He is now writing his next book, a history of military technology revolutions over the past 500 years, War Made New: Four Great Revolutions That Changed the Face of Battle, which will be published by Gotham Books, an imprint of Penguin publishing.

Does America Need an Empire?

Peter Wayner, the author of _Disappearing Cryptography_, writes about online gaming in the New York Times.

An arms race is underway ... Bots can do drudge work to earn extra cash for their owners; video cards can be reprogrammed to let players see and attack through walls; and much more.

It's all here ... black markets, weapons inspections, test bans, treaty verification regimes ...

There's probably some good academic work in this space. Can you design a provably fair massively multiplayer online game?

Do Cheaters Ever Prosper? Just Ask Them

Abstract: Both laboratory and field data suggest that people punish noncooperators even in one-shot interactions. Although such "altruistic punishment" may explain the high levels of cooperation in human societies, it creates an evolutionary puzzle: existing models suggest that altruistic cooperation among nonrelatives is evolutionarily stable only in small groups.

Thus, applying such models to the evolution of altruistic punishment leads to the prediction that people will not incur costs to punish others to provide benefits to large groups of nonrelatives.

However, here we show that an important asymmetry between altruistic cooperation and altruistic punishment allows altruistic punishment to evolve in populations engaged in one-time, anonymous interactions.

This process allows both altruistic punishment and altruistic cooperation to be maintained even when groups are large and other parameter values approximate conditions that characterize cultural evolution in the small-scale societies in which humans lived for most of our prehistory.

This article appears in the March 18, 2003 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). It is provided here by the author with no subscription required.

The evolution of altruistic punishment [PDF]

Pierre Moulin has a paper entitled "Information-Theoretic Analysis of Information Hiding" in the March 2003 issue of IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. You can find this paper online here, along with his other related work.

Excerpts from the abstract of the paper: An information-theoretic analysis of information hiding is presented, forming the theoretical basis for design of information-hiding systems. ... The host data set is intentionally corrupted, but in a covert way, designed to be imperceptible to a casual analysis. We formalize and evaluate the hiding capacity ... [which] is the value of a game between the information hider and the attacker. It is shown that many existing information-hiding systems in the literature operate far below capacity.

Information-Theoretic Analysis of Information Hiding

"We ought to be able to do it (take Baghdad) ... clearly it's going to be brutal, dangerous work and we could take, bluntly, a couple to 3,000 casualties. ... it ought to be a very dicey two to three day battle out there."

Barry McCaffrey: 3,000 casualties to Baghdad

Paul Berman writes for the New York Times Magazine on Sayyid Qutb.

This is some rather deep reading for a Sunday afternoon.

The Philosopher of Islamic Terror

Damn McDonalds for creating so many fast food nations!

On March 11, the Air Force tested its Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) weapon at the Eglin Air Force Base Air Armament Center's western test range. Dropped from a C-130, the MOAB is a precision-guided weapons weighing 21,500 pounds. It will be the largest non-nuclear conventional weapon in existence. The MOAB is an Air Force Research Laboratory technology project that began in fiscal year 2002 and is to be completed this year.

I know that other people already blogged about MOAB and that it's old news, but the previous entries had nothing beyond a single still image to offer.

Here is one minute of RealVideo showing the live test from air drop through detonation and the resulting fireball and mushroom cloud of smoke.

Test of a Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb on March 11, 2003 [RealVideo]

PC Magazine's associate editor said, "The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference was the most worthwhile business travel I've done: the most intellectually stimulating, and the most educative."

Featured speakers include: Alan Kay; K. Eric Drexler; Steven Johnson; Howard Rheingold; Clay Shirky; Tim O'Reilly; David Isenberg; Brewster Kahle; Dan Gillmor; David Weinberger; and more. Rael Dornfest is the program chair.

The conference will be held at the Westin in Santa Clara, CA.

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference -- April 22-25, 2003

Get Your War On; It's a go.

Catch the president at 10:15 ET.