The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
When Microsoft stock was at a record high in 1999, and its market capitalization was nearly $620 billion, the notion that Apple Computer would ever be bigger—let alone twice as big—was laughable.
You comfort your grieving friend online over chat, but you can't reach out and touch their shoulder.
On the opening night of this year's Sundance Film Festival, two films, as usual, had their premières, gaining maximum exposure to reporters and critics.
Microsoft Research's chief has said he thinks artificial intelligence systems could achieve consciousness, but has played down the threat to human life.
Dara Entekhabi, an MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering and of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, is the science team leader of NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite, scheduled to be launched…
It's hard to predict what startups Andreessen Horowitz wants to get behind.
About a half-billion dollars worth of it vanished from an online exchange in Tokyo.
In 2010 two physicists at Manchester University in the U.K. shared a Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on a new wonder material: graphene, a flat sheet of carbon just one atom thick.
It's generally wise to take demonstrations of new technologies with a grain of salt.
Have you ever thought about why doorknobs are positioned at around two-fifths of the door's height, instead of right in the middle? Or why a washing machine is of its particular shape and size?
It's the end of October, when the days have already grown short in Redmond, Washington, and gray sheets of rain are just beginning to let up.
Do you know what you really want?
It's a rare thing to see a movie about science that takes no prisoners intellectually.
You won't have Glass to kick around anymore. At least not for a while.
Algorithms are everywhere, supposedly.
During one scene in the upcoming hacker action movie Blackhat, a team is sent into the control room of a burned-out nuclear power plant to gather clues about the evil computer saboteur who sparked its catastrophic meltdown.
When he was in grad school, the roboticist Daniel Wilson installed 150 binary sensors in his house.
Design is in flux.
The tech industry once again can't decide: When it comes to the home of the future, will it have a centralized computer telling you when to mop floors, clean windows and cook breakfast, or will there be an all-in-one robot doing…
Ross Ulbricht is finally getting his day in court, 15 months after plainclothes FBI agents grabbed him in the science fiction section of a San Francisco library and accused him of running the billion-dollar online drug bazaar…
Imagine it's a Sunday in the not-too-distant future.
One of the best Twitter accounts inside the Beltway or out—belongs to former representativeJohn Dingell (D-Mich.), who announced his retirement with self-effacing posts such as "Added the 'F' word to my Twitter bio" and "Also…
In an on-camera interview with James Bamford for an upcoming episode of PBS' NOVA, Edward Snowden warned that the U.S. Department of Defense and National Security Agency have over-emphasized the development of offensive network…
The leap second is the rare and obscure practice of occasionally adding a second to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) system that most of us use to set our watches.
It's challenging enough to sustain any scientific study for a decade. Now Eric Horvitz, managing director of the Microsoft Research lab in Redmond, Washington, is launching a project he wants to last a century.
Dynamic scoring, as adopted on Jan. 6 by the House of Representatives, seems like the ultimate no-brainer.
The twin fixations of CES this year are, to no one's surprise, wearable technology and the internet of things.
To mathematician Amir Aczel the most important number of all might just be zero.