Computing Profession
Advertisement
Legally speaking: is information property?
This column will discuss why the law has traditionally resisted characterizing information as the sort of thing that can be private property, and will speculate about why judges may be more receptive nowadays to assertions that information should be treated as property. This new attitude is illustrated by a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court decision which upheld criminal convictions based solely on the misappropriation of information which the Court found to be the property of one of the defendants' employers.
Electronic frontier: coming into the country
Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions. Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs to exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate that expands with development.
This note proposes an optimization to an algorithm published by T.E. Gerasch in his article “An Insertion Algorithm for a Minimal Internal Path Length Binary Search Tree” (Communications of the ACM, May 1988, pp. 579-585).
Personal computing: personal computers and the world software market
It may be trite to say that “the world is shrinking,” but it is true nonetheless. Political and technological changes are edging us in the direction of the global village. We have the economic unification of Western Europe, the transition of Eastern Europe to market economies, and free trade agreements and negotiations in the Western hemisphere. Blue jeans and rock and roll music are found throughout the world, we can direct dial to Iceland, and your grandmother may have a FAX machine.
Shape the Future of Computing
ACM encourages its members to take a direct hand in shaping the future of the association. There are more ways than ever to get involved.
Get InvolvedCommunications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication.
By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer.
Learn More