I can't wait til the anti-bullying crowd lobby for something like this wherever their children might be on the internet. Sounds like it is early days though, 20% false positives is pretty darn high.
Actually, a couple of years ago I just helped my son with the Computers merit badge--it is definitely one of the more information-intensive merit badges and took quite a while to polish off.
I was glad at the time to see that the older version of the merit badge sheet listed articles from www.linuxjournal.com as resources for adult leaders, including an article called "Bit Prepared: A Missing Link?, Building the case for turning the Boy Scouts into a worldwide advocate of free software" http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7533.
Looks like they were on the right road once.
But, when they recently revised the merit badge worksheet, this stuff was left off and new copyright stuff was added from the RIAA, including asking the scout to explain "the restrictions and limitations of downloading music from the Internet."
In a sense, this was good because it let me explain the issue to my son and explain what copyright is, what fair use is, what DRM is, what a rootkit is, and what legal antics have gone on in the name of the poor penniless recording companies. He now understands these issues without all the hype.
As to all the bigotry comments, I don't see it in my son's troop. Mostly it is about having fun and learning to take responsibility for yourself and as you get more mature, learning to take responsibility for and lead a group (a patrol, or a troop)--not bad goals regardless of your ethical or sexual orientation.
Actually, I bought that Acer laptop at CC for (450.00 I think) and have been very happy with it for the money--no problems for the year I've had it (except that the internal wifi card won't work under Linux). The bluetooth switch is useless (it works on their high end laptops), but the wifi hardware switch has come in handy a couple of times when I've had to boot Vista but wanted to keep Vista off the network.
As far as I can tell, the switches are there to let you conserve battery power by explicitly disabling the wireless networking hardware.
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I can't wait til the anti-bullying crowd lobby for something like this wherever their children might be on the internet. Sounds like it is early days though, 20% false positives is pretty darn high.
Actually, a couple of years ago I just helped my son with the Computers merit badge--it is definitely one of the more information-intensive merit badges and took quite a while to polish off. I was glad at the time to see that the older version of the merit badge sheet listed articles from www.linuxjournal.com as resources for adult leaders, including an article called "Bit Prepared: A Missing Link?, Building the case for turning the Boy Scouts into a worldwide advocate of free software" http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7533. Looks like they were on the right road once. But, when they recently revised the merit badge worksheet, this stuff was left off and new copyright stuff was added from the RIAA, including asking the scout to explain "the restrictions and limitations of downloading music from the Internet." In a sense, this was good because it let me explain the issue to my son and explain what copyright is, what fair use is, what DRM is, what a rootkit is, and what legal antics have gone on in the name of the poor penniless recording companies. He now understands these issues without all the hype. As to all the bigotry comments, I don't see it in my son's troop. Mostly it is about having fun and learning to take responsibility for yourself and as you get more mature, learning to take responsibility for and lead a group (a patrol, or a troop)--not bad goals regardless of your ethical or sexual orientation.
Actually, I bought that Acer laptop at CC for (450.00 I think) and have been very happy with it for the money--no problems for the year I've had it (except that the internal wifi card won't work under Linux). The bluetooth switch is useless (it works on their high end laptops), but the wifi hardware switch has come in handy a couple of times when I've had to boot Vista but wanted to keep Vista off the network. As far as I can tell, the switches are there to let you conserve battery power by explicitly disabling the wireless networking hardware.