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Opinion Sep 1 2012

Operationalizing Privacy By Design

While I largely agree with Sarah Spiekermann's "The Challenges of Privacy by Design" (July 2012), I want to make it clear that many organizations do understand the need to embed privacy in their systems and technologies and regularly ask my office's help in doing so.
Opinion Aug 1 2012

Composable Trees For Configurable Behavior

I concur wholeheartedly with the composability benefits outlined in "Why LINQ Matters: Cloud Composability Guaranteed" (Apr. 2012) due to my experience using composability principles to design and implement the message-dissemination mechanism for a mobile ad hoc router in a proprietary network
Architecture and Hardware
Opinion Jul 1 2012

An Integral Number and Its Consequences

Pondering Moshe Y. Vardi's "What Is an Algorithm?" (Mar. 2012), one should consider that in its most abstract and tangible form an algorithm is simply an integral number and that an interpretation of an algorithm as an abstract state machine reflects this truth.
Opinion Jun 1 2012

The Halting Problem in the Clear Light of Probability

"Turing's Titanic Machine?" considered Alan Turing's contributions to computability theory, concentrating on the halting problem; that is, decide whether a given program will stop or continue indefinitely. The fact that in general no one can know makes it undecidable.
Opinion Apr 1 2012

The Beauty of Simplicity

I was disappointed by Robert Green's and Henry Ledgard's emphasis in "Coding Guidelines: Finding the Art in the Science" (Dec. 2011) on "alignment, naming, use of white space, use of context, syntax highlighting, and IDE choice." As effective as these aspects of beautiful code may be, they are at best only skin deep.
Opinion Mar 1 2012

From Syntax to Semantics For AI

Concerning Moshe Y. Vardi's Editor's Letter "Artificial Intelligence: Past and Future" (Jan. 2012), I'd like to add that AI won't replace human reasoning in the near future for reasons apparent from examining the context, or "meta," of AI.
Opinion Feb 1 2012

Credit Non-Anonymous Reviewers with a Name

I agree with Bertrand Meyer's blog "Fixing the Process of Computer Science Refereeing" (Nov. 2011) and "Why I Sign My Reviews" in favor of open reviewing but suggest we go further with the quality of refereeing by rewarding reviewers and encouraging their contribution.
Opinion Jan 1 2012

Software Engineering Is Engineering

I was confounded by the conclusion of Michael Davis's Viewpoint "Will Software Engineering Ever Be Engineering?" (Nov. 2011), mainly because anything I can do in code I can also do in digital hardware, analog hardware, fluidics, even gears and motors.

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