So wait a second... Since he settled for $1 million dollars and in his career he actually made more than $1 million, how is this fair? We still all lose, right? If he's made enough money to buy the house and the BMW, what's a million dollar fine but a slap on the wrist? Why doesn't this punk go to jail?
The article says he has to sell the house and the BMW in order to pay the fine, plus he's agreed to stop sending spam. How does that mean we lose?
Personally I don't care if this punk goes to jail or not. I care that he stops crapflooding my mail servers.
The Chinese government can deal with Chinese spammers however they want. This guy's in the US, and subject to US law. Let's work on cleaning up the spam problem in our own country, before we worry about foreign spammers, ok?
You know what I want? I want a video Podcast of movie trailers. Not commentary, not extra crap, just the trailers. I want my computer to download them automatically as they are released, with new ones marked as unplayed and old ones deleted automatically (according to my preferences in my preferred Podcast client). Since I don't watch TV, I'm often completely unaware of new movies coming out, and I would see more movies if I could subscribe to a Podcast like this.
(For any of you who are confused by the marketing hype surrounding the term "Podcast", it's just a standard XML feed that points to MP3 or video files instead of HTML pages; a Podcast client is like an RSS reader, but automatically downloads the file and, optionally, syncs it to your iPod if you have one. Nothing evil or proprietary about it, and you should know that Podcasting was already popular long before Apple jumped on the bandwagon; Apple neither invented it nor chose the name "Podcast".)
If you get a letter from a car dealer stating that you won $3000 in credit if you buy one of his cars, do you automatically go and buy one? NO. Same thing goes for email, you don't open all emails and follow all links blindly.
If you DID automatically go and buy one, and the dealer didn't follow through on the $3,000 offer, you could easily get your local law enforcement officials to take action against them. Why? Because it's illegal, and a car dealership doesn't just disappear.
Now, if those diamonds you bought for your wife out of the back of a pickup truck on the side of the highway turn out to be cubic zirconium, well, that's a different story - and a lot more like buying from a spammer.
How many posts have you read from Mac users touting how secure Os X is because if you try to do anything important to the system, a box pops up and asks for the root password??
Just a nitpick: it actually asks for any administrator's password, so if your own account has administrator privileges, that'd be your own password. Actually, it asks for both the username and password, with the username already filled in if you are logged on as an administrator; you can enter the username and password of any administrator account.
It doesn't ask for the root password, because (by default) there isn't one (and setting one isn't obvious). This means you don't have two different passwords to keep track of, just yours.
My guess would be, when it wakes up from hibernation, EVERYTHING in RAM is paged out to disk, so the first time you do ANYTHING, it has to swap a bunch of stuff back into RAM. I can see how it would be annoying, but it's how I'd do it - I don't see a better way.
1. You can vote from your phone for American Idol, you have to trudge out to the polls to vote for the next president, on a work day on top of it.
I wonder why more states don't follow Oregon's model? We have what is probably the best voting system in the country:
1) Everyone receives a voter's pamphlet: a booklet listing all candidates and measures on the ballot, with a description of each, and paid single-column advertisements for/against them (not sure about candidates, but for ballot measures it's $500 per column, ANYONE can buy one). It works better than I'm probably making it sound.
2) All registered voters get a ballot in the mail. I don't think you can register to vote if you don't have a mailing address. If you move and don't receive your ballot, I'm pretty sure there's a number you can call or something to get it straightened out.
3) Fill out the ballot at your leisure. It's a Scantron-style form, fill in the bubbles with a pencil or black/blue pen.
4) Stuff the completed ballot into a "secrecy envelope", which has no identifying information.
5) Stuff the secrecy envelope into another envelope, with your name and address printed on it (and a barcode). Sign the outside of the envelope. Of course it's against the law to sign somebody else's name.
6) Drop it off at your local public library or wherever else they have ballot drop boxes, or stick a stamp on it and drop it in the mail.
7) When ballots are received, election officials make sure they only receive one envelope from each registered voter, and that your signature on the envelope matches the signature on your voter registration. Yes, they actually check. This is an open transparent process with people watching.
8) The secrecy envelope containing your ballot is removed and mixed in with everybody else's. Now there's no way to associate ballots with voters, but we know there's only one ballot per voter.
9) Secrecy envelopes are opened, and ballots are manually checked for problems (e.g. somebody put an X through the bubble instead of filling it in completely). Election officials are allowed to fix these kinds of problems, when the intent of the voter is clear; again, this is an open process with people watching.
10) Ballots are scanned and counted, on machines that have been tested for accuracy (they have a pile of sample ballots that they run through the machines first, to make sure all the machines return the correct results). Results are reported.
11) If it's close, ballots are recounted. Because the ballots are human-readable as well as machine-readable, manual recounts are easy.
The only possible drawback here is that it's easy to pressure someone into voting a certain way. Someone can pay you to vote a certain way, then watch you vote and seal your envelope. So far, it hasn't been a problem, but I'll admit it's a flaw in the system. However, it's obviously something that can't be fixed in any system where you can vote from home, and the convenience of being able to vote in your underwear at 1am, or sit around with a group of friends drinking tea and filling out ballots, or whatever else you want to do, so far seems to far outweigh the risk of abuse.
You forgot to mention where it tries to scare you into using it by offering up protection from Phishers if you leave the service enabled. You think the average end user knows the deal their cutting there? They don't.
I wasn't aware of this feature; it's something new they've added since the last time I installed it.
Also, the option to turn the pagerank feature on or off at install is a recent thing.
I wasn't aware of that either; the first time I installed the Google Toolbar it came with the big red warning.
It phones home. Its spyware. Notifying me or not notifying me is not a defining trait, it just makes it worse if you don't.
You missed the part where it doesn't do this by default, and there's no way for this particular feature (displaying Google's PakeRank score for each web page you visit) to work without phoning home. Other features like the spell checker send a query when you use them; of course you could make a similar feature using a local dictionary, but Google's spellcheck is based on popular words actually used on the Web, not an actual English dictionary, so it can easily handle proper nouns and slang, which traditional dictionaries have never been good at.
If you don't want this kind of functionality, that's fine, don't use it. If you want this functionality, but want to send your data to somebody other than Google, that's fine too, use somebody else's toolbar. But don't say Google is evil just for offering these kinds of services.
By the way, you do realize that web sites collect data about you too, right? Every time you do a search on ANY search engine, they log your search terms; any time you use a translation service to translate something to/from another language, they log your query; every time you look something up in an online dictionary or encyclopedia, they log what you were looking for. I hope you don't use Babelfish, Wikipedia, or Dictionary.com! They're all spying on you!
Privacy rights and citizen-snooping mix worse than water and oil.
True, but data retention isn't the same as snooping! Data retention without snooping doesn't necessarily infringe upon my rights. Snooping in order to collect data to retain, well, that's a problem. Sharing this data with anyone else, be they other companies or the NSA or my neighbor across the street, without express permission from me or a warrant from a judge, is completely unacceptable.
Obviously Gmail uses the content of your e-mail to select context-sensitive advertisements; I don't see anything evil about that. What kind of data mining are you talking about? Mining data by itself isn't inherently evil; it's what you do with the data you've collected that's important (e.g. sell it to other companies).
Google Toolbar - Spyware/ stop doing it
The Google Toolbar includes an optional feature which can only operate by "phoning home" with every URL you visit; upon installation this is explained and you're given a very clear option of whether you want to enable it or not. Is this what you're calling spyware, or something else I haven't heard about?
AdWords - No support for clickfraud/ support the people who make you money
I agree, they need to be more active here. Although, supporting the people who make them money is precisely the problem; they need to stop supporting some of the people who make them money.
Google China - Following local laws at the expense of human decency/ Decide that money isn't everything
You don't think offering a filtered Google search in China is a positive thing? Sure, it's not as good as unfiltered access, but nobody can legally offer that, so that's completely irrelevant. It's not like the Chinese government is going to back down if Google threatens not to do business there, or something. You think it would be better for the Chinese people to be stuck with just MSN and Yahoo, filtered the same way?
However, it's very hard to use sudo when automating large-scale scripts, where I'm pushing out a root-level change to 50 machines at once... short of putting the password into the scripts.
Try adding NOPASSWD to your sudoers file, like this:
"Buy for product, not market share" - buying Halo (a product) certainly fits here. Yes, along the way they killed it on other platforms (the first public demo of Halo was on Mac OS 9 on a PowerMac G3 during a Macworld Expo keynote), but killing it on other platforms wasn't Microsoft's motivation for buying it.
Google is quickly becoming a search monopoly, and I can't wait till they get knocked around a bit because of it. The delivery of information should NEVER go through such a pinch point. Do no evil? Bullshit, just make sure you're doing evil that the everyman has no clue about.
Tell me, what evil thing are they doing, and what non-evil thing could they do to fix it?
I suppose you could assemble one if you already had all the components you needed, and some instructions. Maybe. The average person could most certainly NOT build one from scratch starting with buying components individually. AGP vs PCI-E? PCIe-x16 vs PCIe-x1 vs PCI-X? VGA vs DVI? ATAPI vs ATA/133 vs SATA vs SCSI? 3.5" vs 2.5"? DDR2 SDRAM? SO-DIMMs? IEEE802.11g vs IEEE1394b vs IEEE1284? They're not interchangeable, and if you don't know how to tell the difference, you can't build one.
Personally, I have no idea how to change the oil in my car, I just know I need to go back to JiffyLube whenever the sticker in the corner of the windshield says it's time, and they'll sell me $150 worth of services that I may or may not actually need, but they tell me it's a good idea, and who am I to argue with a professional? That doesn't mean I can't drive.
Agreed. I do favor usage taxes that are used to fund related things, for example gasoline taxes that are used to fund road repair (the more you drive, the more you contribute to potholes, so the more tax you should pay; if you don't like it, take the bus). But taxing SMS messages is stupid.
My hard drive with all my music files crashed, and I can't transfer the songs from my handheld into a new computer?
There are two components to this: being able to actually copy the files onto another computer, and being able to play them. With the iPod, Apple does not currently provide a way to copy music from the iPod onto a computer; it can be done easily enough on Linux or using third-party software, but for the average user, it can't be done. Of course Apple's position is that if they allowed this, it would encourage piracy, and they're right, it would (if I had an iPod and Apple made it easy to copy songs from it, I would use it to share MP3s with other people far more often than I would ever use it to copy MP3s onto my own computer). Nevertheless, it would be nice if Apple added a way to copy music from an iPod.
To be fair, when you buy anything from the iTunes Music Store, you are advised to back it up on CD or something. I think they've tried to make it clear that copying to an iPod is not a replacement for backups. I've heard that if you call Apple and whine enough, they'll let you re-download all your purchases, which is nice of them, but really, backing up your data is your own responsibility.
The other issue here is playing the files on a different computer. Apple allows you to authorize up to five computers at a time, and normally you can deauthorize computers you'll no longer be using... but if the hard drive in an authorized computer dies, you can't deauthorize it yourself. If you don't use multiple computers, you can just ignore this problem until you hit your limit of five. Otherwise, if you call Apple and explain the situation, they can remove the authorization from your account. So it's really not a huge problem right now.
The verb "to lay" always requires an object; i.e. you must lay something, not just lay. The slang usage "getting laid" (meaning someone's having sex with you) is grammatically identical to an egg being laid by a chicken (a chicken is laying an egg); both a subject (the chicken) and an object (the egg) are involved.
The phrase "Now I lay me down to sleep" works grammatically because it's reflexive: the object here is "me". "Now I lay down to sleep" would be incorrect.
If you don't have an object, use "lie", not "lay".
Being able to show probable cause, when you ALREADY have evidence that the suspect has committed a crime, isn't fascism. The original post suggests that the FBI already has enough evidence to show probable cause, and in a criminal investigation the next step would be to get a warrant, find more evidence, have the suspect arrested and brought to trial, prove to a jury that the suspect is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and get a conviction and sentence. The original post suggests that only reason these investigations haven't take place yet is because the FBI doesn't have enough money and can't be bothered to pursue them.
I don't agree with the supposition made here (that the FBI already has evidence of crimes that have been committed by every member of Congress). However, I do support prosecuting members of Congress who have actually been caught committing crimes, just as I support prosecuting anyone else who has actually been caught committing crimes. To do so is not fascism: in fact, it's the opposite. If Congress were above the law (i.e. free to break the law without fear of prosecution), THAT would be a sign of fascism, and this is what the original post is arguing AGAINST.
Um, no. I think it's unreasonable to search the offices of every member of congress, like the post I replied to advocated.
Well sure, it would be unreasonable if you didn't have good reason to. The original post seems to be suggesting that most (or all) members of Congress are already suspected of committing crimes, and the FBI could show probable cause if they wanted to.
Slashdot Mirror
So wait a second... Since he settled for $1 million dollars and in his career he actually made more than $1 million, how is this fair? We still all lose, right? If he's made enough money to buy the house and the BMW, what's a million dollar fine but a slap on the wrist? Why doesn't this punk go to jail?
The article says he has to sell the house and the BMW in order to pay the fine, plus he's agreed to stop sending spam. How does that mean we lose?
Personally I don't care if this punk goes to jail or not. I care that he stops crapflooding my mail servers.
And who will enforce this laws in, say, China?
The Chinese government can deal with Chinese spammers however they want. This guy's in the US, and subject to US law. Let's work on cleaning up the spam problem in our own country, before we worry about foreign spammers, ok?
Can anyone think of a good way for two Skype clients to establish a P2P connection that would not violate this patent?
If not, then the method described in this patent must be pretty obvious, and therefore not patentable...
You know what I want? I want a video Podcast of movie trailers. Not commentary, not extra crap, just the trailers. I want my computer to download them automatically as they are released, with new ones marked as unplayed and old ones deleted automatically (according to my preferences in my preferred Podcast client). Since I don't watch TV, I'm often completely unaware of new movies coming out, and I would see more movies if I could subscribe to a Podcast like this.
(For any of you who are confused by the marketing hype surrounding the term "Podcast", it's just a standard XML feed that points to MP3 or video files instead of HTML pages; a Podcast client is like an RSS reader, but automatically downloads the file and, optionally, syncs it to your iPod if you have one. Nothing evil or proprietary about it, and you should know that Podcasting was already popular long before Apple jumped on the bandwagon; Apple neither invented it nor chose the name "Podcast".)
If you get a letter from a car dealer stating that you won $3000 in credit if you buy one of his cars, do you automatically go and buy one? NO. Same thing goes for email, you don't open all emails and follow all links blindly.
If you DID automatically go and buy one, and the dealer didn't follow through on the $3,000 offer, you could easily get your local law enforcement officials to take action against them. Why? Because it's illegal, and a car dealership doesn't just disappear.
Now, if those diamonds you bought for your wife out of the back of a pickup truck on the side of the highway turn out to be cubic zirconium, well, that's a different story - and a lot more like buying from a spammer.
How many posts have you read from Mac users touting how secure Os X is because if you try to do anything important to the system, a box pops up and asks for the root password??
Just a nitpick: it actually asks for any administrator's password, so if your own account has administrator privileges, that'd be your own password. Actually, it asks for both the username and password, with the username already filled in if you are logged on as an administrator; you can enter the username and password of any administrator account.
It doesn't ask for the root password, because (by default) there isn't one (and setting one isn't obvious). This means you don't have two different passwords to keep track of, just yours.
My guess would be, when it wakes up from hibernation, EVERYTHING in RAM is paged out to disk, so the first time you do ANYTHING, it has to swap a bunch of stuff back into RAM. I can see how it would be annoying, but it's how I'd do it - I don't see a better way.
1. You can vote from your phone for American Idol, you have to trudge out to the polls to vote for the next president, on a work day on top of it.
I wonder why more states don't follow Oregon's model? We have what is probably the best voting system in the country:
1) Everyone receives a voter's pamphlet: a booklet listing all candidates and measures on the ballot, with a description of each, and paid single-column advertisements for/against them (not sure about candidates, but for ballot measures it's $500 per column, ANYONE can buy one). It works better than I'm probably making it sound.
2) All registered voters get a ballot in the mail. I don't think you can register to vote if you don't have a mailing address. If you move and don't receive your ballot, I'm pretty sure there's a number you can call or something to get it straightened out.
3) Fill out the ballot at your leisure. It's a Scantron-style form, fill in the bubbles with a pencil or black/blue pen.
4) Stuff the completed ballot into a "secrecy envelope", which has no identifying information.
5) Stuff the secrecy envelope into another envelope, with your name and address printed on it (and a barcode). Sign the outside of the envelope. Of course it's against the law to sign somebody else's name.
6) Drop it off at your local public library or wherever else they have ballot drop boxes, or stick a stamp on it and drop it in the mail.
7) When ballots are received, election officials make sure they only receive one envelope from each registered voter, and that your signature on the envelope matches the signature on your voter registration. Yes, they actually check. This is an open transparent process with people watching.
8) The secrecy envelope containing your ballot is removed and mixed in with everybody else's. Now there's no way to associate ballots with voters, but we know there's only one ballot per voter.
9) Secrecy envelopes are opened, and ballots are manually checked for problems (e.g. somebody put an X through the bubble instead of filling it in completely). Election officials are allowed to fix these kinds of problems, when the intent of the voter is clear; again, this is an open process with people watching.
10) Ballots are scanned and counted, on machines that have been tested for accuracy (they have a pile of sample ballots that they run through the machines first, to make sure all the machines return the correct results). Results are reported.
11) If it's close, ballots are recounted. Because the ballots are human-readable as well as machine-readable, manual recounts are easy.
The only possible drawback here is that it's easy to pressure someone into voting a certain way. Someone can pay you to vote a certain way, then watch you vote and seal your envelope. So far, it hasn't been a problem, but I'll admit it's a flaw in the system. However, it's obviously something that can't be fixed in any system where you can vote from home, and the convenience of being able to vote in your underwear at 1am, or sit around with a group of friends drinking tea and filling out ballots, or whatever else you want to do, so far seems to far outweigh the risk of abuse.
since a few years ago, along with .museum and .pro and .aero and some others.
You forgot to mention where it tries to scare you into using it by offering up protection from Phishers if you leave the service enabled. You think the average end user knows the deal their cutting there? They don't.
I wasn't aware of this feature; it's something new they've added since the last time I installed it.
Also, the option to turn the pagerank feature on or off at install is a recent thing.
I wasn't aware of that either; the first time I installed the Google Toolbar it came with the big red warning.
It phones home. Its spyware. Notifying me or not notifying me is not a defining trait, it just makes it worse if you don't.
You missed the part where it doesn't do this by default, and there's no way for this particular feature (displaying Google's PakeRank score for each web page you visit) to work without phoning home. Other features like the spell checker send a query when you use them; of course you could make a similar feature using a local dictionary, but Google's spellcheck is based on popular words actually used on the Web, not an actual English dictionary, so it can easily handle proper nouns and slang, which traditional dictionaries have never been good at.
If you don't want this kind of functionality, that's fine, don't use it. If you want this functionality, but want to send your data to somebody other than Google, that's fine too, use somebody else's toolbar. But don't say Google is evil just for offering these kinds of services.
By the way, you do realize that web sites collect data about you too, right? Every time you do a search on ANY search engine, they log your search terms; any time you use a translation service to translate something to/from another language, they log your query; every time you look something up in an online dictionary or encyclopedia, they log what you were looking for. I hope you don't use Babelfish, Wikipedia, or Dictionary.com! They're all spying on you!
Privacy rights and citizen-snooping mix worse than water and oil.
True, but data retention isn't the same as snooping! Data retention without snooping doesn't necessarily infringe upon my rights. Snooping in order to collect data to retain, well, that's a problem. Sharing this data with anyone else, be they other companies or the NSA or my neighbor across the street, without express permission from me or a warrant from a judge, is completely unacceptable.
Gmail - Data mining and spyware/ stop doint it
Obviously Gmail uses the content of your e-mail to select context-sensitive advertisements; I don't see anything evil about that. What kind of data mining are you talking about? Mining data by itself isn't inherently evil; it's what you do with the data you've collected that's important (e.g. sell it to other companies).
Google Toolbar - Spyware/ stop doing it
The Google Toolbar includes an optional feature which can only operate by "phoning home" with every URL you visit; upon installation this is explained and you're given a very clear option of whether you want to enable it or not. Is this what you're calling spyware, or something else I haven't heard about?
AdWords - No support for clickfraud/ support the people who make you money
I agree, they need to be more active here. Although, supporting the people who make them money is precisely the problem; they need to stop supporting some of the people who make them money.
Google China - Following local laws at the expense of human decency/ Decide that money isn't everything
You don't think offering a filtered Google search in China is a positive thing? Sure, it's not as good as unfiltered access, but nobody can legally offer that, so that's completely irrelevant. It's not like the Chinese government is going to back down if Google threatens not to do business there, or something. You think it would be better for the Chinese people to be stuck with just MSN and Yahoo, filtered the same way?
However, it's very hard to use sudo when automating large-scale scripts, where I'm pushing out a root-level change to 50 machines at once ... short of putting the password into the scripts.
Try adding NOPASSWD to your sudoers file, like this:
admin ALL=NOPASSWD:/usb/local/sbin/foo
"Buy for product, not market share" - buying Halo (a product) certainly fits here. Yes, along the way they killed it on other platforms (the first public demo of Halo was on Mac OS 9 on a PowerMac G3 during a Macworld Expo keynote), but killing it on other platforms wasn't Microsoft's motivation for buying it.
Google is quickly becoming a search monopoly, and I can't wait till they get knocked around a bit because of it. The delivery of information should NEVER go through such a pinch point. Do no evil? Bullshit, just make sure you're doing evil that the everyman has no clue about.
Tell me, what evil thing are they doing, and what non-evil thing could they do to fix it?
That would be included in the "third-party software" I mentioned.
...Excel, PowerPoint...
I suppose you could assemble one if you already had all the components you needed, and some instructions. Maybe. The average person could most certainly NOT build one from scratch starting with buying components individually. AGP vs PCI-E? PCIe-x16 vs PCIe-x1 vs PCI-X? VGA vs DVI? ATAPI vs ATA/133 vs SATA vs SCSI? 3.5" vs 2.5"? DDR2 SDRAM? SO-DIMMs? IEEE802.11g vs IEEE1394b vs IEEE1284? They're not interchangeable, and if you don't know how to tell the difference, you can't build one.
Personally, I have no idea how to change the oil in my car, I just know I need to go back to JiffyLube whenever the sticker in the corner of the windshield says it's time, and they'll sell me $150 worth of services that I may or may not actually need, but they tell me it's a good idea, and who am I to argue with a professional? That doesn't mean I can't drive.
When you reencode to MP3, you lose quality. Many people don't really notice, but please be aware that it's a concern for some people.
Agreed. I do favor usage taxes that are used to fund related things, for example gasoline taxes that are used to fund road repair (the more you drive, the more you contribute to potholes, so the more tax you should pay; if you don't like it, take the bus). But taxing SMS messages is stupid.
My hard drive with all my music files crashed, and I can't transfer the songs from my handheld into a new computer?
There are two components to this: being able to actually copy the files onto another computer, and being able to play them. With the iPod, Apple does not currently provide a way to copy music from the iPod onto a computer; it can be done easily enough on Linux or using third-party software, but for the average user, it can't be done. Of course Apple's position is that if they allowed this, it would encourage piracy, and they're right, it would (if I had an iPod and Apple made it easy to copy songs from it, I would use it to share MP3s with other people far more often than I would ever use it to copy MP3s onto my own computer). Nevertheless, it would be nice if Apple added a way to copy music from an iPod.
To be fair, when you buy anything from the iTunes Music Store, you are advised to back it up on CD or something. I think they've tried to make it clear that copying to an iPod is not a replacement for backups. I've heard that if you call Apple and whine enough, they'll let you re-download all your purchases, which is nice of them, but really, backing up your data is your own responsibility.
The other issue here is playing the files on a different computer. Apple allows you to authorize up to five computers at a time, and normally you can deauthorize computers you'll no longer be using... but if the hard drive in an authorized computer dies, you can't deauthorize it yourself. If you don't use multiple computers, you can just ignore this problem until you hit your limit of five. Otherwise, if you call Apple and explain the situation, they can remove the authorization from your account. So it's really not a huge problem right now.
If anyone has trouble with this:
The verb "to lay" always requires an object; i.e. you must lay something, not just lay. The slang usage "getting laid" (meaning someone's having sex with you) is grammatically identical to an egg being laid by a chicken (a chicken is laying an egg); both a subject (the chicken) and an object (the egg) are involved.
The phrase "Now I lay me down to sleep" works grammatically because it's reflexive: the object here is "me". "Now I lay down to sleep" would be incorrect.
If you don't have an object, use "lie", not "lay".
Being able to show probable cause, when you ALREADY have evidence that the suspect has committed a crime, isn't fascism. The original post suggests that the FBI already has enough evidence to show probable cause, and in a criminal investigation the next step would be to get a warrant, find more evidence, have the suspect arrested and brought to trial, prove to a jury that the suspect is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and get a conviction and sentence. The original post suggests that only reason these investigations haven't take place yet is because the FBI doesn't have enough money and can't be bothered to pursue them.
I don't agree with the supposition made here (that the FBI already has evidence of crimes that have been committed by every member of Congress). However, I do support prosecuting members of Congress who have actually been caught committing crimes, just as I support prosecuting anyone else who has actually been caught committing crimes. To do so is not fascism: in fact, it's the opposite. If Congress were above the law (i.e. free to break the law without fear of prosecution), THAT would be a sign of fascism, and this is what the original post is arguing AGAINST.
Um, no. I think it's unreasonable to search the offices of every member of congress, like the post I replied to advocated.
Well sure, it would be unreasonable if you didn't have good reason to. The original post seems to be suggesting that most (or all) members of Congress are already suspected of committing crimes, and the FBI could show probable cause if they wanted to.