about whether they have knowledge or spirit that lets us be more together than we each are separately, and about whether our personalities mesh.
Asking whether nerds are cool is just recycling the problematic classifications that got us here in the first place.
It's cyclic. When I grew up, being technically-inclined was respected: you had understanding that others did not, and even if you didn't follow all social norms to the letter you were tolerated, because if nothing else you were useful. At some point that changed: people with "book larnin'" were to be feared, derided, discouraged from pursuing their interests and encouraged to be more "socially acceptable."
That's problematic at best. Indeed, for any nation that wishes to maintain scientific and technological preeminence that is a terrible mistake. The citizens of this country need to wake up and realize that it's the nerds that brought us out of the caves, that it was the nerds that figured out how the Universe works, the goddamn NERDS who taught us how to build things that people in other countries would buy so that we could all be gainfully employed. Maybe when our entire industrial base collapses they'll begin to understand that mistreating the people in your society who have good minds and are actually capable of making something out of them is fundamentally stupid.
Fact is, the world has largely proven incapable of doing that very well, which is why so very many extremely bright and talented nerds came to the United States in the past couple hundred years: we would let them use their brains, create ideas, technologies and wealth, and not beat them up too much because they were different.