Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2012
From ACM Careers
Follow a Career Passion? Let It Follow You
In the spring of 2004, during my senior year of college, I faced a hard decision about my future career.
From ACM Opinion
Do Patent and Copyright Law Restrict Competition and Creativity Excessively?
To evaluate optimal patent protection for an invention, one has to consider both the cost of inventing and the cost of copying; the higher the ratio of the former to the latter, the greater the optimal patent protection for the…
From ACM News
Apple Designs the Future
It’s impossible to look anywhere these days without noticing how profoundly Apple has influenced design and computing interfaces.
From ACM Opinion
Meet the Man Who Gave the Mars Rover Its Eyes
Iconic pictures from the latest mission to the Red Planet are coming courtesy of space-imaging expert Michael Malin.
From ACM Opinion
How Can We Make Devices Better? By Studying What People Actually Do
Many new technologies are based on what companies and designers seem to think their users might want to do, or what they envision them wanting to do, but not as many are based on what people actually do, Ellen Isaacs told attendees…
From Communications of the ACM
Reflecting on the Facebook IPO
Exploring some factors that reflect a company's worth.
From Communications of the ACM
The Foresight Saga, Redux
Short-term thinking is the enemy of the long-term future.
From Communications of the ACM
The Goldilocks Estimate
Balancing two extremes in project estimation.
From Communications of the ACM
A Nice Piece of Code
Colorful metaphors and properly reusing functions.
From Communications of the ACM
Computing as If Infrastructure Mattered
Understanding the technical and social fundamentals of the computing infrastructure is essential in the continuously evolving technological realm.
From Communications of the ACM
The Tyranny of the Clock
Promoting a clock-free paradigm that fits everything learned about programming since Turing.