Yes, I am glad that people do realize I said that in jest. I personally feel that the missile defense is hogwash. Interesting that comment (as of this writing) received two mod points - one "+1 funny" and one "+1 insightful".
However, I also see news stories promoting the missile defense system as a result of the satellite take-down.
I found this an interesting comment from TFA:
Also, the ThinkPad's screen, when opened, stands significantly higher than the Mac's, so it is less usable in a coach seat on an airplane when the person in front of you reclines.
Really, how many people who are willing to spend $3,000 on a laptop are flying coach? I spent barely 1/4 of that on my laptop, and I do fly coach. If I had 4x as much income available, I think I would at least spring for business class if I had to do work on my laptop while flying...
... this is irrefutable proof that our missile defense system is totally awesome, flawless, and deserving of billions of dollars of tax investment, right?
Why is "kill it completely where it stands (and be hailed for saving children from that horrific fucking monstrosity)" not an option?
An excellent question.
One only has to refer to the impact of the right-wing noise machine to see the answer. After all, it was the conservatives that created this monster, and they control the loudest of the media outlets. If one were to kill off "no child left behind", the right-wing media would jump all over it and label the people behind its killing as being "anti-child", "anti-education", "anti-progress", "anti-jesus", and of course "anti-america" and hence "anti-patriotic".
Hell, just look at what those same media outlets did to Howard Dean's campaign in 2004, or what they've done to Kucinich every time he's tried to run.
So in short, you would never be successfully hailed for saving children (due to the true controls over the US media), though you can certainly try. The neocons have set up almost a perfect storm by establishing this woefully underfunded beast of a bill.
You cannot support it without funding it (bad for raising taxes)
You cannot kill it without hurting children (bad for hurting children)
Add to that the spineless fowl in congress that aren't willing to call out Bushco on their offenses, and you see that we're stuck with it for a long time to come.
He'll delay Constellation for five years
Has any candidate committed to funding it? I haven't heard anyone talking up NASA lately. McCain said we may have a military presence in Iraq for another 100 years, which would tie up a fair amount of money - and don't forget he just made a Bush41-style "no new taxes" pledge this week.
layoffs for all the people we'd need to get to the moon, and then we'll have to go try to re-hire them
I don't know who else is hiring these people right now - after all there is hardly anyone currently working who can claim experience with lunar missions. While I wouldn't want to see them lose their jobs any more than anyone else, I wouldn't think we'd have to worry greatly about competition for lunar work.
the plans will just sit for 5 years going out of date
Considering some of the work with propulsion and energy, I think another 5 years to wait on the plans might not be all that bad.
And what will the money be used for? Saving no child left behind
There aren't many choices on this issue, really. Considering Bush's "no child left behind" was absurdly underfunded when it was passed, there are pretty much only two choices:
Increase the funding to where it should be (and be attacked for spending too much)
Kill it completely where it stands (and be attacked for being anti-child)
If a standard can't solve the problem, you can't count the lack of solution against it.
Forgive my lack of knowledge on XML - I primarily just see bad implementations of it.
But what problem was XML supposed to solve? Exactly who/what/where was in need of an extensible markup language, anyways?
Considering all the (internet, and elsewhere) crapola that gets passed around as XML, with pretty much anything-you-want included, I don't really understand how we can call it "formalized".
Add to that the fact that then the ability to "display" XML comes down to the whatever-you-want-to-write manner, and I think there are plenty of people who would be hard to convince that there really is a "formal standard" for XML.
Perhaps Duke Nukem Forever will be written with this fantastic standard?
Considering the slashdot effect of people trying to view just these tiny files was enough to bring a server at an Australian University to its knees...
Back when I had time to read it, I used to subscribe to popular mechanics. It seemed like pretty much every year another company was proposing newer, sexier, faster supersonic passenger transport. And this goes back to even when the concorde was still flying.
Now the concorde is de-commissioned, we're told never to fly again. If the concorde allegedly couldn't turn a profit, even at something like 10x the ticket price of regular air carriers for the same route, how will these new ones be able to do it?
And thats all regardless of public feelings towards sonic booms...
I sadly suspect these planes will someday compete with Duke Nukem Forever for vaporware lifetime achievement awards...
So does that mean this is, in fact, Ron Paul himself answering, or his people, or a combination, or...?
Well, just like Ron Paul's newsletters, these will be his own writing when he agrees with it, then someone else's writing when it gets attention, and finally ghostwritten with no prior knowledge of his when the sh*t hits the fan...
But of course, we are all supposed to believe that he is not just another politician, and he is somehow fantastic and different.
commentators on palaeontology who have got no knowledge of Greek at all
I am willing to admit to not knowing ancient Greek. However, one possibility that is overlooked is that the Greek word "Kopros" was chosen from amongst other terms for the same. Considering the fact that there are at least 5 words in the English language to describe fecal matter, it would be interesting to know how many ways it could be expressed in ancient Greek.
So there is a possibility that no time machine was required in 1856 for Marsh to do this. I could not find any history on the term "coprophilia" - that would probably be useful in this case...
From my own experience, I would like to chime in on how I see this problem. First, I can say from when I took an upper-division course on vertebrate paleontology that there really are not that many people in the world with the job title "paleontologist". And those few that do have that title have to push pretty hard for a piece of a shrinking pot of research money. So while it is unfortunate, it isn't a huge surprise that there was a rush to get credit for naming this particular creature.
Second, paleontology has been competitive in this country for a very long time. One only has to look back to the infamous 19th century Bone Wars to see how cut-throat that field was at its beginnings. Some people have even rumored that Marsh actually named dinosaur dung "coprolites" as a way to discredit his competitor named Cope.
scientists and academic's are even bigger money grubbers then business, most people don't realise this fact though
I couldn't disagree more with you on that one. I'm not sure what scientists and academians you were exposed to that caused you to come to that conclusion, but i can tell you they are not representative of the community.
Even the highest paid / most despised scientists make nowhere near the money that corporate bigwigs do. How many CEO's in the US pull in multi-million dollar bonuses? Thats a rather long list. But yet most scientists - especially in academia - will die before they pull in anywhere near that much money.
Anyone who goes into science or academia looking to get rich are going into the wrong field. Thankfully, graduate school usually brings reality crashing into these people...
After all, who isn't running OS/2 on their thinkpads these days, or typing on Model M keyboards? And the IBM PowerPC chip - now that's a popular chip for the mainstream market if ever I saw one!
Yep, I'm sure the guys who sold us all on "I just totally warped my files" would be capable of blocking a Microsoft initiative... When I think powerful and successful marketing, I know I think IBM.
WTF? Because they believe those domains are valuable in and of themselves? Picking up the leftover crumbs in the domain investment world? This sounds just like the argument against P2P technology: "We don't do it, therefore it's probably criminal."
Please read the remainder of my message. I didn't suggest outlawing registration en masse. I suggested that it should be a red flag for the registrar to investigate the history of the customer.
Though really, should one person own "2008adobedeals", "softfactorysale", "nnowsoft", and "nbuysoft", to name a few? Especially if its the same name *and* contact information that was used previously to register hundreds of other sites selling pirated software and/or controlled drugs?
I really just would like to see the registrars clean up their act, and apply a little common sense to who they keep as customers. If they would actually pay some attention to what their products (as in registered domains) are being used for, they could help with the real problem here.
Instead, (many of) the registrars are apparently in it strictly for the money. They don't appear to have the least concern for what their customers are doing with the domains that they purchased. A little social responsibility and concern here could really go a long way.
Picking up the leftover crumbs in the domain investment world?
I wanted to touch this one in particular, while I'm on my soapbox. I've never been a fan of people who purchase intentionally misspelled names in the hope of getting traffic from people who don't type well.
But much of this large-scale registration isn't even going for that. I've seen other spamvertisements that were using mostly random domain names, that didn't even resemble words in any language I've ever seen in the latin alphabet. Many of these criminals just want to buy as many disposable domain names as possible, rather than trying for speculative investing.
Is he serving that page from his EEE?
on
Hacking Asus EEE
·
· Score: 1
I don't know who they would get this information.
That is a valid point, certainly. However, for many of the criminals, there are some obvious patterns involved. In particular, the criminals generally purchase several dozen (or more?) domains in a single day. If you are aware of a good reason why a legitimate business or individual would want to do such a thing, I'm interested in hearing it.
Second, many of these criminals do keep the same name and registration data as they move from one registrar to another. For example, "Leo Kuvayev" has been using the alias "Alex Rodrigez" (note the spelling) for several years now. And over the past three registrars, he as always claimed to live in Lappeenranta, Finland.
So if the registrar started by taking notice of the red flag that should come up when someone registers a large number of domains with very different names, and then they took 5 seconds to do a google search on the contact data, they'd see that they are selling to a known criminal.
If I was on that jury that was trying to convict the registrar of negligence, I'd need to see some more direct evidence showing that it was practical for them to screen criminals, and that it was part of their responsibilities.
ICANN does state that the registrars are obligated to keep valid WHOIS records on the domains they sell. And it really isn't that hard for them to check against publicly available data on their customers when they get unusual requests.
I'm even willing to concede that they shouldn't be expected to check every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Jane that buys a domain. When I've checked the WHOIS records of the spamvertised domains that I see, I would say that over 80% of spamvertised domains are registered to less than 5% of all spamvertised domain registrants, and through less than 2% of all accredited registrars. If the registrars were at least held accountable to check the data on their customers that make unusually large purchases, we could do a lot to stem the current problem.
Do any registrars check any data you give them that is not required to process your payment? As far as I know, none of them do criminal back ground checks, or require your information to be accurate.
Well, ICANN does require that registrars maintain accurate WHOIS data so that the domain owners can be contacted.
Payment processing is an interesting question in and of itself, as well. I would suspect that someone with extensive criminal connections (such as Leo Kuvayev) probably wouldn't have much difficulty getting credit cards that correspond to any name and location he likes. And if that is how we wanted to make his payment, then it would be easy to skate by on just enough data to process the payment.
And I would suspect that few if any registrars would bother doing any kind of background checks on their customers. It would probably cost them more than the fee they charge for registration, and I wouldn't expect them to be willing to take in that kind of loss.
However, some registrars are selling domains to names that have been documented for years to be associated with criminal spamming enterprises. These registrars are simply negligent at best, or criminal co-conspirators at worst. They know that their customers are associated with crime, yet they opt to do nothing.
And of course, the registrar could do something about if they really wanted to. All they have to do it change the DNS record for the spamvertised domain to something that either doesn't resolve at all, or won't resolve the domain in question. With that done, new requests to the domain will never get anywhere, as they won't be able to resolve the domain to an IP address.
If pacnames, yesnic and mouzz are getting kickbacks from the criminals, maybe they are sending a cut to ICANN.
That is an interesting question to raise. Honestly, I have always hoped that the problem with ICANN was due to incompetence rather than corruption.
Frankly, the more cynical side of me should have considered that possibility long ago. For some reason the optimist was in charge of that decision instead...
And on a side note, I can't help but wonder who the wise-ass is that modded your post "funny". If I had mod points today (and wasn't posting in this thread already) I'd have given it "insightful".
Is domain tasting really the most important problem that ICANN could sink its teeth into?
I say no.
ICANN has the role of accreditation of domain name registrars themselves (particularly for.com,.net,.org,.info domains). But yet they chose to remain toothless in all but the most very extreme cases of bad registrar services.
Bad registrars, such as pacnames.com, yesnic.com, and more recently mouzz.com, are willing partners in the international spamming epidemic. They have or still do sell domains to computer criminals, willingly accepting bogus data from these criminals in exchange for a kickback.
If ICANN really wants to make a positive difference on the internet, they need to flex their muscle and make use of their ability to un-accredit bad registrars. Why they continue to neglect the opportunity to do so is beyond me.
He could be living in Finland, as it is near the Russian, but could you give other sources than Wikipedia?
I was trying to find a public WHOIS server to refer to, but that is easier said than done. The speculation of him living in Finland is based on the registration data that he provides to the registrars when he sets up a new domain for his software piracy / counterfeit drugs / replica watches / internet porn businesses.
For example, a couple of the domains he has registered recently are "nnowsoft.com" and "softfactorysale.com". You can check these yourself via a WHOIS service and you'll see what I am referring to.
He has been providing the Finnish city of Lappeenranta as his residence for some time. Previously he would give a post office box as his address, but his most recent registrar partner-in-crime has allowed him to simply state the city as his address. As I stated before, I highly doubt that he owns the entire city, which of course means he is not providing sufficient registration data. But yet his registrar friends don't seem to care.
I have more information on his latest registrar friend in My Journal entry on another spam-friendly registrar.
I highly doubt that he owns anything in Finland.
I agree with that speculation entirely. I like to believe that nobody in Finland is willingly aiding a criminal spamming enterprise. I do suspect that the registration data provided by Kuvayev for his domains is completely bogus, but his registrars don't seem to care because they are making money off the deal as well.
This is part of why I chose "Damn_Registrars" for my slashdot name. I truly believe that a big part of the spamming problem lies in complacent registrars and an ICANN that is not willing to take action against them.
Yes, I am glad that people do realize I said that in jest. I personally feel that the missile defense is hogwash. Interesting that comment (as of this writing) received two mod points - one "+1 funny" and one "+1 insightful".
However, I also see news stories promoting the missile defense system as a result of the satellite take-down.
Also, the ThinkPad's screen, when opened, stands significantly higher than the Mac's, so it is less usable in a coach seat on an airplane when the person in front of you reclines.
Really, how many people who are willing to spend $3,000 on a laptop are flying coach? I spent barely 1/4 of that on my laptop, and I do fly coach. If I had 4x as much income available, I think I would at least spring for business class if I had to do work on my laptop while flying...
... this is irrefutable proof that our missile defense system is totally awesome, flawless, and deserving of billions of dollars of tax investment, right?
An excellent question.
One only has to refer to the impact of the right-wing noise machine to see the answer. After all, it was the conservatives that created this monster, and they control the loudest of the media outlets. If one were to kill off "no child left behind", the right-wing media would jump all over it and label the people behind its killing as being "anti-child", "anti-education", "anti-progress", "anti-jesus", and of course "anti-america" and hence "anti-patriotic".
Hell, just look at what those same media outlets did to Howard Dean's campaign in 2004, or what they've done to Kucinich every time he's tried to run.
So in short, you would never be successfully hailed for saving children (due to the true controls over the US media), though you can certainly try. The neocons have set up almost a perfect storm by establishing this woefully underfunded beast of a bill.
Add to that the spineless fowl in congress that aren't willing to call out Bushco on their offenses, and you see that we're stuck with it for a long time to come.
Has any candidate committed to funding it? I haven't heard anyone talking up NASA lately. McCain said we may have a military presence in Iraq for another 100 years, which would tie up a fair amount of money - and don't forget he just made a Bush41-style "no new taxes" pledge this week.
layoffs for all the people we'd need to get to the moon, and then we'll have to go try to re-hire them
I don't know who else is hiring these people right now - after all there is hardly anyone currently working who can claim experience with lunar missions. While I wouldn't want to see them lose their jobs any more than anyone else, I wouldn't think we'd have to worry greatly about competition for lunar work.
the plans will just sit for 5 years going out of date
Considering some of the work with propulsion and energy, I think another 5 years to wait on the plans might not be all that bad.
And what will the money be used for? Saving no child left behind
There aren't many choices on this issue, really. Considering Bush's "no child left behind" was absurdly underfunded when it was passed, there are pretty much only two choices:
Do we currently have satellites orbiting the moon? Or would these be the first satellites for our main satellite?
(Straight from TFA...)
Forgive my lack of knowledge on XML - I primarily just see bad implementations of it.
But what problem was XML supposed to solve? Exactly who/what/where was in need of an extensible markup language, anyways?
Considering all the (internet, and elsewhere) crapola that gets passed around as XML, with pretty much anything-you-want included, I don't really understand how we can call it "formalized".
Add to that the fact that then the ability to "display" XML comes down to the whatever-you-want-to-write manner, and I think there are plenty of people who would be hard to convince that there really is a "formal standard" for XML.
Perhaps Duke Nukem Forever will be written with this fantastic standard?
Considering the slashdot effect of people trying to view just these tiny files was enough to bring a server at an Australian University to its knees...
... but wasn't the star wars holiday special also (at least partially) animated?
Sure, there's a limit to "soviet russia" joke humor, but this one is spot-on. My coworkers still don't understand wtf I was just laughing at...
Back when I had time to read it, I used to subscribe to popular mechanics. It seemed like pretty much every year another company was proposing newer, sexier, faster supersonic passenger transport. And this goes back to even when the concorde was still flying.
Now the concorde is de-commissioned, we're told never to fly again. If the concorde allegedly couldn't turn a profit, even at something like 10x the ticket price of regular air carriers for the same route, how will these new ones be able to do it?
And thats all regardless of public feelings towards sonic booms...
I sadly suspect these planes will someday compete with Duke Nukem Forever for vaporware lifetime achievement awards...
Well, just like Ron Paul's newsletters, these will be his own writing when he agrees with it, then someone else's writing when it gets attention, and finally ghostwritten with no prior knowledge of his when the sh*t hits the fan...
But of course, we are all supposed to believe that he is not just another politician, and he is somehow fantastic and different.
I am willing to admit to not knowing ancient Greek. However, one possibility that is overlooked is that the Greek word "Kopros" was chosen from amongst other terms for the same. Considering the fact that there are at least 5 words in the English language to describe fecal matter, it would be interesting to know how many ways it could be expressed in ancient Greek.
So there is a possibility that no time machine was required in 1856 for Marsh to do this. I could not find any history on the term "coprophilia" - that would probably be useful in this case...
From my own experience, I would like to chime in on how I see this problem. First, I can say from when I took an upper-division course on vertebrate paleontology that there really are not that many people in the world with the job title "paleontologist". And those few that do have that title have to push pretty hard for a piece of a shrinking pot of research money. So while it is unfortunate, it isn't a huge surprise that there was a rush to get credit for naming this particular creature.
Second, paleontology has been competitive in this country for a very long time. One only has to look back to the infamous 19th century Bone Wars to see how cut-throat that field was at its beginnings. Some people have even rumored that Marsh actually named dinosaur dung "coprolites" as a way to discredit his competitor named Cope.
I couldn't disagree more with you on that one. I'm not sure what scientists and academians you were exposed to that caused you to come to that conclusion, but i can tell you they are not representative of the community.
Even the highest paid / most despised scientists make nowhere near the money that corporate bigwigs do. How many CEO's in the US pull in multi-million dollar bonuses? Thats a rather long list. But yet most scientists - especially in academia - will die before they pull in anywhere near that much money.
Anyone who goes into science or academia looking to get rich are going into the wrong field. Thankfully, graduate school usually brings reality crashing into these people...
After all, who isn't running OS/2 on their thinkpads these days, or typing on Model M keyboards? And the IBM PowerPC chip - now that's a popular chip for the mainstream market if ever I saw one!
Yep, I'm sure the guys who sold us all on "I just totally warped my files" would be capable of blocking a Microsoft initiative... When I think powerful and successful marketing, I know I think IBM.
Please read the remainder of my message. I didn't suggest outlawing registration en masse. I suggested that it should be a red flag for the registrar to investigate the history of the customer.
Though really, should one person own "2008adobedeals", "softfactorysale", "nnowsoft", and "nbuysoft", to name a few? Especially if its the same name *and* contact information that was used previously to register hundreds of other sites selling pirated software and/or controlled drugs?
I really just would like to see the registrars clean up their act, and apply a little common sense to who they keep as customers. If they would actually pay some attention to what their products (as in registered domains) are being used for, they could help with the real problem here.
Instead, (many of) the registrars are apparently in it strictly for the money. They don't appear to have the least concern for what their customers are doing with the domains that they purchased. A little social responsibility and concern here could really go a long way.
Picking up the leftover crumbs in the domain investment world?
I wanted to touch this one in particular, while I'm on my soapbox. I've never been a fan of people who purchase intentionally misspelled names in the hope of getting traffic from people who don't type well.
But much of this large-scale registration isn't even going for that. I've seen other spamvertisements that were using mostly random domain names, that didn't even resemble words in any language I've ever seen in the latin alphabet. Many of these criminals just want to buy as many disposable domain names as possible, rather than trying for speculative investing.
Because it already seems to be slashdotted.
That is a valid point, certainly. However, for many of the criminals, there are some obvious patterns involved. In particular, the criminals generally purchase several dozen (or more?) domains in a single day. If you are aware of a good reason why a legitimate business or individual would want to do such a thing, I'm interested in hearing it.
Second, many of these criminals do keep the same name and registration data as they move from one registrar to another. For example, "Leo Kuvayev" has been using the alias "Alex Rodrigez" (note the spelling) for several years now. And over the past three registrars, he as always claimed to live in Lappeenranta, Finland.
So if the registrar started by taking notice of the red flag that should come up when someone registers a large number of domains with very different names, and then they took 5 seconds to do a google search on the contact data, they'd see that they are selling to a known criminal.
If I was on that jury that was trying to convict the registrar of negligence, I'd need to see some more direct evidence showing that it was practical for them to screen criminals, and that it was part of their responsibilities.
ICANN does state that the registrars are obligated to keep valid WHOIS records on the domains they sell. And it really isn't that hard for them to check against publicly available data on their customers when they get unusual requests.
I'm even willing to concede that they shouldn't be expected to check every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Jane that buys a domain. When I've checked the WHOIS records of the spamvertised domains that I see, I would say that over 80% of spamvertised domains are registered to less than 5% of all spamvertised domain registrants, and through less than 2% of all accredited registrars. If the registrars were at least held accountable to check the data on their customers that make unusually large purchases, we could do a lot to stem the current problem.
Well, ICANN does require that registrars maintain accurate WHOIS data so that the domain owners can be contacted.
Payment processing is an interesting question in and of itself, as well. I would suspect that someone with extensive criminal connections (such as Leo Kuvayev) probably wouldn't have much difficulty getting credit cards that correspond to any name and location he likes. And if that is how we wanted to make his payment, then it would be easy to skate by on just enough data to process the payment.
And I would suspect that few if any registrars would bother doing any kind of background checks on their customers. It would probably cost them more than the fee they charge for registration, and I wouldn't expect them to be willing to take in that kind of loss.
However, some registrars are selling domains to names that have been documented for years to be associated with criminal spamming enterprises. These registrars are simply negligent at best, or criminal co-conspirators at worst. They know that their customers are associated with crime, yet they opt to do nothing.
And of course, the registrar could do something about if they really wanted to. All they have to do it change the DNS record for the spamvertised domain to something that either doesn't resolve at all, or won't resolve the domain in question. With that done, new requests to the domain will never get anywhere, as they won't be able to resolve the domain to an IP address.
That is an interesting question to raise. Honestly, I have always hoped that the problem with ICANN was due to incompetence rather than corruption.
Frankly, the more cynical side of me should have considered that possibility long ago. For some reason the optimist was in charge of that decision instead...
And on a side note, I can't help but wonder who the wise-ass is that modded your post "funny". If I had mod points today (and wasn't posting in this thread already) I'd have given it "insightful".
Is domain tasting really the most important problem that ICANN could sink its teeth into?
.com, .net, .org, .info domains). But yet they chose to remain toothless in all but the most very extreme cases of bad registrar services.
I say no.
ICANN has the role of accreditation of domain name registrars themselves (particularly for
Bad registrars, such as pacnames.com, yesnic.com, and more recently mouzz.com, are willing partners in the international spamming epidemic. They have or still do sell domains to computer criminals, willingly accepting bogus data from these criminals in exchange for a kickback.
If ICANN really wants to make a positive difference on the internet, they need to flex their muscle and make use of their ability to un-accredit bad registrars. Why they continue to neglect the opportunity to do so is beyond me.
I was trying to find a public WHOIS server to refer to, but that is easier said than done. The speculation of him living in Finland is based on the registration data that he provides to the registrars when he sets up a new domain for his software piracy / counterfeit drugs / replica watches / internet porn businesses.
For example, a couple of the domains he has registered recently are "nnowsoft.com" and "softfactorysale.com". You can check these yourself via a WHOIS service and you'll see what I am referring to.
He has been providing the Finnish city of Lappeenranta as his residence for some time. Previously he would give a post office box as his address, but his most recent registrar partner-in-crime has allowed him to simply state the city as his address. As I stated before, I highly doubt that he owns the entire city, which of course means he is not providing sufficient registration data. But yet his registrar friends don't seem to care.
I have more information on his latest registrar friend in My Journal entry on another spam-friendly registrar. I highly doubt that he owns anything in Finland.
I agree with that speculation entirely. I like to believe that nobody in Finland is willingly aiding a criminal spamming enterprise. I do suspect that the registration data provided by Kuvayev for his domains is completely bogus, but his registrars don't seem to care because they are making money off the deal as well.
This is part of why I chose "Damn_Registrars" for my slashdot name. I truly believe that a big part of the spamming problem lies in complacent registrars and an ICANN that is not willing to take action against them.