Ignoring for the moment the differences in depth and geological stability between the Channel and the [Bering] Straights.
Depth isn't a particular problem; we can build tunnels almost as deep as we wish so long as we're willing to pay what it takes, and the Strait isn't that deep (similar depth to the Channel for the most part). There are road tunnels in Europe that go much deeper under water. OTOH, the geological stability... that's the real issue. Dealing with the tectonic boundary that runs through the Strait is the biggest technical issue for any proposed crossing. (Of course, the actual biggest issue is getting enough traffic to justify the cost...)
Especially since once the IPO happens, his primary duty is a fiduciary one, to the stockholders - not the actual advancement of the technology or whatever else he wants to do with the company.
That actually depends on the company's own rules. Most public companies have "make a profit" as their basic rule, yes, but typically do so by pursuing a particular line of business (e.g., making and launching rockets). If you disagree with the line of business of a particular public company, well, you don't need to hold the stock; you're free to sell to someone else. And as long as the board are following the company's rules and aren't trying to screw over the stockholders (no, taking a risk on the line of business isn't screwing over; thieving from the company is) then they're doing their duty.
In other words, if SpaceX goes public then you'd be stupid to buy their stock if you didn't support them building rockets. That's what they do, and they're totally open about it. Arguing that you didn't know otherwise when you bought would just make people thing you're crazy, lazy and thick.
If it has taken us this long to develop to the stage we are currently at, it is reasonable to assume that under similar conditions, life (similar to ours) on other plants would occur in roughly the same timeframe.
But 1% less time, not an unreasonable amount of error, would put them 100 million years before now (using a guess for the current age of the galaxy). Even if we go with just the age of the earth as the major factor, that error is 45 million years. That's a long time in which stuff can happen (for comparison, modern humanity has only really been going for half a percent of that). Given all that, and the immense size of the galaxy, where is everyone? That's the core of the Fermi Paradox.
There's huge unknowns as yet. We don't actually know how many earth-like planets there are out there (because we can't yet search for them in a useful way). We don't know what proportion of them host life (no data except Earth, which doesn't help). We don't what proportion of those host intelligence. We don't know what proportion of intelligent life is actually able and interested in communication with us (we do know that for most of the time that humanity's been about, we couldn't build radios and a lot of cultures just haven't been interested in the outside world). It's even possible that there are lots of civilizations out there that don't use normal radio to communicate (lasers would be harder to detect) and which have agreed to leave us alone until we reach out to them far enough. We just don't know.
Right now, SETI is like a drunk looking for his house keys under a lamp post. Except more so. I hold more hope for the scientists who are trying to figure out things by attacking the whole problem from the other end; for example, we now that there are lots of planets out there (even if we can't yet find the kinds that we're interested in).
As much as I hate its quirks and idiosyncrasies, LaTeX is still hands-down the best tool for writing and managing a large document.
(La)TeX is only the best if you're doing really complex math. For image-heavy documents, it's not so good. Not that I'd accuse Word of being particularly great in that regard either. There are some very good tools in this area, but they're very expensive.
OTOH, Word's a lot better than it used to be for longer documents. Sure that's starting from a low base, but I've just been through a project where we were using it for that sort of thing extensively and the world didn't collapse. (Everyone else was using Word, so there wasn't much choice of format and Word certainly was better than OpenOffice at the time we started; you just have to pick your fights, and that wasn't one that it was worth chasing.) The trick to having manageable documents is to stick rigorously to using styles for text, i.e., to pretend you're writing LaTeX with a wysiwyg front end...
Concurrency makes code nearly impossible to debug.
Then you're probably doing it wrong. But I'd certainly not characterize it as being particularly easy. Key issues are that you need to avoid shared state (shared state concurrency is very difficult to debug) and you need to beware of global problems like deadlocks and livelocks; not everything can be solved just by looking at individual threads.
But if you keep the level of separation between different concerns strong, with every piece of state having a clear single owner at a time, you avoid most problems.
We don't *like* Erlang. But without concurrency we can only execute in one hyperthread at a time, and that's slow.
One of the issues with Erlang for most people is that they aren't just learning to write highly parallel programs when they start using it, they are also learning to use functional programming. Now there's nothing wrong with FP, but it's very different to the imperative style used by most programmers.
Whereas my terrorism example is probably an exaggeration, your store example is an understatement. A store has customers who have no continuing contractual agreements with the store: You walk in, buy something, pay, walk out. Deal done. In the case of an ISP, the ISP has ongoing contractual obligations to their legitimate customers that have been stomped on by this take-down. Those customers had a term relationship that they paid for in advance, for months if not a year or more, and now that's been forcibly interfered with.
That tends to come under the heading "Tough Shit". The upstream providers do not have any kind of responsibility to keep any of the customers of Trokak and Group 3 online; there's no contractual relationship between the two groups. The problem ISPs were told to clamp down on their evil customers or be disconnected, and refused to do anything about it. So the threat was carried out, and any legit customers affected should sue their provider for failing to take actions to keep them online.
To put it another way. If you have a contract with Troyak (picking one name for clarity) to get service, why should that be binding on the upstream provider? They don't know you exist. It's Troyak's responsibility to get connectivity to service their contract with you; if Troyak failed to do it (by being at the very least asshats) then they carry the can for failing to satisfy their contract with you. And the upstream provider will have an AUP that lets them terminate their customers (not you, Troyak et al) for excessive scumbagness that impacts their other customers.
If you're impacted by this, it's time to fire up the lawyers. And change ISP.
It's the IDEA that's the money maker, not screwing over some part of the liabilities sheet.
That's BS. The original idea itself counts for very little; "ideas are like assholes: everyone has one". It's how you turn an idea into reality that counts, and how you get the money in from people in return for their little bit of that reality which counts, and yes, how you control liabilities.
That's why the OP's point was to form a new organization comprised of representatives from the major browser manufacturers. I know reading the articles is a bit much, but is reading the comments that you are responding to asking too much?
The browser makers (or at least those that matter) are either already present at W3C, or explicitly choosing to not be there. You can't force them to join if they don't want to.
Making a new organization won't change that one bit; you'll get the same people. Or rather you won't; anyone who matters will probably just say "oh no, not another organization" and skip it so that they have a chance to get some real work done. The only reason the W3C matters is because the people who need to talk to each other are already there, and if they're already there then that's the venue where they'll get business done.
None of which has jack to do with the leadership of W3C, but in many ways the overall leadership is about managing the organization itself, how to promote it, how to get people to come. Doing things like changing IPR rules or other obnoxious stuff... very unlikely. It's a lot of work, and if it doesn't align with what members want, it won't actually happen on the ground; standards organizations like W3C are not at all like companies where the CEO can dictate the direction for everyone else. (Naturally, if it does align with members desires, then it's arguably the right thing to do.)
It boils down to "people are idiots, they can't possibly learn anything new, they are either indoctrinated at birth in My True Way, or lost and hopeless." Who in their right mind would take that seriously?
That quote reminds me of a number of religions who have exactly that attitude. Makes me suspect that it must be a recurrent (though no less foolish) theme to human thought...
The main problem is a lack of an easy to use code repository & plugin modules.
I use ActiveState's repository, which has loads of packages ready to use and easy to install. It's only really on Linux where this is an issue, because each distro has its own repository of everything (and it's usually not that well maintained either).
How about we break away from the W3C and its strange policies and instead appoint a community-based chair with people from Mozilla, Apple, Opera, Google, Microsoft (if they would show) and anyone else who wanted to make a browser. I'm not really seeing the benefit of the W3C lately, and with this, why don't we just break away?
The main reason to not do that is that you probably won't get either the (main) browser makers or the users to show up. Without them, you're simply irrelevant. But if they do turn up, you've effectively got the W3C (with maybe a round of musical chairmanships at the top). Lot of fuss and bother to achieve nothing of value.
Multi-threaded game engines have to be built from the ground up to BE multi threaded. This doesn't work well when you want your game to run on single core systems as well(See recent problems with Mass Effect 2 on single core systems for reference)
That was a problem with the video renderer; everything else about ME2 worked just fine on single core. Moreover, ME2 is now fixed and works just fine (provided you've got enough memory and a good graphics card, of course, but they're easier to upgrade).
The issue is my ASS: Availability, Safety, Security.
Sensible things to want. Are you willing to pay what it takes to get them? Availability is expensive. So is Safety. And Security makes everything else more expensive and awkward (sometimes not much more expensive – ssh is very good for example – but the cost over being without security is still there, even if it is worth it).
Agreed entirely. Inefficiency is an inherent property of all old organizations. And it's more expensive to convert old processes to new technology than it is to design new processes from the ground-up.
Part of it is because they're old, and part of it is because they're large. The reason why being large is an important effect is that small organizations that go that way tend to fail totally; there are efficiencies in being large that can support lots of sub-optimal practices. (OTOH, it's probably good that things aren't too optimal, since the overhang leaves room for action when the excrement impacts the ventilator.)
It does have valid meaning, but it also is getting used well beyond that meaning. That's the point it which it became irritating....
It's just the hype cycle. Nothing to get too excited about. See what's actually going on for what it is and use it where it makes real sense. (Virtualized hosting of hardware and services is useful for a lot of problems, though naturally not all.)
If you want something radically new, don't look at A-Titles. Too much money at stake to risk something really, genuinely new.
Why look for radically new things? A lot of what most people want just isn't radically new, not in gaming, not in cinema, not in music, not in literature, not in any part of the whole scope of entertainment. Yes, there are radical artists out there trying to do new things, but most fail to make much impact with it. (Many of these failures then claim that they were never trying for success, but that's just hypocritical BS. Or total lack of vision.) Eventually, one of those artists will stumble across a new basic type of some class of art (e.g., new basic game type) but that's rare, and if you go looking for it as a consumer of art, then you're going to come across a lot of impenetrable rubbish.
OTOH, the dearth of the radically new does not mean that we should settle for the same-old crap all the time. There's a lot of good to be had with varying the details and producing new variations on existing basic themes. By analogy with cinema, there's not much basic novelty in an action film, but there's plenty of room for one that's done ably and which is entertaining.
It is more difficult to make a site that allows some people to provide content including html and script, and still prevent evil content to enter your database / pages.
The issue there is that you're allowing that at all (see CWE-79). The solution is to not allow general HTML/script input from non-trusted sources (i.e., they can upload new HTML with sftp, but not through a web form) and instead support some greatly restricted syntax (e.g., bbcode or wikisyntax) that is easy to convert to guaranteed fang-free content. And use a proper templating library for output of content from the database instead of hacking things.
That would go to the densest material, which does not exactly correspond to atomic number. Behold:
Al: 2.7 g/cc Fe: 7.8 Pb: 11.3 U : 19.1 W : 19.3 Pu: 19.8 Pt: 21.4
You made a nice little table but missed out on the top two densest elements. The densest known element is Osmium, which clocks in at 22.61 g/cc. The second densest is Iridium, at 22.56. (I mostly know these facts from doing general knowledge crosswords...)
And they are changing the material uploaded, by re-encoding it as a flash video.
You're taking a perverse position there. Format conversion makes a derivative work, but it's still the same content and it's the content that matters and not the fashion in which it is encoded. Equivalently, when a TV show is imported from the US to the EU, it needs to be format converted (there are many technical differences between the systems used on each side of the Atlantic) but it's still the same TV show. To claim otherwise is just... weird.
Shit, if I take an email and change the charset used to encode it from UTF-8 to UCS-2, it's still the same message with the same content, even though it uses a different sequence of bytes to express it. Given that, to claim that what Google does on uploading of a video to YouTube is morally different is just not a tenable position.
Back in Win 95 days, Microsoft could have required all 3rd party software to use.ini files located in that software's main directory, or they could have required them to all use the registry, and use it in specified ways.
Back in Win95 days, they were still trying to support the old Win3.1 way of doing things so that lots of custom corporate apps would continue to work. (It's supporting those third-party-written VB monstrosities that is the source of most of Windows's lock-in, and most of MS's support headaches too I suspect.) They also still thought very strongly in terms of a single user of the machine at a time. If the apps aren't written to work with privilege separation, imposing it on them is bound to be a problem. (Heck, knowing to store settings and save-files in a per-user directory by default is a big step up, and wasn't something that most Win apps did back then.)
Each $1,000 laptop is insured by parents, with $55/yr premium and $100 deductible. 2,800 laptops netted $154K, enough to fully replace 154 laptops every year. But they lost only 42, and over more than a year. So the school should just remove all the security software and let the insurance deal with it.
That's just the economic answer. However, it is human nature to spend more than the level of losses in order to prevent them when those are due to people gaming the system. Really. It's part of ensuring that there's some level of social cohesion, and is overall a group-adaptive measure provided it's not out of hand. (Maybe a cheaper method should have been chosen, but that's an independent point.)
All of the above doesn't excuse anyone being a peeping tom. Hence the parties authorized to use the remote camera activation have got to explain just why they activated the anti-theft system on systems not reported stolen.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignoring for the moment the differences in depth and geological stability between the Channel and the [Bering] Straights.
Depth isn't a particular problem; we can build tunnels almost as deep as we wish so long as we're willing to pay what it takes, and the Strait isn't that deep (similar depth to the Channel for the most part). There are road tunnels in Europe that go much deeper under water. OTOH, the geological stability... that's the real issue. Dealing with the tectonic boundary that runs through the Strait is the biggest technical issue for any proposed crossing. (Of course, the actual biggest issue is getting enough traffic to justify the cost...)
Especially since once the IPO happens, his primary duty is a fiduciary one, to the stockholders - not the actual advancement of the technology or whatever else he wants to do with the company.
That actually depends on the company's own rules. Most public companies have "make a profit" as their basic rule, yes, but typically do so by pursuing a particular line of business (e.g., making and launching rockets). If you disagree with the line of business of a particular public company, well, you don't need to hold the stock; you're free to sell to someone else. And as long as the board are following the company's rules and aren't trying to screw over the stockholders (no, taking a risk on the line of business isn't screwing over; thieving from the company is) then they're doing their duty.
In other words, if SpaceX goes public then you'd be stupid to buy their stock if you didn't support them building rockets. That's what they do, and they're totally open about it. Arguing that you didn't know otherwise when you bought would just make people thing you're crazy, lazy and thick.
If it has taken us this long to develop to the stage we are currently at, it is reasonable to assume that under similar conditions, life (similar to ours) on other plants would occur in roughly the same timeframe.
But 1% less time, not an unreasonable amount of error, would put them 100 million years before now (using a guess for the current age of the galaxy). Even if we go with just the age of the earth as the major factor, that error is 45 million years. That's a long time in which stuff can happen (for comparison, modern humanity has only really been going for half a percent of that). Given all that, and the immense size of the galaxy, where is everyone? That's the core of the Fermi Paradox.
There's huge unknowns as yet. We don't actually know how many earth-like planets there are out there (because we can't yet search for them in a useful way). We don't know what proportion of them host life (no data except Earth, which doesn't help). We don't what proportion of those host intelligence. We don't know what proportion of intelligent life is actually able and interested in communication with us (we do know that for most of the time that humanity's been about, we couldn't build radios and a lot of cultures just haven't been interested in the outside world). It's even possible that there are lots of civilizations out there that don't use normal radio to communicate (lasers would be harder to detect) and which have agreed to leave us alone until we reach out to them far enough. We just don't know.
Right now, SETI is like a drunk looking for his house keys under a lamp post. Except more so. I hold more hope for the scientists who are trying to figure out things by attacking the whole problem from the other end; for example, we now that there are lots of planets out there (even if we can't yet find the kinds that we're interested in).
As much as I hate its quirks and idiosyncrasies, LaTeX is still hands-down the best tool for writing and managing a large document.
(La)TeX is only the best if you're doing really complex math. For image-heavy documents, it's not so good. Not that I'd accuse Word of being particularly great in that regard either. There are some very good tools in this area, but they're very expensive.
OTOH, Word's a lot better than it used to be for longer documents. Sure that's starting from a low base, but I've just been through a project where we were using it for that sort of thing extensively and the world didn't collapse. (Everyone else was using Word, so there wasn't much choice of format and Word certainly was better than OpenOffice at the time we started; you just have to pick your fights, and that wasn't one that it was worth chasing.) The trick to having manageable documents is to stick rigorously to using styles for text, i.e., to pretend you're writing LaTeX with a wysiwyg front end...
Concurrency makes code nearly impossible to debug.
Then you're probably doing it wrong. But I'd certainly not characterize it as being particularly easy. Key issues are that you need to avoid shared state (shared state concurrency is very difficult to debug) and you need to beware of global problems like deadlocks and livelocks; not everything can be solved just by looking at individual threads.
But if you keep the level of separation between different concerns strong, with every piece of state having a clear single owner at a time, you avoid most problems.
We don't *like* Erlang. But without concurrency we can only execute in one hyperthread at a time, and that's slow.
One of the issues with Erlang for most people is that they aren't just learning to write highly parallel programs when they start using it, they are also learning to use functional programming. Now there's nothing wrong with FP, but it's very different to the imperative style used by most programmers.
Whereas my terrorism example is probably an exaggeration, your store example is an understatement. A store has customers who have no continuing contractual agreements with the store: You walk in, buy something, pay, walk out. Deal done. In the case of an ISP, the ISP has ongoing contractual obligations to their legitimate customers that have been stomped on by this take-down. Those customers had a term relationship that they paid for in advance, for months if not a year or more, and now that's been forcibly interfered with.
That tends to come under the heading "Tough Shit". The upstream providers do not have any kind of responsibility to keep any of the customers of Trokak and Group 3 online; there's no contractual relationship between the two groups. The problem ISPs were told to clamp down on their evil customers or be disconnected, and refused to do anything about it. So the threat was carried out, and any legit customers affected should sue their provider for failing to take actions to keep them online.
To put it another way. If you have a contract with Troyak (picking one name for clarity) to get service, why should that be binding on the upstream provider? They don't know you exist. It's Troyak's responsibility to get connectivity to service their contract with you; if Troyak failed to do it (by being at the very least asshats) then they carry the can for failing to satisfy their contract with you. And the upstream provider will have an AUP that lets them terminate their customers (not you, Troyak et al) for excessive scumbagness that impacts their other customers.
If you're impacted by this, it's time to fire up the lawyers. And change ISP.
It's the IDEA that's the money maker, not screwing over some part of the liabilities sheet.
That's BS. The original idea itself counts for very little; "ideas are like assholes: everyone has one". It's how you turn an idea into reality that counts, and how you get the money in from people in return for their little bit of that reality which counts, and yes, how you control liabilities.
Doodling with pen and paper doesn't absorb the attention to the same degree as playing Facebook games and chatting with friends via IM.
Making paper planes out of the notes and throwing them at the lecturer does absorb the attention a lot. But at least it made Analytical Chemistry fun!
That's why the OP's point was to form a new organization comprised of representatives from the major browser manufacturers. I know reading the articles is a bit much, but is reading the comments that you are responding to asking too much?
The browser makers (or at least those that matter) are either already present at W3C, or explicitly choosing to not be there. You can't force them to join if they don't want to.
Making a new organization won't change that one bit; you'll get the same people. Or rather you won't; anyone who matters will probably just say "oh no, not another organization" and skip it so that they have a chance to get some real work done. The only reason the W3C matters is because the people who need to talk to each other are already there, and if they're already there then that's the venue where they'll get business done.
None of which has jack to do with the leadership of W3C, but in many ways the overall leadership is about managing the organization itself, how to promote it, how to get people to come. Doing things like changing IPR rules or other obnoxious stuff... very unlikely. It's a lot of work, and if it doesn't align with what members want, it won't actually happen on the ground; standards organizations like W3C are not at all like companies where the CEO can dictate the direction for everyone else. (Naturally, if it does align with members desires, then it's arguably the right thing to do.)
It boils down to "people are idiots, they can't possibly learn anything new, they are either indoctrinated at birth in My True Way, or lost and hopeless." Who in their right mind would take that seriously?
That quote reminds me of a number of religions who have exactly that attitude. Makes me suspect that it must be a recurrent (though no less foolish) theme to human thought...
The main problem is a lack of an easy to use code repository & plugin modules.
I use ActiveState's repository, which has loads of packages ready to use and easy to install. It's only really on Linux where this is an issue, because each distro has its own repository of everything (and it's usually not that well maintained either).
How about we break away from the W3C and its strange policies and instead appoint a community-based chair with people from Mozilla, Apple, Opera, Google, Microsoft (if they would show) and anyone else who wanted to make a browser. I'm not really seeing the benefit of the W3C lately, and with this, why don't we just break away?
The main reason to not do that is that you probably won't get either the (main) browser makers or the users to show up. Without them, you're simply irrelevant. But if they do turn up, you've effectively got the W3C (with maybe a round of musical chairmanships at the top). Lot of fuss and bother to achieve nothing of value.
But has Apple stooped to assimilating other people's technology?
Wasn't there a lot of discussion recently when Nokia accused Apple of using patented technology without paying a fair price?
Multi-threaded game engines have to be built from the ground up to BE multi threaded. This doesn't work well when you want your game to run on single core systems as well(See recent problems with Mass Effect 2 on single core systems for reference)
That was a problem with the video renderer; everything else about ME2 worked just fine on single core. Moreover, ME2 is now fixed and works just fine (provided you've got enough memory and a good graphics card, of course, but they're easier to upgrade).
The issue is my ASS: Availability, Safety, Security.
Sensible things to want. Are you willing to pay what it takes to get them? Availability is expensive. So is Safety. And Security makes everything else more expensive and awkward (sometimes not much more expensive – ssh is very good for example – but the cost over being without security is still there, even if it is worth it).
Agreed entirely. Inefficiency is an inherent property of all old organizations. And it's more expensive to convert old processes to new technology than it is to design new processes from the ground-up.
Part of it is because they're old, and part of it is because they're large. The reason why being large is an important effect is that small organizations that go that way tend to fail totally; there are efficiencies in being large that can support lots of sub-optimal practices. (OTOH, it's probably good that things aren't too optimal, since the overhang leaves room for action when the excrement impacts the ventilator.)
It does have valid meaning, but it also is getting used well beyond that meaning. That's the point it which it became irritating....
It's just the hype cycle. Nothing to get too excited about. See what's actually going on for what it is and use it where it makes real sense. (Virtualized hosting of hardware and services is useful for a lot of problems, though naturally not all.)
Modded insightful without a source?
That's why it wasn't Informative. Duh!
If you want something radically new, don't look at A-Titles. Too much money at stake to risk something really, genuinely new.
Why look for radically new things? A lot of what most people want just isn't radically new, not in gaming, not in cinema, not in music, not in literature, not in any part of the whole scope of entertainment. Yes, there are radical artists out there trying to do new things, but most fail to make much impact with it. (Many of these failures then claim that they were never trying for success, but that's just hypocritical BS. Or total lack of vision.) Eventually, one of those artists will stumble across a new basic type of some class of art (e.g., new basic game type) but that's rare, and if you go looking for it as a consumer of art, then you're going to come across a lot of impenetrable rubbish.
OTOH, the dearth of the radically new does not mean that we should settle for the same-old crap all the time. There's a lot of good to be had with varying the details and producing new variations on existing basic themes. By analogy with cinema, there's not much basic novelty in an action film, but there's plenty of room for one that's done ably and which is entertaining.
It is more difficult to make a site that allows some people to provide content including html and script, and still prevent evil content to enter your database / pages.
The issue there is that you're allowing that at all (see CWE-79). The solution is to not allow general HTML/script input from non-trusted sources (i.e., they can upload new HTML with sftp, but not through a web form) and instead support some greatly restricted syntax (e.g., bbcode or wikisyntax) that is easy to convert to guaranteed fang-free content. And use a proper templating library for output of content from the database instead of hacking things.
Plus, ethanol doesn't pollute our drinking water.
But does water pollute your drinking ethanol?
That would go to the densest material, which does not exactly correspond to atomic number. Behold:
Al: 2.7 g/cc
Fe: 7.8
Pb: 11.3
U : 19.1
W : 19.3
Pu: 19.8
Pt: 21.4
You made a nice little table but missed out on the top two densest elements. The densest known element is Osmium, which clocks in at 22.61 g/cc. The second densest is Iridium, at 22.56. (I mostly know these facts from doing general knowledge crosswords...)
And they are changing the material uploaded, by re-encoding it as a flash video.
You're taking a perverse position there. Format conversion makes a derivative work, but it's still the same content and it's the content that matters and not the fashion in which it is encoded. Equivalently, when a TV show is imported from the US to the EU, it needs to be format converted (there are many technical differences between the systems used on each side of the Atlantic) but it's still the same TV show. To claim otherwise is just... weird.
Shit, if I take an email and change the charset used to encode it from UTF-8 to UCS-2, it's still the same message with the same content, even though it uses a different sequence of bytes to express it. Given that, to claim that what Google does on uploading of a video to YouTube is morally different is just not a tenable position.
Back in Win 95 days, Microsoft could have required all 3rd party software to use .ini files located in that software's main directory, or they could have required them to all use the registry, and use it in specified ways.
Back in Win95 days, they were still trying to support the old Win3.1 way of doing things so that lots of custom corporate apps would continue to work. (It's supporting those third-party-written VB monstrosities that is the source of most of Windows's lock-in, and most of MS's support headaches too I suspect.) They also still thought very strongly in terms of a single user of the machine at a time. If the apps aren't written to work with privilege separation, imposing it on them is bound to be a problem. (Heck, knowing to store settings and save-files in a per-user directory by default is a big step up, and wasn't something that most Win apps did back then.)
Each $1,000 laptop is insured by parents, with $55/yr premium and $100 deductible. 2,800 laptops netted $154K, enough to fully replace 154 laptops every year. But they lost only 42, and over more than a year. So the school should just remove all the security software and let the insurance deal with it.
That's just the economic answer. However, it is human nature to spend more than the level of losses in order to prevent them when those are due to people gaming the system. Really. It's part of ensuring that there's some level of social cohesion, and is overall a group-adaptive measure provided it's not out of hand. (Maybe a cheaper method should have been chosen, but that's an independent point.)
All of the above doesn't excuse anyone being a peeping tom. Hence the parties authorized to use the remote camera activation have got to explain just why they activated the anti-theft system on systems not reported stolen.