bzipitidoo - Slashdot User

Submission + - Laredo to be largest city with no bookstore (clickondetroit.com)

Submitted by

bzipitidoo

on Friday December 18, 2009 @02:39PM

bzipitidoo writes: "The last bookstore in Laredo, TX (population 230,000) is closing, which fact may be played up as a sign that civilization is declining, at least in Laredo. Is this a tragedy or a blessing, or neither? The city still has public libraries and Internet access and through that Project Gutenberg and online ordering of books. The bookstore is only a business-- it isn't devoted to raising the level of culture, or literacy, it is only there to profit. Perhaps this is only a sign that bookstores are obsolete."

Submission + - The topics covered in Communications of the ACM

Submitted by

bzipitidoo

on Friday August 03, 2007 @11:18PM

bzipitidoo writes: "The flagship publication of the Association for Computing Machinery, the professional society for Computer Scientists, is Communications of the ACM. In the 1970's CACM had many articles of technical and scientific interest. In the 1980s, CACM shifted emphasis, and today its articles are mostly about the business and management of software engineering. The next most common subject is security and military problems. The remainder tend to be mushy social science in tone, and often have a tie in to business or security. Is that all the ACM thinks Computer Science is? CACM shouldn't be an Applied CS in Business and Military Special Interest Group journal, as the flagship journal, CACM should be a general CS journal. If one never reads any other journals in CS, one could wonder whether CS is becoming "played out", with every year bringing fewer and fewer research papers about algorithms, or programming languages, or other fundamentals of CS, and that's why CACM has shifted emphasis. But then something like the June issue of Scientific American, which was a better issue on CS than any CACM issue in the last decade, comes out. Or, something big happens, such as the solving of Checkers. What's with the ACM and their main publication?"

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