The linked USB device costs $16.99 One shipping option to (I picked Bayern) Germany was 16.95. So you get a retro joystick for under $35. They also have another shipping option that runs $28 so you'd be looking at $45. Still not what most people would consider prohibitive.
Plus import tax (14% IIRC) plus VAT (19%) plus "customs handling fee" (20%).
That's what I had to pay (on top of both the price and shipping) when I bought stuff at thinkgeek and had it shipped to Germany. So this $17 joystick would cost you $52, over 3 times the price. OTOH, $35 might be under the limit, so you might get along without paying taxes at all.
That's fairly crazy to me. If it's legal to keep and store data in paper records without a license, I see no reason why a computer should be treated differently - it's just a more efficient way of doing the same thing.
There is a big difference. You said it yourself: Efficiency is the answer. As an example, consider a criminal who looks for potential victims to blackmail. Let's say he has access to huge unrelated data sets about people who work in high government positions or have access to lots of money, who have an alcohol problem, or a money problem, or little children, or a police record of certain nasty habits.
It would take forever to correlate these data sets if they were on paper. OTOH, in a computer DB it'd take you a few lines of SQL and a few seconds to find your victims. Of course, this example is totally made up, but you might be able to map it to a more realistic scenario.
Warning! This Rock Contains Chemicals Known To The State of California To Cause Cancer and Birth Defects Or Other Reproductive Harm. A Brochure With More Information On Specific Chemical Exposures Is Available Inside The Rock.
What about CNN and BBC? I'm curious because it would seem to me, it would be in the interests of the government to block access to outside new sources.
I don't really remember about CNN and BBC (except that I had "Asian editions" of both on the hotel TV) because I usually read German news, e.g. spiegel.de, which was completely uncensored.
Maybe you were in HK, where I hear it is much more progressive than the rest of the country (and sheltered a quite a bit more from the "communism" aspects).
No, I was in Beijing, where I tried the internet in my hotel, at work and in a language school with consistent results (see my GP).
A Canadian relative once went to Cuba and they were plenty pissed when he brought magazines and newspapers from North America for leisurely reading during his vacation. Luckily he wasn't arrested, but the materials were confiscated. Who knows, maybe the security guards wanted to read it for themselves.
This was the first surprise when I entered China: The immigration officer stamped my passport, gave me a nice aloha-style smile and that was it. No questions, no opening my luggage, nothing. It felt almost like a domestic flight.
I was totally baffled, because my previous encounters with communist countries was when I visited my relatives in East Germany. I used to spend hours in the immigration procedure, where they gave us the whole program: they removed the car seats (and we had to figure out how to put them back), made us lower the pants, asked nasty questions, made us wait an extra hour because my father made a harmless joke, and whatnot.
My conclusion: China is not a communist country. It's just a plain old capitalist country without elections. They let you do whatever you want as long as it means business and as long as you don't publicly criticize the government.
"seditious Chinese website" -- like wikipedia, dropbox, archive.org, google cache, blogspot, sourceforge, freebsd.org, youtube, twitter, foursquare and facebook.
My experience might be a bit outdated (October 2008 was the last time I was in China), but I didn't see much of a firewall there. The only sites that I couldn't reach (occasionally!) were zh.wikipedia.org (which I tried out of curiosity) and a sourceforge download site in Taiwan. And I tried a lot of sites, including the ones that you mention and other usual suspects.
My Chinese colleagues told me that generally only Chinese-language sites and sites located in Taiwan are blocked. They also told me that anyone with basic computing literacy can circumvent the firewall anyway without so much of an effort. I can't tell you much about the details because I didn't need to and my colleagues didn't seem to want to speak about it. My impression was that the Chinese DNS server just didn't resolve some site names.
At times I had the impression that the SSL connection to my webmail service in Germany and the VPN connection to my company's intranet was a bit slow and unreliable (which made me paranoid of a man-in-the-middle attack), but when I was in the US recently the connection was even more slow and unreliable. Draw your own conclusions.
Germans usually tolerate porn and other adult content more than in the US.
True. For instance, I wonder why nobody complains about the beeps that replace all four-letter words (except "Lord") on American TV. (You are aware that the people aren't actually saying "beep", right?) I'd call that censorship. I can live with people saying "fuck" on TV every once in a while.
On the other hand, I find it hard to live with the knowledge that kids are being abused in order to produce child porn. And I wouldn't (necessarily) call the attempt to dry out the child porn market censorship. I mean, seriously, does it impede your right to free speech if you are not allowed to produce and circulate child porn?
and voted to censor child porn (only to have the president kill the ban as unconstituitonal).
Except he didn't, he signed this law. It's just that everybody (including half the people who voted for it) hoped he wouldn't because a few month after this law was voted on the pirate party gained 2% in the federal election (5% is the minimum to get seats, which they did get in some regions). The last thing any of the established parties want is yet another party to worry about so internet topics suddenly because important. The ministry of justice has instructed the police to treat this law as the most unimportant one of all (i.e. not enforce it) and the parliament is actively working on replacing it with a law that does not allow filtering.
The success of the German Pirate Party may be one of the reasons, but I guess the major reason is that the law gives the BKA (German federal police) the right to decide which site is to be blocked. Which is unconstitutional. The job of the police is to enforce the law, not to decide what is lawful. So everybody is scared that the law is torn to pieces by the constitutional court.
BTW: The German Pirate Party has its own problems now. Their most famous member (Jörg Tauss, former social democrat and member of parliament) has just been convicted of possessing child porn (no surprise he is against censorship). Oh, ex-member: he left the party in order "to keep damage away from it", but I suspect that sufficient damage has been done already.
Most other Europeans do not "make do with ID cards" to travel but are obliged by law to carry one on them at all times (whether traveling or not).
Here in Germany you can get fined for not carrying an ID (IIRC around 10 EUR), but I never actually saw this happen.
Back in the days when Berlin was under allied law (until 1990), allied soldiers were actually allowed to kill you on the spot if you didn't show your ID, but AFAIK they never did that.
BTW, I don't understand what is so bad about an ID card (without the biometric stuff and central data mining). It's a convenient standardized item that you can use anywhere (except US liquor stores) to prove your identity. It has been around here since I don't know when, and it doesn't seem to turn this country into a nightmare.
We (a team of 5) moved into new office space a month ago. We were put into 5 adjacent cubicles in a very large room. Which sucks: you are close enough to annoy each other by noise, e.g. phone calls, but not close enough to cooperate (which requires line of sight).
After a few days we removed the walls separating 4 of our cubicles, which took us a good hour and created a space of roughly 4x6 meters. The walls of the resulting big cubicle are lined with small tables, which we use when we want to work separately. In the middle, we have a table, which we use when we meet. When someone calls in a meeting, everybody just swings his chair around, and viola, the meeting starts within seconds.
On the central table sits a computer with two screens (sometimes facing opposite directions, showing same contents, sometimes side by side with different windows), two keyboards and two mice, so each of us can easily grab a device to point, write, etc. This computer has a complete IDE, and all documentation is in a wiki, the code is in SVN etc., so it has basically the same configuration as the others and everybody is familiar with it. Our meetings sometimes escalate when all of us compete for control of the mouse cursor, but generally discipline is high enough.
We found that this arrangement is the ideal balance between single and group workplace:
You want to work alone, turn your back to the others, face the wall. It gives you just about the privacy you need. You can listen to the discussions in the middle, but you don't have to.
You want to co-work (pair programming, discuss, etc.) turn around and face the middle.
We will definitely keep this arrangement, because we all find it very convenient, and we think that our productivity has increased a lot through it.
Of course, it might require more tables or computers than you have, but Ikea is around the corner, and you probably have a few unused PCs around your place anyway.
It was his stepchild who killed herself. His one-year old biological child is alive and well.
Yup. I was preparing to nominate this occurrence for the Darwin award, when I noticed this detail. Male lions kill the offspring of a female lion before mating with her. This is apparently advantageous for their own genes. Ol' Dougie did the same.
It's a great way to make sure the code works the way you expect, and when it doesn't you can learn how it actually works. Often you will find that this will expose huge flaws in the original code too.
After that, it's a source of documentation, sort of.
I'll second that. I have been in the same situation a couple of times. Unit tests are IMHO the best way to understand the code. You express your assumptions of how the code works in the unit test, and you verify your assumptions at the same time! If your initial assumptions were wrong, you learn the truth while creating a succesful test.
Once I am reasonably sure about a piece of code, I usually write javadoc comments (or the equivalent in doxygen or pydoc etc.) to chisel my findings in stone. You can also start with the comments, putting a TODO wherever you're uncertain, then try to throw out the TODOs one by one.
The additional benefit of unit tests is that when you have enough unit tests in place you can start refactoring the code to your taste without worrying about breaking it.
Re:Suppression of costs via minimizing testing.
on
2010 Bug Plagues Germany
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree. In my experience, testing is usually cut down first when it comes to cost reduction, because the bosses can't see the benefit of testing. They never learn, it seems.
I mean, who in the year 2000 could have predicted that a one day the important digit would roll over from 0, 1, 2,... 9, and back to 0 again?
I don't know the details but my guess is that the chip expects year-2000 in BCD (which is traditionally used in trade IIRC), but the machine provides it in plain binary. So the chip fails to dig bit pattern 1100.
Especially when you are so busy eating cheese and contemplating surrender.
You must be referring to the fact that they refused to join the 'coalition of the willing'. IMHO this beats celebrating victory (remember MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?) in a war even before it starts to get real nasty.
You remind me of Cato the Elder who had the habit of ending all his speeches with the words Furthermore, I think Carthage must be destroyed. I think he was right, and I think you're right, too. But that's slashdot: What earned the old Roman eternal reputation gives you only a "-1, Troll". Hang on, though.
Furthermore, I think that the CO2 level in the atmosphere must be reduced.
What exactly has he done to deserve the prize? Would it not have been better to wait until he got done with his presidency first?
As a non-American, I'd say the prize is justified alone because he treats foreign countries like peers, not pawns (think "fraternity'). This much was obvious from day 1 of his presidency, and it came as a great relief after 8 years of Dubya's lunacy, arrogance and ignorance (if you pardon my French).
If you are between the ages of ~15 and ~60, and are in general good health, you should not get the flu shot. It terrifies me when I see flu shots being given out to students at local schools and colleges. These are the people who have absolutely zero risk of dying from the flu. None.
Not quite: The Spanish Flu seems to have killed especially healthy young adults.
No the scam is not on you, you get cheaper heating. The scam is on everyone else, who pay more for the electricity than you pay for the gas you use to generate it.
OK, let's go back to start: These things are needed to provide short-term (in the order of minutes) backup for the highly volatile production of PV and wind energy, which currently make up around 7% of the total production and rising. We're talking physics here, not business.
Germany doesn't have many alternatives: Almost all suitable lakes already have dams. Gas plants produce CO2. Nuclear energy is too slow and not wanted (whether you like it or not) and even if it were it couldn't be increased in a few years anyway.
BTW: Nuclear fuel isn't unlimited; the Desertec Consortium speaks of 100 years of proven resouces (and four times more "expected" resources). If we increase the use of nuclear energy fourfold, Uranium is possibly gone or too expensive in 30 years.
So, if you compare a swarm of CHPs with the only viable alternative for short-term backup, namely a gas plant, they have a couple of advantages: they produce less CO2; they generate electricity well within the grid, i.e. they don't need any new high-voltage lines; they don't even need a single additional square meter of land; they help the car industry through the crisis.
This is a way of stealing the reusable energy subsidies while increasing CO2 output.
The subsidy on CHP in Germany is not terribly high: 0.23 c/kWh for small plants below 100MWh/y and 0.05 c/kWh above, which is funded by raising the price of each kWh consumed in Germany. If 1% (guessed) of the electricity comes from CHP country-wide it increases the price per kWh for everyone else by less than 0.0023 c. That's bearable.
But when everyone in your house is taking their morning shower ready to go to work/school you don't want to have to wait a few hours for the hot water to be ready - you want it now.
C'mon, nobody said the system would have to be stupid. The parameters of the swarm leave plenty of room for sensible optimization. E.g. if the temperature falls below an even lower threshold, it will heat even though there is no demand for electricity. This won't even show in the noise of the grid if it happens for a couple thousand of them every now and then.
Anyway, since you can turn gas into heat at about the same efficiency as this thing turns gas into electricity + heat this is just a scam to offset the price of your (increased) gas consumption by the difference between the price of gas and electricity.
Nope. No scam at all. The pricing model is quite attractive: You don't pay for the gas, only for the heat that is fed into your home; the price per kWh is the same as you'd pay for a kWh ( ~= 0.1 m^3) of gas (currently around 9c/kWh). As a bonus you get 0.5 c per kWh electricity, so it's even a bit cheaper than regular gas heating. They even take care of hardware maintenance, because it's their plant.
If any Joe can sue the crap out of a major lobbying corporation for some silly patent you can be damn sure that the corporations will do anything to nullify this.
Quite the opposite, I'd say: The corporations leave the patent system untouched and write even more patents, so they can slam their counter-patent into Joe's face when he tries to sue them. This is the home turf of large corporations: They have huge patent departments, which Joe hasn't. But since you can't enforce good ideas, the patents get crappier and crappier.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a joke, right? Exploding manhole covers? In pre-Snake Plissken-New York? OMG
The linked USB device costs $16.99 One shipping option to (I picked Bayern) Germany was 16.95. So you get a retro joystick for under $35. They also have another shipping option that runs $28 so you'd be looking at $45. Still not what most people would consider prohibitive.
Plus import tax (14% IIRC) plus VAT (19%) plus "customs handling fee" (20%).
That's what I had to pay (on top of both the price and shipping) when I bought stuff at thinkgeek and had it shipped to Germany. So this $17 joystick would cost you $52, over 3 times the price. OTOH, $35 might be under the limit, so you might get along without paying taxes at all.
That's fairly crazy to me. If it's legal to keep and store data in paper records without a license, I see no reason why a computer should be treated differently - it's just a more efficient way of doing the same thing.
There is a big difference. You said it yourself: Efficiency is the answer. As an example, consider a criminal who looks for potential victims to blackmail. Let's say he has access to huge unrelated data sets about people who work in high government positions or have access to lots of money, who have an alcohol problem, or a money problem, or little children, or a police record of certain nasty habits.
It would take forever to correlate these data sets if they were on paper. OTOH, in a computer DB it'd take you a few lines of SQL and a few seconds to find your victims. Of course, this example is totally made up, but you might be able to map it to a more realistic scenario.
Warning! This Rock Contains Chemicals Known To The State of California To Cause Cancer and Birth Defects Or Other Reproductive Harm. A Brochure With More Information On Specific Chemical Exposures Is Available Inside The Rock.
What about CNN and BBC? I'm curious because it would seem to me, it would be in the interests of the government to block access to outside new sources.
I don't really remember about CNN and BBC (except that I had "Asian editions" of both on the hotel TV) because I usually read German news, e.g. spiegel.de, which was completely uncensored.
Maybe you were in HK, where I hear it is much more progressive than the rest of the country (and sheltered a quite a bit more from the "communism" aspects).
No, I was in Beijing, where I tried the internet in my hotel, at work and in a language school with consistent results (see my GP).
A Canadian relative once went to Cuba and they were plenty pissed when he brought magazines and newspapers from North America for leisurely reading during his vacation. Luckily he wasn't arrested, but the materials were confiscated. Who knows, maybe the security guards wanted to read it for themselves.
This was the first surprise when I entered China: The immigration officer stamped my passport, gave me a nice aloha-style smile and that was it. No questions, no opening my luggage, nothing. It felt almost like a domestic flight.
I was totally baffled, because my previous encounters with communist countries was when I visited my relatives in East Germany. I used to spend hours in the immigration procedure, where they gave us the whole program: they removed the car seats (and we had to figure out how to put them back), made us lower the pants, asked nasty questions, made us wait an extra hour because my father made a harmless joke, and whatnot.
My conclusion: China is not a communist country. It's just a plain old capitalist country without elections. They let you do whatever you want as long as it means business and as long as you don't publicly criticize the government.
"seditious Chinese website" -- like wikipedia, dropbox, archive.org, google cache, blogspot, sourceforge, freebsd.org, youtube, twitter, foursquare and facebook .
My experience might be a bit outdated (October 2008 was the last time I was in China), but I didn't see much of a firewall there. The only sites that I couldn't reach (occasionally!) were zh.wikipedia.org (which I tried out of curiosity) and a sourceforge download site in Taiwan. And I tried a lot of sites, including the ones that you mention and other usual suspects.
My Chinese colleagues told me that generally only Chinese-language sites and sites located in Taiwan are blocked. They also told me that anyone with basic computing literacy can circumvent the firewall anyway without so much of an effort. I can't tell you much about the details because I didn't need to and my colleagues didn't seem to want to speak about it. My impression was that the Chinese DNS server just didn't resolve some site names.
At times I had the impression that the SSL connection to my webmail service in Germany and the VPN connection to my company's intranet was a bit slow and unreliable (which made me paranoid of a man-in-the-middle attack), but when I was in the US recently the connection was even more slow and unreliable. Draw your own conclusions.
You're kidding, right? It's a simple reciprocal.
That's the whole point of the article. Reciprocal is NOT simple for the masses.
I had quite a few fellow students at school not understanding why 1/2 + 1/2 != 1/(2+2). None of them read slashdot now.
It depends on how you would define child porn. Some would argue that having small breasts makes you a child.
Hm.. well, others would argue that having small breasts makes you a middle-aged man who has had too many beers.
Germans usually tolerate porn and other adult content more than in the US.
True. For instance, I wonder why nobody complains about the beeps that replace all four-letter words (except "Lord") on American TV. (You are aware that the people aren't actually saying "beep", right?) I'd call that censorship. I can live with people saying "fuck" on TV every once in a while.
On the other hand, I find it hard to live with the knowledge that kids are being abused in order to produce child porn. And I wouldn't (necessarily) call the attempt to dry out the child porn market censorship. I mean, seriously, does it impede your right to free speech if you are not allowed to produce and circulate child porn?
Except he didn't, he signed this law. It's just that everybody (including half the people who voted for it) hoped he wouldn't because a few month after this law was voted on the pirate party gained 2% in the federal election (5% is the minimum to get seats, which they did get in some regions). The last thing any of the established parties want is yet another party to worry about so internet topics suddenly because important. The ministry of justice has instructed the police to treat this law as the most unimportant one of all (i.e. not enforce it) and the parliament is actively working on replacing it with a law that does not allow filtering.
The success of the German Pirate Party may be one of the reasons, but I guess the major reason is that the law gives the BKA (German federal police) the right to decide which site is to be blocked. Which is unconstitutional. The job of the police is to enforce the law, not to decide what is lawful. So everybody is scared that the law is torn to pieces by the constitutional court.
BTW: The German Pirate Party has its own problems now. Their most famous member (Jörg Tauss, former social democrat and member of parliament) has just been convicted of possessing child porn (no surprise he is against censorship). Oh, ex-member: he left the party in order "to keep damage away from it", but I suspect that sufficient damage has been done already.
Most other Europeans do not "make do with ID cards" to travel but are obliged by law to carry one on them at all times (whether traveling or not).
Here in Germany you can get fined for not carrying an ID (IIRC around 10 EUR), but I never actually saw this happen.
Back in the days when Berlin was under allied law (until 1990), allied soldiers were actually allowed to kill you on the spot if you didn't show your ID, but AFAIK they never did that.
BTW, I don't understand what is so bad about an ID card (without the biometric stuff and central data mining). It's a convenient standardized item that you can use anywhere (except US liquor stores) to prove your identity. It has been around here since I don't know when, and it doesn't seem to turn this country into a nightmare.
Nail him up, I say!
Nail some sense into him!
We (a team of 5) moved into new office space a month ago. We were put into 5 adjacent cubicles in a very large room. Which sucks: you are close enough to annoy each other by noise, e.g. phone calls, but not close enough to cooperate (which requires line of sight).
After a few days we removed the walls separating 4 of our cubicles, which took us a good hour and created a space of roughly 4x6 meters. The walls of the resulting big cubicle are lined with small tables, which we use when we want to work separately. In the middle, we have a table, which we use when we meet. When someone calls in a meeting, everybody just swings his chair around, and viola, the meeting starts within seconds.
On the central table sits a computer with two screens (sometimes facing opposite directions, showing same contents, sometimes side by side with different windows), two keyboards and two mice, so each of us can easily grab a device to point, write, etc. This computer has a complete IDE, and all documentation is in a wiki, the code is in SVN etc., so it has basically the same configuration as the others and everybody is familiar with it. Our meetings sometimes escalate when all of us compete for control of the mouse cursor, but generally discipline is high enough.
We found that this arrangement is the ideal balance between single and group workplace:
You want to work alone, turn your back to the others, face the wall. It gives you just about the privacy you need. You can listen to the discussions in the middle, but you don't have to.
You want to co-work (pair programming, discuss, etc.) turn around and face the middle.
We will definitely keep this arrangement, because we all find it very convenient, and we think that our productivity has increased a lot through it.
Of course, it might require more tables or computers than you have, but Ikea is around the corner, and you probably have a few unused PCs around your place anyway.
It was his stepchild who killed herself. His one-year old biological child is alive and well.
Yup. I was preparing to nominate this occurrence for the Darwin award, when I noticed this detail. Male lions kill the offspring of a female lion before mating with her. This is apparently advantageous for their own genes. Ol' Dougie did the same.
It's a great way to make sure the code works the way you expect, and when it doesn't you can learn how it actually works. Often you will find that this will expose huge flaws in the original code too. After that, it's a source of documentation, sort of.
I'll second that. I have been in the same situation a couple of times. Unit tests are IMHO the best way to understand the code. You express your assumptions of how the code works in the unit test, and you verify your assumptions at the same time! If your initial assumptions were wrong, you learn the truth while creating a succesful test.
Once I am reasonably sure about a piece of code, I usually write javadoc comments (or the equivalent in doxygen or pydoc etc.) to chisel my findings in stone. You can also start with the comments, putting a TODO wherever you're uncertain, then try to throw out the TODOs one by one.
The additional benefit of unit tests is that when you have enough unit tests in place you can start refactoring the code to your taste without worrying about breaking it.
I agree. In my experience, testing is usually cut down first when it comes to cost reduction, because the bosses can't see the benefit of testing. They never learn, it seems.
I mean, who in the year 2000 could have predicted that a one day the important digit would roll over from 0, 1, 2, ... 9, and back to 0 again?
I don't know the details but my guess is that the chip expects year-2000 in BCD (which is traditionally used in trade IIRC), but the machine provides it in plain binary. So the chip fails to dig bit pattern 1100.
Especially when you are so busy eating cheese and contemplating surrender.
You must be referring to the fact that they refused to join the 'coalition of the willing'. IMHO this beats celebrating victory (remember MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?) in a war even before it starts to get real nasty.
(Assuming global warming is caused by California's use of hydroelectric power - which seems unlikely.)
You're 100% right about the GP being a troll, but only 14.5% right about CA using hydroelectric power.
That's pretty old news, actually. The European Union already convinced phone makers to agree on a standard charger a few months ago.
climate change
You remind me of Cato the Elder who had the habit of ending all his speeches with the words Furthermore, I think Carthage must be destroyed . I think he was right, and I think you're right, too. But that's slashdot: What earned the old Roman eternal reputation gives you only a "-1, Troll". Hang on, though.
Furthermore, I think that the CO2 level in the atmosphere must be reduced.
What exactly has he done to deserve the prize? Would it not have been better to wait until he got done with his presidency first?
As a non-American, I'd say the prize is justified alone because he treats foreign countries like peers, not pawns (think "fraternity'). This much was obvious from day 1 of his presidency, and it came as a great relief after 8 years of Dubya's lunacy, arrogance and ignorance (if you pardon my French).
If you are between the ages of ~15 and ~60, and are in general good health, you should not get the flu shot. It terrifies me when I see flu shots being given out to students at local schools and colleges. These are the people who have absolutely zero risk of dying from the flu. None.
Not quite: The Spanish Flu seems to have killed especially healthy young adults.
No the scam is not on you, you get cheaper heating. The scam is on everyone else, who pay more for the electricity than you pay for the gas you use to generate it.
OK, let's go back to start: These things are needed to provide short-term (in the order of minutes) backup for the highly volatile production of PV and wind energy, which currently make up around 7% of the total production and rising. We're talking physics here, not business.
Germany doesn't have many alternatives: Almost all suitable lakes already have dams. Gas plants produce CO2. Nuclear energy is too slow and not wanted (whether you like it or not) and even if it were it couldn't be increased in a few years anyway.
BTW: Nuclear fuel isn't unlimited; the Desertec Consortium speaks of 100 years of proven resouces (and four times more "expected" resources). If we increase the use of nuclear energy fourfold, Uranium is possibly gone or too expensive in 30 years.
So, if you compare a swarm of CHPs with the only viable alternative for short-term backup, namely a gas plant, they have a couple of advantages: they produce less CO2; they generate electricity well within the grid, i.e. they don't need any new high-voltage lines; they don't even need a single additional square meter of land; they help the car industry through the crisis.
This is a way of stealing the reusable energy subsidies while increasing CO2 output.
The subsidy on CHP in Germany is not terribly high: 0.23 c/kWh for small plants below 100MWh/y and 0.05 c/kWh above, which is funded by raising the price of each kWh consumed in Germany. If 1% (guessed) of the electricity comes from CHP country-wide it increases the price per kWh for everyone else by less than 0.0023 c. That's bearable.
But when everyone in your house is taking their morning shower ready to go to work/school you don't want to have to wait a few hours for the hot water to be ready - you want it now.
C'mon, nobody said the system would have to be stupid. The parameters of the swarm leave plenty of room for sensible optimization. E.g. if the temperature falls below an even lower threshold, it will heat even though there is no demand for electricity. This won't even show in the noise of the grid if it happens for a couple thousand of them every now and then.
Anyway, since you can turn gas into heat at about the same efficiency as this thing turns gas into electricity + heat this is just a scam to offset the price of your (increased) gas consumption by the difference between the price of gas and electricity.
Nope. No scam at all. The pricing model is quite attractive: You don't pay for the gas, only for the heat that is fed into your home; the price per kWh is the same as you'd pay for a kWh ( ~= 0.1 m^3) of gas (currently around 9c/kWh). As a bonus you get 0.5 c per kWh electricity, so it's even a bit cheaper than regular gas heating. They even take care of hardware maintenance, because it's their plant.
If any Joe can sue the crap out of a major lobbying corporation for some silly patent you can be damn sure that the corporations will do anything to nullify this.
Quite the opposite, I'd say: The corporations leave the patent system untouched and write even more patents, so they can slam their counter-patent into Joe's face when he tries to sue them. This is the home turf of large corporations: They have huge patent departments, which Joe hasn't. But since you can't enforce good ideas, the patents get crappier and crappier.