It is my understanding that the federal government will reimburse the hospitals for more than they would receive from insurance companies if the death is classified 'Covid-19'.

Your understanding is ludicrous. The government and insurance companies are not engaged in a bidding war.

5. No statement ascribing a mental predicate can be derived from any set of purely physical descriptions.

Meh. Hume's Law doesn't really apply to that statement. That's the same as the Chinese Room argument against strong ai. It is more wishful thinking than a valid thesis. It is very easy for a collection to have properties that its individual elements do not. A simple example is that a set of objects can be assigned a number corresponding to the number of objects in the set, whereas that property isn't meaningful for a single object. Once the collective property is defined, it is very easy to logically derive it from the collection of individual objects. So a particular mental state can be assigned to a particular set of neurons firing and, assuming that you have a good neurological model of the mind, you can therefore derive mental states from physical descriptions in the same way you derive results in calculus once you have defined concepts like limits.

To come back to the point of the thread, attempting to save humanity is meaningful even if it may ultimately be unsuccessful.

I'm no fan of Java-based curricula, for the same reason I'd be no fan of Fortran-based curricula. Computing isn't about one language. Each language and system shows you one hyperplane of a vast multidimensional space. The best programmers know lots of languages, and choose wisely among them — or even create new ones when appropriate.

In the production world, there are times where some C++ or Java code is appropriate ... and there are times when what you want is a couple of lines of shellscript and some pipes ... and there are times when the most sensible algorithm for something can't be neatly expressed in a language like C++ or Java, and really requires something like Common Lisp or Haskell. If you need to exploit multiple processors without getting bogged down in locking bullshit and race conditions, you're much better off using Go than Java.

(Just last night, at a meetup, I was talking with two bright young physicists who reported that their universities don't do a good enough job of teaching Fortran, which is the language they actually need to do their job. Scientific computing still relies heavily on Fortran, Matlab, and other languages well removed from what's trendy in the CS department — no matter if that CS department is in the Java, Haskell, or Python camp. But if you want to learn to write good Fortran, you basically need a mentor in the physics department with time to teach you.)

And there are times when the right thing to do is to create a new language, whether a domain-specific language or a new approach on general-purpose computing. There's a good reason Rob Pike came up with Sawzall, a logs-analysis DSL that compiles to arbitrarily parallel mapreduces; and then Go, a C-like systems language with a rocket engine of concurrency built in.

(And there's a good reason a lot of people adopting Go have been coming not from the C++/Java camps that the Go developers expected, but from Python and Ruby: because Go gives you the raw speed of a concurrent and native-compiled language, plus libraries designed by actual engineers, without a lot of the verbose bullshit of C++ or Java. Would I recommend Go as a first language? I'm not so sure about that ....)

What would an optimal computing curriculum look like? I have no freakin' clue. It would have to cover particular basics — variable binding, iteration, recursion, sequencing, data structures, libraries and APIs, concurrency — no matter what the language. But it can't leave its students thinking that one language is Intuitive and the other ones are Just Gratuitously Weird ... and that's too much of what I see from young programmers in industry today.

But the big G doesn't contribute anything to the work of creatives.

You never use a search engine while writing? They're awfully handy for fact-checking, looking up sources, and so on.

But I suppose those sorts of activities are not required these days ....

Are you monitoring outbound traffic from your site? Is this report just an avert for some McAfee service?

Eh, there's a fair number of power users who could step up in case of necessity. It's not just neckbeards and grandmas out there.

They could gas the rats...

The City of London was well within reason to ask them to look at whether one of their users was violating their terms, and all they had to do was say "no". RTFS