And therefore, I shall now declaim a pompous, long-winded pulled-out-of-my-ass speech on that very same subject, about how evolution has shaped men as a hunters and women as nurturers -- an idea no one has *EVAR* thought of before!
This idea is one of those great uncontested theories that seems to make sense on first glance, but as soon as you delve into it it quickly falls under its own weight. From TFA:
The biggest difference was men were hunters and women were gatherers. This gender specialization did not arise because of some male conspiracy to dominate women or some other nastiness. It was the natural, inevitable result of a basic physical difference between men and women
What the hell?! Evidence please? Something beyond the musings of scientists raised in a somewhat, shall be say, biased society. Can anyone seriously suggest that half the adult population of a tribe of hungry, on the line, hunter-gatherers simply stayed at home twiddling their thumbs and watching sprogs while the other half actually went out risking life and limb to haul back the meat? You'd have to be born in the Fifties to buy this.
Oh wait. They did do something. They picked berries! That's rich. I can see this state of affairs lasting for about five minutes before someone in group A, the "hunter" group, realises and the majority of group B, the "gather" group, is reaping the benefit of this relationship far more than he.
A word to the wise who hold such unsubstanciated claims. Women have always worked. They have always been breadwinners. OK, there was a decade or two back there in the fifties where times were so good one spouse could afford not to work and stay home minding the kids. I know I would have. But apart from that, you'll find that women's hands have traditionally been just as calloused as everyone elses.
And if you bother to do any research at all, you'll find some of that modern callous is comeing from holding gampads all day.
Your argument is coherant and persuasive in the context of the game. However it falls apart under the simple realisation that the integrity of your person, property and privacy is more important than your expieriences in an online game.
I, for one, think Blizzard is doing something positive here, and the complainers are probably cheaters or farmers -- or non-players. Cheating ruins the experience for honest customers.
You're right. The benefits of not meeting the odd player expoliting holes in Blizzard's own software, far outweighs the essential complete annexation of your entire personal and private computer system by Blizzard entertainment, the creator of said exploits.
I could draw parallels to the whole War on Terrorism keeping us all safe thing here, but I think it speaks for itself.
The editors usage of the term rootkit is correct, and proper. You may as well argue that the usage of 'cockpit' for the pilot seat and control area of an airplane is incorrect. From the relevent wikipedia article.
Generally now the term is not restricted to Unix based operating systems, as tools that perform a similar set of tasks now exist for non-Unix operating systems such as Microsoft Windows (even though such operating systems may not have a "root" account).
Rootkit is no longer a term restricted to gaining "root" user access. The term now stands for any suite of hack and/or programs (the "kit") that enables the malware to disguise its presence in the OS in a more sophistocated manner than simply having obscurely named.exes and registry entries.
Furthermore, in my entirely humble and sincerely personal opinion, the term is an appropriate, apt, and succinct way of decribing these types of malicious programs, both in distinguishing them from the less deeply embedded malware types, and in emphasising the increased security threat these programs pose.
OK. So I, and many other Slashdotters, are usually roped into tech support for family and friends. Just why I thought I was getting some way on top of things with SP2, firefox and AV, this comes along.
So after all my hard work, my little cousins just go out, buy one Sony CD and WHAM! All my efforts gone to pot as the worlds biggest backdoor is slapped straight onto the system. It's not like you can tell teenagers NOT to buy CDs. And really I shouldn't have to.
Gods what if they put this stuff on the CDs the Adults buy!?.....
It's going to be a llllooonnng christmas season.....
Of course, Mark Russinovich did (inadvertantly) dissasemble content protected by the EULA.
And that is why he shall burn in seven fiery litigious suffering hells along with all the other reverse engineering, anti-DRM, I-want-to-own-what-I-buy, hippy COMMUNISTS! So preacheth the church of the new global economy!
Unless the company has buckets of cash and red hot rabid technobabbling lawyers. Then, you know, the judge will agree to just about anything. Doubly so if they're in the Supreme Court.
You shall defend and hold the SONY BMG PARTIES harmless from and against any and all liabilities, damages, costs, expenses or losses arising out of your use of the LICENSED MATERIALS
Ahhh! But is the rootkit one of those licensed materials?
Do I give permission to any software vendor to install anything they want when I run the installer executable?
Pretty much yeah. And according to most EULAs, they can also come to your house, steal everything there, burn what's left, kill your family, poision your cat and still be well within their rights.
If you want an example of what companies can and will do with EULA carte blanc, just read up on the whole Blizzard WoW spyware controversy that Slashdot simply refuses to report on. I guess CmdrTaco is working hard for that custom name!
Group D: Whose population ranges from around 3,500,000,000 to 4,000,000,000 people who are heartily sick of Groups A, B and C and wish they would just litigate, bomb and preach each other into oblivion so that the rest of us can get on with living our lives in some kind of rationality.
I wonder what percentage of the south korean economy is made up of those internet cafes. Switching OS's won't really be fun for them (if it comes to that.).
Actually most problems internet cafes have is quazi slick users playing around with the windows software and of course bugs in IE.
Internet Cafes are essentially now all about using Web interfaces. Thus, switching to Linux with the Redmond KDE skin makes a lot of sense.
The developer's dream is a single processor console that has a very fast CPU. Unfortunately that's hard to manufacture, so they're stuck with something less than ideal that can be made cheaply with today's technology.
My dream is to finally have a language that handles threads in a managable way, rather than me having to manually deal with synchronisation, race issues, locking, etc, etc, etc. Most main modern languages (including java and C#) are built to essentially be backwards compatable with single threaded application, and so programmers fall down when using them to make multi-threaded apps.
People keeps saying that programmers don't "grok" threads. I'd argue that programmers do "grok" thread, they just don't have a language that can deal with them appropriately. Just like people said that programmers didn't "grok" objects. Well, at the time, the most popular languages simply didn't have appropriate object support, so programmers simply didn't use objects.
My wet dream of course is a compiler that will examine my code written for single threads, and automagically seperated parallelisible processes into seperate thread. This obviously, isn't going to happen.
Your system is among the top 1% of all systems scanned by the Game Advisor
Well... that's what the scan would have said if my current Linux box actually ran Windows!
Is this some market survey by Microsoft in an attempt to determine how much cruft their games can handle? To this day I will never understand the amount of resources PC games require.
I find Games are now taking up over 500MB of RAM regularly. OK Texture resolutions are increasing, but has noone heard of streaming technology? Console games manage to have higher res textures, using a lot less RAM. What's going on here?
CPU usage. Again, console games seem to get much more bang for their buck here. OK PC games run on top of an OS, but so do hardcore number crunching research experiments. I had thought that with all the latest graphics card technology, the heaviest calculations were being offloaded more and more to the GPU. Where are all these cycles going, because wherever they're going, the fun/cycle ration seems to be going down.
Disk usage. OK WTF. I've bough games that ship on 1 CD and take up 1GB of Hard Disk. Games seem to be taking up GB of space by default nowadays. It's getting to the point that an 80GB hardrive simply won't be able to take 20+ games. Where the hell is are all the bits going? And why am I still running things off the CD?
Anyway, I thought I'd bring up these points given that as the years go by, PC games seem to have accumulated cruft at a much higher rate than console games. In order to stay competative, I hope PC game developers start trimming down their apps a little. It would be nice to have a modern game install, start, play and close without grinding the entire (high performance) system to a halt.
Shouldn't the British Government be less worried about a game setting a bad example, than by their own bullying of Iraqis twisting the minds of a generation?
I completely fail to understand how one video game will have a greater effect on a child than images of their own country triumphantly wreaking havoc during a war?
Kids thinking it's OK to hit other kids might be bad, but is kids thinking it's OK to bomb other countries any better?
I, for one, hope the former occurs. I'll admit I'm not a good enough programmer (yet) to do anything about the problem now, but I hope the Open Source programmers who are capable will tackle this problem and fix it w/o making petty excuses.
You seem to have an advanced understanding of how open source works! You put up with the sub-par betas, keep on complaining to devs, and gradually things get better. Bravo!
Hmm, we must not of went on a spree arresting our own people during the communist witch hunts under McCarthy then eh? Please, nobody could see the reds weren't under the bed..paranoia ran rampant much like it is doing again today..you obviously were not alive during that era and can therefore shut the hell up.
McCarthy's campaign lasted from ~1950-1953. The Red Scare itself was over by 1956. People essentially got wise to it, and quickly realised that the reds were not under the bed. It's also worth noting that a great many people were skeptical of McCarty's claims.
Contrast this to today. The Terrorism mantra has lasted over four years 2001-2005. A president has been elected, largely on it sucess. It is very reasonable to suggest that this mantra will remain for at least the next decade, without abating.
The key difference here, is that the communists were understandable to the public, in terms of their overt presence in the form of the Soviet Union, their covert presence as spys, and in terms of their idealogy. The modern terrorist is none of these things.
Ask anyone today what a modern terrorist is, what they stand for and what their idealologies are. Ask them for an estimation of how many terrorists there are in the world. Ask them to pick out a possible terrorist target(Some will, and have said a local Wal-Mart).
People have no idea exactly what a terrorist is. They are in a very real sense, like the bogeyman to ordinary people. Fantastical, terrifying, unquantifiable and completely outside of rational expierience.
If i was Bin Laden i'd be pi**ing myself laughing - it's amazing how a couple of planes and a bomb here and there can derail centuries of democracy and accountable government, where dozens of wars, natural disasters, the nuclear threat and the cold war all failed.
That's because all those threats were definable, quantifiable, and understandable. Especially to the average man. The Russians were a threat, but you knew for sure they were "over there" and there were "that many" of them. So government could only go so far with spin and propaganda. You weren't going to be stopped and searched, arrested and/or executed at will because you could plainly see that the Reds were not in fact Under The Bed.
However, with the terrorism issue, absolutely no one knows how many terrorists there are, or what their plans are. In fact, if pressed, most people could not accurately define what a terrorists actually is. No one has a clue about the manner, nature, extent, cause and/or defence against this shadowy threat. Or even if it exists at all.
Thus Governments are able to essentially use whatever smoke and mirrors they like. Usama Bin Laden; a 48 year old fundamentalist on a kidney dialysis machine, hiding out in some cellar or barn in the back of beyond of the pakistan-afganistan border, becomes Osama Bin Laden; the notorious Blofeld-like mastermind of a global network of elite fanatical terrorist cells, controlling this web through his ferociously loyal spymasters, from a secret sophisticated underground lair, connected by a network of tunnels running up and down the border, probably complete with fusion reactor and 90m high display screen used for demanding $100 billion from the UN security council. If he's never caught, expect news specials in 2057 asking whether the 100 year old Osama is still at large, and specials in 2100 asking whether his body has been cloned and his old brain transfered so he may terrorise the free world for another lifetime. I'm not joking.
The reality is probably much more mundane. Aggrieved and disenfranchised young men, see their only way out as some kind of "honorable" death in killing as many of their supposed oppressors as can. The most likely answer is that there is no terrorist network, just disparate and seperate groups sharing only common ideologies. The cells are just that. Cells. There is no network, and any connection are tenuous at best.
Of course, by pointing this out your "aiding the terrorists". This can be proclaimed, because of course, the common man has no way of knowing whether this threat is real or imagined. He's kept in a state of constant disorientation, fear and patriotism while the noose of authoritatianism draws ever tighter.
We'll all wake up one day in a changed society, where the rights of individuals are trampeled upon, and people's minds are kept coralled in the state that the ruling oligarchy desires. All who deviate will be terrorist sympathisers. And to think, WWII, the h-bomb, quakes, floods and the Soviets could never have managed what was accomplished two plane crashes and a few dozen bombs.
I'm really not completely sure why the 50-year magnitude cycle occurs, but it's well-documented.
A 50 year cycle is confirmed after only 150 years of bookkeeping? This doesn't sound like a very solid prediction scheme. I'll stick with industry fueled climate change as the most likely suspect until I see hard data to the contrary.
The most fundamental purpose of a government is to manage the country for the benefit of the people.
The Taiwan government is 100% right. It is doings its JOB! It is, more or less, legally obliged to provide these drugs in the event of an outbreak, and by extention is obliged to stockpile them in the run up.
Roche is simply trying to make a profit some might say. Well, in this case, Roche's profit motive is in direct conflict with the safety of every citizen in Taiwan. This isn't even a hard call.
This story brings to mind the recent decision to allow the military indistrial complex to ignore a patent, in the interests of national security.
Slashdot Mirror
And therefore, I shall now declaim a pompous, long-winded pulled-out-of-my-ass speech on that very same subject, about how evolution has shaped men as a hunters and women as nurturers -- an idea no one has *EVAR* thought of before!
This idea is one of those great uncontested theories that seems to make sense on first glance, but as soon as you delve into it it quickly falls under its own weight. From TFA:
The biggest difference was men were hunters and women were gatherers. This gender specialization did not arise because of some male conspiracy to dominate women or some other nastiness. It was the natural, inevitable result of a basic physical difference between men and women
What the hell?! Evidence please? Something beyond the musings of scientists raised in a somewhat, shall be say, biased society. Can anyone seriously suggest that half the adult population of a tribe of hungry, on the line, hunter-gatherers simply stayed at home twiddling their thumbs and watching sprogs while the other half actually went out risking life and limb to haul back the meat? You'd have to be born in the Fifties to buy this.
Oh wait. They did do something. They picked berries! That's rich. I can see this state of affairs lasting for about five minutes before someone in group A, the "hunter" group, realises and the majority of group B, the "gather" group, is reaping the benefit of this relationship far more than he.
A word to the wise who hold such unsubstanciated claims. Women have always worked. They have always been breadwinners. OK, there was a decade or two back there in the fifties where times were so good one spouse could afford not to work and stay home minding the kids. I know I would have. But apart from that, you'll find that women's hands have traditionally been just as calloused as everyone elses.
And if you bother to do any research at all, you'll find some of that modern callous is comeing from holding gampads all day.
Your argument is coherant and persuasive in the context of the game. However it falls apart under the simple realisation that the integrity of your person, property and privacy is more important than your expieriences in an online game.
That is, if you want them to be more important.
I, for one, think Blizzard is doing something positive here, and the complainers are probably cheaters or farmers -- or non-players. Cheating ruins the experience for honest customers.
You're right. The benefits of not meeting the odd player expoliting holes in Blizzard's own software, far outweighs the essential complete annexation of your entire personal and private computer system by Blizzard entertainment, the creator of said exploits.
I could draw parallels to the whole War on Terrorism keeping us all safe thing here, but I think it speaks for itself.
The editors usage of the term rootkit is correct, and proper. You may as well argue that the usage of 'cockpit' for the pilot seat and control area of an airplane is incorrect. From the relevent wikipedia article.
.exes and registry entries.
Generally now the term is not restricted to Unix based operating systems, as tools that perform a similar set of tasks now exist for non-Unix operating systems such as Microsoft Windows (even though such operating systems may not have a "root" account).
Rootkit is no longer a term restricted to gaining "root" user access. The term now stands for any suite of hack and/or programs (the "kit") that enables the malware to disguise its presence in the OS in a more sophistocated manner than simply having obscurely named
Furthermore, in my entirely humble and sincerely personal opinion, the term is an appropriate, apt, and succinct way of decribing these types of malicious programs, both in distinguishing them from the less deeply embedded malware types, and in emphasising the increased security threat these programs pose.
OK. So I, and many other Slashdotters, are usually roped into tech support for family and friends. Just why I thought I was getting some way on top of things with SP2, firefox and AV, this comes along.
.....
So after all my hard work, my little cousins just go out, buy one Sony CD and WHAM! All my efforts gone to pot as the worlds biggest backdoor is slapped straight onto the system. It's not like you can tell teenagers NOT to buy CDs. And really I shouldn't have to.
Gods what if they put this stuff on the CDs the Adults buy!?
It's going to be a llllooonnng christmas season.....
Of course, Mark Russinovich did (inadvertantly) dissasemble content protected by the EULA.
And that is why he shall burn in seven fiery litigious suffering hells along with all the other reverse engineering, anti-DRM, I-want-to-own-what-I-buy, hippy COMMUNISTS! So preacheth the church of the new global economy!
Glory To capitaliZm!!! HAIL SATAN!!!!
Unless the company has buckets of cash and red hot rabid technobabbling lawyers. Then, you know, the judge will agree to just about anything. Doubly so if they're in the Supreme Court.
You shall defend and hold the SONY BMG PARTIES harmless from and against any and all liabilities, damages, costs, expenses or losses arising out of your use of the LICENSED MATERIALS
Ahhh! But is the rootkit one of those licensed materials?
Do I give permission to any software vendor to install anything they want when I run the installer executable?
Pretty much yeah. And according to most EULAs, they can also come to your house, steal everything there, burn what's left, kill your family, poision your cat and still be well within their rights.
If you want an example of what companies can and will do with EULA carte blanc, just read up on the whole Blizzard WoW spyware controversy that Slashdot simply refuses to report on. I guess CmdrTaco is working hard for that custom name!
I don't know where you got your info from, but plugging in a hotswap disk does NOT require a reboot....
Now if only they'd extend this paradigm to installing software.
You forgot:
Group D: Whose population ranges from around 3,500,000,000 to 4,000,000,000 people who are heartily sick of Groups A, B and C and wish they would just litigate, bomb and preach each other into oblivion so that the rest of us can get on with living our lives in some kind of rationality.
I wonder what percentage of the south korean economy is made up of those internet cafes. Switching OS's won't really be fun for them (if it comes to that.).
Actually most problems internet cafes have is quazi slick users playing around with the windows software and of course bugs in IE.
Internet Cafes are essentially now all about using Web interfaces. Thus, switching to Linux with the Redmond KDE skin makes a lot of sense.
The developer's dream is a single processor console that has a very fast CPU. Unfortunately that's hard to manufacture, so they're stuck with something less than ideal that can be made cheaply with today's technology.
My dream is to finally have a language that handles threads in a managable way, rather than me having to manually deal with synchronisation, race issues, locking, etc, etc, etc. Most main modern languages (including java and C#) are built to essentially be backwards compatable with single threaded application, and so programmers fall down when using them to make multi-threaded apps.
People keeps saying that programmers don't "grok" threads. I'd argue that programmers do "grok" thread, they just don't have a language that can deal with them appropriately. Just like people said that programmers didn't "grok" objects. Well, at the time, the most popular languages simply didn't have appropriate object support, so programmers simply didn't use objects.
My wet dream of course is a compiler that will examine my code written for single threads, and automagically seperated parallelisible processes into seperate thread. This obviously, isn't going to happen.
Your system is among the top 1% of all systems scanned by the Game Advisor
Well... that's what the scan would have said if my current Linux box actually ran Windows!
Is this some market survey by Microsoft in an attempt to determine how much cruft their games can handle? To this day I will never understand the amount of resources PC games require.
I find Games are now taking up over 500MB of RAM regularly. OK Texture resolutions are increasing, but has noone heard of streaming technology? Console games manage to have higher res textures, using a lot less RAM. What's going on here?
CPU usage. Again, console games seem to get much more bang for their buck here. OK PC games run on top of an OS, but so do hardcore number crunching research experiments. I had thought that with all the latest graphics card technology, the heaviest calculations were being offloaded more and more to the GPU. Where are all these cycles going, because wherever they're going, the fun/cycle ration seems to be going down.
Disk usage. OK WTF. I've bough games that ship on 1 CD and take up 1GB of Hard Disk. Games seem to be taking up GB of space by default nowadays. It's getting to the point that an 80GB hardrive simply won't be able to take 20+ games. Where the hell is are all the bits going? And why am I still running things off the CD?
Anyway, I thought I'd bring up these points given that as the years go by, PC games seem to have accumulated cruft at a much higher rate than console games. In order to stay competative, I hope PC game developers start trimming down their apps a little. It would be nice to have a modern game install, start, play and close without grinding the entire (high performance) system to a halt.
Shouldn't the British Government be less worried about a game setting a bad example, than by their own bullying of Iraqis twisting the minds of a generation?
I completely fail to understand how one video game will have a greater effect on a child than images of their own country triumphantly wreaking havoc during a war?
Kids thinking it's OK to hit other kids might be bad, but is kids thinking it's OK to bomb other countries any better?
I just don`t know what is the impact of disabling it... Probably some features need it.
The Sun Microsystems Logo?
I, for one, hope the former occurs. I'll admit I'm not a good enough programmer (yet) to do anything about the problem now, but I hope the Open Source programmers who are capable will tackle this problem and fix it w/o making petty excuses.
You seem to have an advanced understanding of how open source works! You put up with the sub-par betas, keep on complaining to devs, and gradually things get better. Bravo!
I disagree about the bit about Win98 'lying' and being 'neurotic'.
But would you say that Win98 is the product of a deranged mind?
It's a sad, sad day for the games industry when one of the biggest titles coming out for a brand new system is an emulation of an older console title.
Would a little innovation really hurt that much?
Hmm, we must not of went on a spree arresting our own people during the communist witch hunts under McCarthy then eh? Please, nobody could see the reds weren't under the bed..paranoia ran rampant much like it is doing again today..you obviously were not alive during that era and can therefore shut the hell up.
McCarthy's campaign lasted from ~1950-1953. The Red Scare itself was over by 1956. People essentially got wise to it, and quickly realised that the reds were not under the bed. It's also worth noting that a great many people were skeptical of McCarty's claims.
Contrast this to today. The Terrorism mantra has lasted over four years 2001-2005. A president has been elected, largely on it sucess. It is very reasonable to suggest that this mantra will remain for at least the next decade, without abating.
The key difference here, is that the communists were understandable to the public, in terms of their overt presence in the form of the Soviet Union, their covert presence as spys, and in terms of their idealogy. The modern terrorist is none of these things.
Ask anyone today what a modern terrorist is, what they stand for and what their idealologies are. Ask them for an estimation of how many terrorists there are in the world. Ask them to pick out a possible terrorist target(Some will, and have said a local Wal-Mart).
People have no idea exactly what a terrorist is. They are in a very real sense, like the bogeyman to ordinary people. Fantastical, terrifying, unquantifiable and completely outside of rational expierience.
If i was Bin Laden i'd be pi**ing myself laughing - it's amazing how a couple of planes and a bomb here and there can derail centuries of democracy and accountable government, where dozens of wars, natural disasters, the nuclear threat and the cold war all failed.
That's because all those threats were definable, quantifiable, and understandable. Especially to the average man. The Russians were a threat, but you knew for sure they were "over there" and there were "that many" of them. So government could only go so far with spin and propaganda. You weren't going to be stopped and searched, arrested and/or executed at will because you could plainly see that the Reds were not in fact Under The Bed.
However, with the terrorism issue, absolutely no one knows how many terrorists there are, or what their plans are. In fact, if pressed, most people could not accurately define what a terrorists actually is. No one has a clue about the manner, nature, extent, cause and/or defence against this shadowy threat. Or even if it exists at all.
Thus Governments are able to essentially use whatever smoke and mirrors they like. Usama Bin Laden; a 48 year old fundamentalist on a kidney dialysis machine, hiding out in some cellar or barn in the back of beyond of the pakistan-afganistan border, becomes Osama Bin Laden; the notorious Blofeld-like mastermind of a global network of elite fanatical terrorist cells, controlling this web through his ferociously loyal spymasters, from a secret sophisticated underground lair, connected by a network of tunnels running up and down the border, probably complete with fusion reactor and 90m high display screen used for demanding $100 billion from the UN security council. If he's never caught, expect news specials in 2057 asking whether the 100 year old Osama is still at large, and specials in 2100 asking whether his body has been cloned and his old brain transfered so he may terrorise the free world for another lifetime. I'm not joking.
The reality is probably much more mundane. Aggrieved and disenfranchised young men, see their only way out as some kind of "honorable" death in killing as many of their supposed oppressors as can. The most likely answer is that there is no terrorist network, just disparate and seperate groups sharing only common ideologies. The cells are just that. Cells. There is no network, and any connection are tenuous at best.
Of course, by pointing this out your "aiding the terrorists". This can be proclaimed, because of course, the common man has no way of knowing whether this threat is real or imagined. He's kept in a state of constant disorientation, fear and patriotism while the noose of authoritatianism draws ever tighter.
We'll all wake up one day in a changed society, where the rights of individuals are trampeled upon, and people's minds are kept coralled in the state that the ruling oligarchy desires. All who deviate will be terrorist sympathisers. And to think, WWII, the h-bomb, quakes, floods and the Soviets could never have managed what was accomplished two plane crashes and a few dozen bombs.
Once the Chinese market has matured, investors will think of American and the EU as they today think of Luxembourg and Jamaica.
I wonder what they'll think of the Indian market then.
If I arrive, will I finally be able to get those homebrew games
off my dusty old 5 1/2'' (B:) floppy?
I'm really not completely sure why the 50-year magnitude cycle occurs, but it's well-documented.
A 50 year cycle is confirmed after only 150 years of bookkeeping? This doesn't sound like a very solid prediction scheme. I'll stick with industry fueled climate change as the most likely suspect until I see hard data to the contrary.
The most fundamental purpose of a government is to manage the country for the benefit of the people.
The Taiwan government is 100% right. It is doings its JOB! It is, more or less, legally obliged to provide these drugs in the event of an outbreak, and by extention is obliged to stockpile them in the run up.
Roche is simply trying to make a profit some might say. Well, in this case, Roche's profit motive is in direct conflict with the safety of every citizen in Taiwan. This isn't even a hard call.
This story brings to mind the recent decision to allow the military indistrial complex to ignore a patent, in the interests of national security.