This is pretty cool.

It's the greatest and most spectacular battle in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

But filmmakers faced one surprising challenge - how to keep the computer-generated soldiers from fleeing the battlefield.

I am sure there's a punchline in there for Noam Chomsky or Jimmy Carter in there somehwere, something about "if only humans were this smart".

The problem is that not all human beings run the same code. There are whole regions of the world who forgot to buy the Maintenance Plan. They're stuck on HomoSapiens Version 1.0, the poor dumb bastards. Luckily, since they run old code, the also can stick with their old hardware.

The poor dumb bastards.

For the rest of us, who upgraded to Version 2, then Version 3, then Version 4, then Version 5, well we needed to upgrade our hardware as well, and that's a good thing since (while we'd rather not), if we have to go peer-to-peer, we can run them into the ground.

As for the wisdom of flight from battle, those of us on build 5.00.2003 would be stupid to flee; if you flee long enough, soon there's nowhere to flee to.

Montreal Gazette - Story - canada.com network

Can you tell I was up late watching Eagles v. Dolphins last night?