The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
David Weinberger has a new book out entitled Too Big to Know in which he argues that one of the implications of a comprehensively networked society is that the nature of knowledge itself is changing.
All indicators suggest Apple will unveil the iPad 3 during the first week of March. That’s less than a month away, and sources at The Next Web say Apple is in "crunch mode," working hard to line up apps that show off the unique…
Technology used to be so simple.
"Why do we have to aim for the world's No. 1 — what's wrong with being the world's No. 2?" That short question about Japan's vaunted K supercomputer program has haunted policymakers since it was posed live on national television…
If you use Google, and I know you do, you may have noticed a little banner popping up at the top of the page announcing: "We're changing our privacy policy and terms."
Few things seem more pathetic than a science fiction writer who pines for the "good old days."
It's alive! Neurophysiology. Huddled around a warm fireplace one cold summer's night in 1816, a small group of friends decided to hold a competition to see who could write the scariest horror story.
The self-driving cars we’ve been promised since the dawn of the auto age are here.
The much-mythologized Apple television could be a terrible next step for the company.
Sam Ramji met AT&T chief technology officer John Donovan on a speed date—or at least the tech world equivalent of a speed date.
Some forms of biotechnology have become notoriously controversial. Genetic modification of crops, for example, altered the food supply in ways some consumers found troublesome, either because of anticipated consequences, a…
New technologies will be the key to dealing with the coming flood of digital data, says HP Labs director Prith Banerjee.
There are lot of hard jobs at Microsoft. But Sam Moreau just might have the hardest of all. Or at least the most harrowing. Over the past five years, he's taken on the tiny task of redesigning the operating system used by like…
Internet technology veteran David Farber projects that within a decade, computers will be outfitted with optical connections rather than pins for networking, and routers will be swamped by the sheer volume of transmitted data…
Last week, Facebook filed documents with the government that will allow it to sell shares of stock to the public. It is estimated to be worth at least $75 billion. But unlike other big-ticket corporations, it doesn't have an…
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in 1995 to be precise, a scholar named Eli Noam published an article in the prestigious journal Science under the title "Electronics and the Dim Future of the University."
The New York Times recently ran an opinion piece about the concept of a morality pill, a theoretical-but-apparently-not-implausible panacea for humankind's ethical shortcomings.
Does the Internet have a soul?
Facebook is finally going public.
Every day, those of us who live in the digital world give little bits of ourselves away. On Facebook and LinkedIn. To servers that store our email, Google searches, online banking, and shopping records. Does the fact that so…
Keep your debug messages clear, useful, and not annoying.
Reallocating valuable wireless spectrum can generate billions of dollars in revenue to the U.S. federal government while also benefiting consumers.
Examining the role of human emotional response in making complex security-related decisions.
How the computing education community can learn from physics education.
Considering the unexpected risks associated with seemingly minor technological changes.
Upon closer examination, everything old appears to be new again in the realm of software engineering.