Communications of the ACM
Innovation Is Overrated: A Provocation
Digital innovation is not working in the interest of the whole of society. It is time to radically rethink its purpose without…
From ACM Opinion
Why Only Designers Can Create New Programming Languages
Compared to the versions that are hacked together late at night under insane deadline pressure, the programming languages to come out of academia are failures.
From ACM Opinion
One Thing Is Certain: Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle Is Not Dead
A demonstration by experimenters at the Vienna University of Technology violates Heisenberg's original version of his uncertainty principle, but confirms a newer...
From ACM Opinion
International Reactions to Google's New Privacy Policy
Google's new privacy policy took effect last Thursday, following several weeks campaigning to educate users on the changes. The policy will allow them to consolidate...
From ACM Opinion
Schmidt: The Web Will Dissolve National Barriers
Google's Eric Schmidt believes the Internet is breaking down national barriers. "Loyalty is not just to a nation but to friends and interests," Schmidt said in...
From ACM Opinion
Good Reasons Not to Force Online Teaching
The average teen spends 16.7 hours a week on the Internet, not counting time spent with e-mail. Yikes. It's a good thing the Indiana General Assembly dropped...
From ACM Opinion
The Ipad 3 and the Future of the Web
It's easy to mock the excess enthusiasm the tech community has for new Apple gadgets—Wow! Look, it’s a new computer! At the same time it's just as easy to see why...
From ACM Opinion
Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You
GM's current commitment to electric vehicle technology reminds me of the introduction of the personal computer in the 1980s.
From ACM Opinion
I Love You, Killer Robots
It was way back in May 2010 that I first spotted the flying drones that will take over the world. They were in a video that Daniel Mellinger, one of the robots'...
From ACM Opinion
Silicon Valley's Humble Billionaire
It's a Saturday afternoon in Palo Alto, Calif., and there goes David Cheriton, navigating the Silicon Valley suburb's tony downtown on his bike.
From BLOG@CACM
COLT/ICML Open Problems and ICML Instructions
Open problems will be presented in a joint session in the evening of the COLT/ICML overlap day. If you have a difficult, theoretically definable problem in machine...
From ACM Opinion
Nobody Wants to Learn How to Program
Many programming tutorials begin with basic programming principles: variables, loops, data types. This is an obvious way to teach programming to adults, but not...
From ACM Opinion
.s. Senators: No Time to Lose on Strengthening Cybersecurity
Four U.S. senators sound a warning on cybersecurity, comparing the present to the days prior to September 11, 2001. The system is blinking red, and we are failing...
From ACM Opinion
The Dark Side of Facebook
Your social networking pages are being policed by outsourced, unvetted moderators from third-world countries paid just $1 an hour.
From ACM News
Here's The Best (and Prettiest) Way To See Exactly How You're Being Tracked Online
Firefox-browser provider Mozilla has released an awesome new tool for seeing how you're being tracked on the Web.
From ACM TechNews
Stroustrup Reveals What's New in C++ 11
Texas A&M University professor Bjarne Stroustrup recently spoke with InfoWorld's Paul Krill about the past, present, and future of C++, which was recently upgraded...
From ACM Opinion
Why Driverless Cars Will Increase Tensions in Cities and Suburbs Alike
Driverless cars sound less and less like science fiction with each passing month, and that's prompted widespread discussion about how they might change society.
From ACM Opinion
Https and Tor: Working Together to Protect Your Privacy and Security Online
This week EFF released a new version its HTTPS Everywhere extension for the Firefox browser and debuted a beta version of the extension for Chrome. EFF frequently...
From ACM Opinion
Windows Without Windows
Microsoft's new version of Windows is fantastic, jarring, and risky at the same time. Fantastic because it marks the clearest sign yet that Microsoft is embracing...
From ACM Opinion
How Young Is Too Young to Learn to Code?
When the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under 2 spend exactly zero time in front of screens, what its members are concerned about is substitution—all...
From ACM Opinion