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How to Read Between the Lines of Tim Cook's Epic Interview
From ACM Opinion

How to Read Between the Lines of Tim Cook's Epic Interview

To celebrate five years as CEO of Apple, Tim Cook has given a very long, exclusive interview to the Washington Post about his experiences so far. But what he didn’t...

How Copyright Law Stifles Your Right to Tinker with Tech
From ACM Opinion

How Copyright Law Stifles Your Right to Tinker with Tech

The CEO of the gadget-repair site iFixit explains why tech groups are suing the U.S. government over the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Basic Income: A Sellout of the American Dream
From ACM Opinion

Basic Income: A Sellout of the American Dream

Matt Krisiloff is in a small, glass-walled conference room off the lobby of Y Combinator’s office in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood, shouting distance...

The All-American Iphone
From ACM Opinion

The All-American Iphone

Donald Trump says that if he becomes president, he will "get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land, not in China." Bernie ­Sanders...

Why Seti Researchers Must Change the Way They Announce First Contact
From ACM Opinion

Why Seti Researchers Must Change the Way They Announce First Contact

One of humanity’s most significant events will be the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in universe. Back in the 1980s, a group of astronomers involved in...

What If Apple Is Wrong?
From ACM Opinion

What If Apple Is Wrong?

Soon after Devon Godfrey was shot to death in his apartment in Harlem on the evening of April 12, 2010, officers with the New York Police Department thought they...

How Apple Could Fed-Proof Its Software ­pdate System
From ACM Opinion

How Apple Could Fed-Proof Its Software ­pdate System

Apple's refusal to comply with a judge's demand that it help the FBI unlock a terrorist's iPhone has triggered a roiling debate about how much the U.S. government...

Apple's 'code = Speech' Mistake
From ACM Opinion

Apple's 'code = Speech' Mistake

In its legal fight against the FBI over iPhone security, Apple has made just about every argument it can credibly make.

The Step Needed to Make Virtual Reality More Real
From ACM Opinion

The Step Needed to Make Virtual Reality More Real

It's one thing to play the arcade game Whac-A-Mole by swinging around an oversized mallet; it's far easier to whack those moles virtually, controlling the mallet...

Fighting Isis Online
From ACM Opinion

Fighting Isis Online

The two men pecked out messages on opposite sides of the country.

The False Science of Cryonics
From ACM Opinion

The False Science of Cryonics

I woke up on Saturday to a heartbreaking front-page article in the New York Times about a terminally ill young woman who chooses to freeze her brain.

Who Will Own the Robots?
From ACM News

Who Will Own the Robots?

The way Hod Lipson describes his Creative Machines Lab captures his ambitions: "We are interested in robots that create and are creative."  

Why Robots and Humans Struggled with Darpa's Challenge
From ACM Opinion

Why Robots and Humans Struggled with Darpa's Challenge

When some of the world's most advanced rescue robots are foiled by nothing more complex than a doorknob, you get a good sense of the challenge of making our homes...

Toolkits For the Mind
From ACM Opinion

Toolkits For the Mind

When the Japanese computer scientist Yukihiro Matsumoto decided to create Ruby, a programming language that has helped build Twitter, Hulu, and much of the modern...

Reality Check: Comparing Hololens and Magic Leap
From ACM Opinion

Reality Check: Comparing Hololens and Magic Leap

I've seen two competing visions for a future in which virtual objects are merged seamlessly with the real world.

Our Fear of Artificial Intelligence
From ACM Opinion

Our Fear of Artificial Intelligence

Years ago I had coffee with a friend who ran a startup.

2014 in Computing: Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence
From ACM News

2014 in Computing: Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence

The holy grail of artificial intelligence—creating software that comes close to mimicking human intelligence—remains far off. But 2014 saw major strides in machine...

What Are Moocs Good For?
From ACM Opinion

What Are Moocs Good For?

A few years ago, the most enthusiastic advocates of MOOCs believed that these "massive open online courses" stood poised to overturn the century-old model of higher...

Isaac Asimov Mulls 'how Do People Get New Ideas?'
From ACM Opinion

Isaac Asimov Mulls 'how Do People Get New Ideas?'

In 1959, I worked as a scientist at Allied Research Associates in Boston.

The History Inside ­S
From ACM Opinion

The History Inside ­S

Every day our DNA breaks a little. Special enzymes keep our genome intact while we're alive, but after death, once the oxygen runs out, there is no more repair.
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