Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2014
From ACM Opinion
Why Many Programmers Don't Bother Joining the ACM
Earlier this month Vint Cerf, co-creator of the TCP/IP protocol and current Google vice president, openly asked professional programmers for feedback regarding the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a professional organization…
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions For J. Craig Venter
Genome scientist and entrepreneur J. Craig Venter is best known for being the first person to sequence his own genome, back in 2001.
From ACM Opinion
The Nsa's Cyber-King Goes Corporate
Keith Alexander, the recently retired director of the National Security Agency, left many in Washington slack-jawed when it was reported that he might charge companies up to $1 million a month to help them protect their computer…
From ACM Opinion
The Weird Reasons Why People Make p False Identities on the Internet
Sockpuppetry—using false identities for deception—is centuries old, but the advent of the web has made creating sockpuppets, and falling for their tricks, easier than ever before.
From ACM Opinion
Why Is Science Fiction So Hard to Define?
Time Out, the weekly listings magazine, recently ranked the 100 best sci-fi movies of all time.
From ACM Opinion
Google Bets a Billion Dollars on Twitch
Video gaming differentiates itself from the older forms of escapism—literature, theatre, film, television—with interactivity.
From ACM Opinion
How to Invent a Person Online
On April 8, 2013, I received an envelope in the mail from a nonexistent return address in Toledo, Ohio.
From ACM Opinion
When Robots Come For Our Jobs, Will We Be Ready to Outsmart Them?
Non-human employees are filling positions in all sorts of workplaces, and they are proving themselves to be fast, accurate, and reliable—more so than their human counterparts.
From ACM Opinion
How the .s. Stumbled Into the Drone Era
On Sept. 7, 2000, in the waning days of the Clinton administration, a U.S. Predator drone flew over Afghanistan for the first time.
From ACM Opinion
The Next Big Thing in Hardware: Smart Garbage
There's a box on a shelf in my closet stuffed with smart smoke detectors, old smartphones, chargers, battery cases, fitness trackers, a Kindle that I sat on and broke and various sensors that have long ceased to detect anything…
From ACM Opinion
How to Talk About Blowing Things p in Cyberspace, According to the Military
Bombs are relatively simple, when you boil everything down.
From ACM Opinion
The Fasinatng … Frustrating … Fascinating History of Autocorrect
Invoke the word autocorrect and most people will think immediately of its hiccups—the sort of hysterical, impossible errors one finds collected on sites like Damn You Autocorrect.
From ACM Opinion
Id Shows Off Double-Jumping, Skull-Crushing New Doom at Quakecon
The bad news is that only people who were actually at Dallas' QuakeCon last night were able to see the world-premiere gameplay footage from the next Doom game, which somehow hasn't been leaked online yet.
From ACM Opinion
Bletchley Park's Rebirth and Why It Matters
Twenty five years ago, the historic World War II codebreaking center Bletchley Park faced demolition.
From ACM Opinion
Calling All Hackers: Help S Build an Open Wireless Router
EFF is releasing an experimental hacker alpha release of wireless router software specifically designed to support secure, shareable Open Wireless networks.
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Robot Caregivers
Each time I make a house call, I stay much longer than I should.
From ACM Opinion
Being a Better Online Reader
Soon after Maryanne Wolf published "Proust and the Squid," a history of the science and the development of the reading brain from antiquity to the twenty-first century, she began to receive letters from readers. Hundreds of them…
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions For Robotics Inventor Cynthia Breazeal About Social Robots
As an academic, Cynthia Breazeal pioneered research into social interaction between humans and robots, developing Kismet, a robot that used facial expressions in a meaningful way.
From ACM Opinion
The Moral Hazards and Legal Conundrums of Our Robot-Filled Future
The robots are coming, and they're getting smarter.
From ACM Opinion
Take a Virtual Voyage Into Darwin's Library
In his celebrated journey around the world on the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836, Charles Darwin collected a plethora of information on the geology, animals, plants and people he encountered—observations that later helped him to…
From ACM Opinion
Defending the Grand Vision of the Human Brain Project
"A grass roots effort is under way to stop the project... 'Mediocre science, terrible science policy,' begins the spirited letter…"
From ACM Opinion
How to Terraform the Moon
Space fans were startled—and perhaps a little skeptical—in May when the Russians announced that they intend to build a manned moon base.
From ACM Opinion
Nsa Implementing Fix to Prevent Snowden-Like Security Breach
A year after Edward Snowden's digital heist, the NSA's chief technology officer says steps have been taken to stop future incidents. But he says there's no way for the NSA to be entirely secure.
From ACM Opinion
Harnessing the Speed of Light
The fields of data communication, fabrication, and ultrasound imaging share a common challenge when it comes to improving speed and efficiency: light's diffraction limit. Nicholas Fang thinks his group at MIT might have found…
From ACM Opinion
The Trouble With Brain Science
Are we ever going to figure out how the brain works?
From ACM Opinion
How Not to Build a Brain
Building a brain sounds like a worthy goal, one that makes it seem as though the future is within reach.
From ACM Opinion
Early-niverse Explorer Looks For Answers
On March 17, a panel of four astrophysicists held a press conference at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., to announce that they had discovered features in the cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
From ACM Opinion
The Oculus Rift Game That's So Real It Nearly Destroyed Me
I can hear the alien breathing.
From ACM Opinion
Forget Turing, the Lovelace Test Has a Better Shot at Spotting AI
When a chatbot called Eugene Goostman passed Alan Turing's famous measure of machine intelligence in June by posing as a Ukrainian teenager with questionable language skills, the world went nuts for about an hour before realizing…
From ACM Opinion
The Most Annoying Problem in Computing Is Still Unsolved
When I travel these days, I tend to look like a walking Radio Shack—cords bursting out of my pockets, bag overflowing with chargers and accessories.