Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2014
From ACM Opinion
One niverse, One Life: A Conjecture
Opening Disclaimer 1: Although there may be more than one universe, as per the hypothetical multiverse, we will humbly submit to our own bubble of information, the sphere with a radius equal to the distance light has traveled…
From ACM Opinion
How to Build a Gesture-Controlled Web Game with Leap Motion
Modern smartphones have helped shed a light on the power of user interfaces that are driven by gesture and touch. It’s increasingly clear that touch will play a prominent role in the future of computing, but there are still challenges…
From ACM Opinion
Maths Spying: The Quandary of Working For the Spooks
For the past 10 months, a major international scandal has engulfed some of the world's largest employers of mathematicians.
From ACM Opinion
Warp Drive Research Key to Interstellar Travel
As any avid Star Trek fan can tell you, the eccentric physicist Zefram Cochrane invented the warp-drive engine in the year 2063.
From ACM Opinion
Farewell Nokia: The Rise and Fall of a Mobile Pioneer
You never forget your first cellphone.
From ACM Opinion
Putin's Fear of the Internet
In the mid-nineteen-sixties, Brezhnev's Soviet Union introduced a law aimed at stifling ideological dissent.
From ACM Opinion
An Iphone Engineer-Turned-Game Maker Shares His Apple Story
From ACM Opinion
Habitable Exoplanets Are Bad News For Humanity
Last week, scientists announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, a planet 492 light years away in the Cygnus constellation.
From ACM Opinion
Goodbye, Net Neutrality; Hello, Net Discrimination
In 2007, at a public forum at Coe College, in Iowa, Presidential candidate Barack Obama was asked about net neutrality.
From ACM Opinion
The Justice of Coders
Among the most important changes in the structure of this society is the rise of engineers and the ethics they make manifest.
From ACM Opinion
I Didn't Type This Article
I'm dictating it to my iPhone as I walk down the busy city street on the way to my office in the West Village.
From ACM Opinion
The Cloud Industry Needs Aereo to Win. But Consumers Need Something Better.
The best way to think about Aereo, the company at the center of this week's Supreme Court battle over the future of computing, is as an example of legal performance art.
From ACM Opinion
The Limits of Social Engineering
In 1969, Playboy published a long, freewheeling interview with Marshall McLuhan in which the media theorist and sixties icon sketched a portrait of the future that was at once seductive and repellent.
From ACM Opinion
Death Googles Himself
Hey!
From ACM Opinion
At Aereo Arguments, Can Old-School Analogies Explain New Technology?
Technology is hard. Valet parking and coat check rooms are not, at least for U.S. Supreme Court justices.
From ACM Opinion
How America's Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future
Stories set in the future are often judged, as time passes, on whether they come true or not.
From ACM Opinion
Driverless Cars Can't Come Soon Enough
We all know the tragedy of car accidents.
From ACM News
Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?
A quantum computer is a device that could exploit the weirdness of the quantum world to solve certain specific problems much faster than we know how to solve them using a conventional computer.
From ACM Opinion
Michael Lewis on Exposing Wall Street's Biggest High-Tech Swindle
Flash Boys explores the world of high-frequency trading, a scheme in which traders use ultra-fast network connections to sniff out the intentions of other, slower traders, thereby acting before others can respond.
From ACM Opinion
Smallest Subversive: Mathematical Fight For Our World
Did you know that every time you use your cellphone, you strike a blow for republicanism against both monarchy and a fixed Divine Order?
From ACM News
What Makes an Alien Intelligent?
On Thursday, astronomers announced that they'd reached a new milestone in the search for Earth's "twin," or a planet much like ours that orbits in what's known as the Goldilocks Zone—not too close to its star, nor too far away…
From ACM Opinion
The Fuzzy Math Behind the Search For Mh370
Five weeks into the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, more than $30 million has been spent scouring great swatches of the southern Indian Ocean.
From ACM Opinion
The Most Expensive Lottery Ticket in the World
No Exit, the new book from Gideon Lewis-Kraus, should be required reading for anybody who thinks it might be a good idea to found a startup in Silicon Valley.
From ACM Opinion
If the Robots Kill s, It's Because It's Their Job
In the movie Transcendence, which opens in theaters on Friday, a sentient computer program embarks on a relentless quest for power, nearly destroying humanity in the process.
From ACM Opinion
It's Time to Encrypt the Entire Internet
The Heartbleed bug crushed our faith in the secure Web, but a world without the encryption software that Heartbleed exploited would be even worse.
From ACM Opinion
Captchas Are Becoming Security Theater
CAPTCHAs are a time-worn way for humans to tell computers that we are human.
From ACM Opinion
Why the Web Needs Perfect Forward Secrecy More Than Ever
EFF has long advocated for websites to support HTTPS instead of plain HTTP to encrypt and authenticate data transmitted on the Internet.
From ACM Opinion
Google Wants to Make 'science Fiction' a Reality—and That's Limiting Their Imagination
Self-driving cars, extreme life extension, and global wifi provided by weather balloons: Google makes projects that sound like science fiction into reality at its secretive research lab, Google X.
From ACM Opinion
Can We Really pload Johnny Depp's Brain?
When Wally Pfister's Transcendence is released on April 17, millions of moviegoers will be asking themselves, "Could we really upload Johnny Depp into a computer one day?"
From ACM Careers
The New Academic Celebrity
Back in 1991, a New York Times Magazine writer, Anne Matthews, described Andrew Ross, a doyen of American studies, strolling through the Modern Language Association conference in his "pale mango wool-and-silk Commes des Garcons…