COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
Departments
News
Viewpoints
5 ACM-W Letter
ACM-W Celebrates
Women in Computing
By Elaine Weyuker
9 Letters To The Editor
Share the Threats
10 blog@CACM
Speech-Activated User Interfaces
and Climbing Mt. Exascale
Tessa Lau discusses why she
doesn’t use the touch screen on
her in-car GPS unit anymore and
Daniel Reed considers the future
of exascale computing.
22 Privacy and Security
Answering the Wrong Questions
Is No Answer
Asking the wrong questions when
building and deploying systems
results in systems that cannot
be sufficiently protected against
the threats they face.
By Eugene H. Spafford
25 Inside Risks
Reducing Risks of Implantable
Medical Devices
A prescription to improve security
and privacy of pervasive health care.
By Kevin Fu
12 CACM Online
Making That Connection
By David Roman
27 Calendar
13 Micromedicine to the Rescue
Medical researchers have long
dreamed of “magic bullets” that go
directly where they are needed.
With micromedicine, this dream
could become a life-saving reality.
By Don Monroe
101 Careers
16 Content Control
Entertainment businesses say digital
rights management prevents the
theft of their products, but access
control technologies have been
a uniform failure when it comes
to preventing piracy. Fortunately,
change is on the way.
By Leah Hoffmann
28 The Profession of IT
Beyond Computational Thinking
If we are not careful, our fascination
with “computational thinking”
may lead us back into the trap
we are trying to escape.
By Peter J. Denning
Last Byte
103 Puzzled
Solutions and Sources
By Peter Winkler
104 Future Tense
Webmind Says Hello
By Robert J. Sawyer
18 Autonomous Helicopters
Researchers are improving
unmanned helicopters’ capabilities
to address regulatory requirements
and commercial uses.
By Gregory Goth
31 Viewpoint
Why “Open Source” Misses
the Point of Free Software
Decoding the important differences
in terminology, underlying
philosophy, and value systems
between two similar categories
of software.
By Richard Stallman
21 Looking Backward and Forward
CRA’s Computing Community
Consortium hosted a day-long
symposium to discuss the important
computing advances of the last
several decades and how to sustain
that track record of innovation.
By Bob Violino
34 Kode Vicious
Obvious Truths
How to determine when to put
the brakes on late-running projects
and untested software patches.
By George V. Neville-Neil
Association for Computing Machinery
Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession
PhotograPh courtesy of the comPuting research association