Sometime an idea so horribly bad comes along that you wonder how even a committee of incompetent bureaucrats could come up with it (and I’m not referring to the name change of the Angels baseball team).

Without much further ado let us introduce ”Parent Scan.” This nifty application will seek out every single file trading service, music and movie file on the computer it is installed on. It was designed as the 21st century way for parents to “search Billy’s room for pot and/or porn.” I can understand that many parents might feel daunted by the task of having to search a child’s computer for illegal activity but there is one glaring problem with this rent-a-cop provided by our friends at the MPAA: it cannot distinguish between legal and illegal files.

Case in point, the 1359 music files it found on our test system are all legal files created from the owner’s CD collection.

How do you determine which files are legal and which aren’t?

Parent File Scan offers that “You must clarify this question for yourself.”

How? By “discussing with the persons who have used the computer where the music and video files are found.”

Father: Billy, can you tell me which of these 1,359 music files were illegally downloaded from the internets so that I can immediately report you to the nearest MPAA attack squad?

Billy: Can’t we just go back to awkward discussions about where-babies-come-from and that time I caught you smoking a joint?