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Friday, February 12, 2010

Macworld 2010: TUAW attacks San Francisco with the Parrot AR.Drone


OK, let's face it. It is the coolest iPhone accessory since, uhhhhhh, the iPad?


We're talking about the Parrot AR.Drone, the iPhone / iPad touch-controlled quadricopter that, when it finally ships later in 2010, will be one of the hottest geek toys on the market.

TUAW bloggers Mike Schramm, Dave Caolo, Steve Sande, and David Winograd visited with the oh-so-lucky dudes from Parrot yesterday pre-Macworld, and had a chance to try our hands at flying this incredible little device. No, we don't know what this is going to cost, nor do we know when it will ship other than "in 2010," but if you have your geek on, you're going to want one of these. Watch the above video by our awesome videographer Chad Mumm for the scoop.


Officially Official: 2011 Audi A1 finally arrives — Autoblog Green

2011 Audi A1 – Click above for high-res image gallery
 
 

Drone makes first UK 'arrest' as police catch car thief hiding under bushes

By Liz Hull
From: http://www.dailymail.co.uk

It has been nicknamed the flying saucepan and looks an unlikely weapon in the war against crime.

But yesterday it emerged that a suspected car thief had become the first person to be arrested in Britain thanks to the help of this miniature remote-controlled helicopter.
The Air Robot or drone was deployed by Merseyside police after officers lost the alleged offender who had escaped on foot in thick fog. 


Scroll down to see the drone in action
drone

Using the device's on-board camera and thermal-imaging technology, the operator was able to pick up the suspect through his body heat and direct foot patrols to his location.
It led officers to a 16-year-old youth, who was hiding in bushes alongside the Leeds-Liverpool canal, in Litherland, Merseyside. 

The drone, which measures 3ft between the tips of its four carbon fibre rotor blades, uses unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology originally designed for military reconnaissance. 

The battery-powered device can have a range of cameras attached to its main body, including CCTV surveillance or thermal imaging cameras. 

It is designed to hover almost silently above crime scenes and send live footage to officers on the ground, but the unit can also 'perch and stare' from a solid platform, allowing the operator to capture hours of footage from a hidden vantage point. 

Guide: The £40,000 aerial surveillance drone, which is near silent and can operate video, night vision, infrared or stills cameras, as used by Merseyside police
The £40,000 aerial surveillance drone, which is near silent and can operate video, night vision, infrared or stills cameras caught its first criminal in Merseyside

Merseyside Police is one of a handful of forces trying out the devices which, at £40,000 each, are far cheaper to use for small-scale operations than a conventional helicopter.
They have been using the drones for two years, mainly to help in search and rescue operations, to execute drug warrants and to crack down on anti-social behaviour.

 
In August, Derbyshire police used a similar drone to monitor protests at the British National Party's Red, White and Blue festival in Condor, Derbyshire. 

However, this is the first time an arrest has been directly linked to the use of the Air Robot. The incident happened at around 4.30pm on January 26 after officers were told about a stolen Renault Clio in Bootle, Merseyside. 

After a pursuit, two suspects abandoned the vehicle and tried to make off on foot.
One of them, a 20-year-old man, was quickly arrested but the other managed to escape into the thick fog and darkness along the canal towpath. Police chiefs decided to draft in the drone, which can reach heights of 500ft and is controlled by an officer up to 1,500ft away.

The drone uses its heat-seeking technology to catch the suspected car thief
The drone used its heat-seeking technology to catch the suspected car thief 

Using its thermal imaging equipment the device quickly located its target in bushes beside the canal through his body heat and relayed live pictures to a police van nearby. Foot patrols then went and arrested him. 

Both men who were arrested have since been released on police bail pending further inquiries. 


Chief Inspector Nick Gunatilleke, of Merseyside anti-social behaviour taskforce, said: 'These arrests demonstrate the value of having something like the UAV. 

'The live footage was being viewed by the UAV's operator in the mobile command vehicle and they were able to direct patrols on the ground.' 

The Home Office is now exploring how the craft can be used to give back-up to police, ambulance and fire services. 

Spy drones are considered the future of policing, although critics have voiced concerns that they could be a worrying extension of Big Brother Britain. 

Last month arms manufacturer BAE Systems said it was adapting military-style UAVs for a consortium of government agencies led by Kent police. Documents showed the force hoped to begin using the drones in time for the 2012 Olympics. 

But they also indicated that the drones could eventually be used to spy on the civilian population, by rooting out motorists suspected of antisocial driving, for covert urban surveillance and to monitor 'waste management' for local councils.

Man Tries Out Baseball Bat By Smashing 29 TVs in Walmart

From: http://gizmodo.com/


Maybe he was trying out the TVs or the baseball bat, maybe he was struck by Walmart rage. Whatever the case, this guy destroyed a row of TVs before sitting down in the electronics aisle and waiting for the police.
The smashed televisions add up to about $22,000 in damaged goods, 29 counts of criminal damage to property, and one bottle of confiscated anti-depressants. I suppose that's just an itsy-bitsy bit worse than what went down with that foul-mouthed Australian guy. [Huffington Post via Engadget]

Microsoft announces Office for Mac 2011

Key improvements: compatibility, collaboration, and user interface.

Microsoft provided the most extensive look yet into the next version of the Mac version of its popular Office suite on Thursday at Macworld 2010. The new product, Microsoft Office for Mac 2011, will arrive in time for the 2010 holiday season.

Macworld spoke with several representatives of the company’s Mac Business Unit, who told us the company is focusing on three things with this new release: better compatibility across platforms, improved collaboration tools, and a more refined user interface. Also, as Microsoft announced last August, the suite will include Outlook for Mac, which replaces Entourage as Office’s e-mail client. And, in keeping with Microsoft’s 2008 promise, the new version of Office will offer renewed support for Visual Basic, which was dropped in the 2008 version of the productivity suite.

Compatibility, collaboration

To the Mac Business Unit, compatibility means more than making sure that documents, spreadsheets, and presentations created on one platform open and render correctly on the other. Noting that roughly three quarters of their Mac users use Windows at least occasionally, Microsoft’s Mac team says it's also working to make the new Office for the Mac more functionally compatible with the Windows edition.
“Nowadays, compatibility means more than just file formats,” Microsoft’s Kurt Schmucker told Macworld. “It’s also workflow, collaboration, and user interface.”

To that end, the new version of Office will incorporate document-collaboration features that take advantage of Microsoft's online storage features. With Office for Mac 2011, Mac users will be able to share files and collaborate on documents with other Mac and Windows users via Microsoft's SharePoint, SkyDrive, and Office Web Apps.

Those online tools will allow users to collaborate on documents with other Windows and Mac Office users in real time, much as you can in Google Docs now. You could, for example, create a document in Word on your laptop, save it to SkyDrive, then share it with others. A pop-up in Word will show you who’s working on the document; click on that list, and you’ll be able to send them a message (as long as everyone is using Outlook or Microsoft’s Messenger IM application). The paragraphs your collaborators are working on will be locked out until they’re done. You’ll also be able to edit those same documents from any computer, using Office’s Web apps. Mac users will have the same experience in the their versions of Safari and Firefox as Windows users get with their browsers, Schmucker said.



In this preview image from Word 2011, you can see the new Ribbon, a paragraph being edited by another user, and a list of all users editing the document.

Lessons learned

Microsoft also says it’s learned from user feedback about Office 2008 and has tweaked the user interface accordingly in Office 2011.

Most notably, there’s a new Ribbon at the top of each document window. (If you want a preview, check out Office for Windows; the ribbon is already in there, although the Microsoft Mac team members we spoke to said they had learned a lot from the criticism the Ribbon took when launched on Windows.) The Mac version of the Ribbon doesn’t replace any menu bars, but it does replace Office 2008’s controversial Elements Gallery, which took some fire from Mac users for its size and inflexibility. This new Ribbon is designed to give users quick access to each program's most commonly used tools. Unlike the Elements Gallery, the ribbon is customizable and, if you want more screen space, completely collapsible.

The new suite will also feel more Mac-like than Office 2008. For example, the Ribbon is built entirely using Apple’s Cocoa development framework, and takes takes advantage of Apple’s Core Animation system. (As a result, Ribbon tabs will slide smoothly when you rearrange them.) If you click on some Ribbon tools, they will expand smoothly into popovers that don’t obscure the document you’re working on. We even spied a non-modal search box on the right side of the toolbar, right where you’d expect it to be, allowing you to quickly search through documents without having your content blocked by a floating box.



A closer look at the new Ribbon in Office for Mac 2011.
 
Summarizing the interface changes, Microsoft's Han-Yi Shaw likened Office 2008 to a teenager—“a little quirky”—but said the new edition is Office matured. “This is the version that everyone wanted,” he said.
Shaw added that the Mac team at Microsoft worked hard to adopt Apple technologies while also making sure their product was recognizably Microsoft Office. “We’re at a cross-section of Mac and PC, and because we’re die-hard Mac users, we look at the [Office] technology and try to translate it,” he said. “Following the Apple design philosophy really takes you in the right direction.”

Outlook and Visual Basic

The other big news in Office 2011 is the demise of Entourage and the return of Outlook.
The new Outlook will support PST imports (allowing you to move an Outlook installation, including all your old e-mails, from a Windows PC to a Mac). It will also support Microsoft’s Information Rights Management (IRM), which allows senders to specify what recipients can do with messages (print, forward, and so on). Previously-Windows only, IRM is required in some corporate settings. IRM support in Office 2011 is aimed at Mac users in cross-platform environments, Schmucker said: “It’s been a blocker for some companies because the Mac support was not there.”

And Microsoft has re-engineered the Outlook message database system to be a series of small files, so it’s more easily backed up with Time Machine and searched in Spotlight. “Outlook’s new database is more reliable, faster, and fully supports Time Machine and Spotlight,” Schmucker said.

Finally, power users will be glad to see the return of the Visual Basic macro language. Visual Basic was dropped from Office 2008 in part because it was too technically difficult to port it to the Mac’s then-new Intel CPUs. Microsoft says it began work on that port as far back as 2008—before the last Mac Office shipped. That work is now complete. And the Mac suite will be using the most up-to-date version of Visual Basic, so it’ll be much more compatible with Office for Windows than the Visual Basic in previous versions of Office for Mac.

How To: Stream Your Music Library to Any Computer

by Norman Chan
from: http://www.maximumpc.com/


Sometimes you just want to browse and listen to your album collection at the office without having to load it all into a portable music player. Pandora and Last.fm are great web services that can help you discover new music, but they won’t let you specify your own music playlist. Streaming music from within a home network is easy with iTunes and Windows Media Player; what’s trickier is getting access to your 100GB music library while away from home. We’ll teach you how to turn your library into an Internet radio station with Apache server software and a little-known program called netjukebox. You’ll be able to browse your collection via a gallery of album cover art, stream custom playlists, and even download entire albums as zip files.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL WALKTHROUGH: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/howtos/how_to_stream_your_music_library_any_computer?page=0%2C0

Megan Fox Strips Down for Sexy Armani Commercial

 
Megan Fox recently signed on to be the face (and body) of Emporio Armani's underwear line, and with the first glimpses of her work finally trickling in, it appears Fox is following in the footsteps of former spokesmodel Victoria Beckham by sporting the label's signature barely-there black lingerie. We're running low on things to say, because the video speaks for itself. Check the video out after jump.






Armani
Megan Fox poses for Emporio Armani's underwear line. See more photos >>

Old Nintendo System & 5 Games Sells for $13,105 on eBay

Another eBay seller has stumbled onto a small fortune with the listing of an old Nintendo system and 5 other games which includes the original: Mario/Duck Hunt, Mario 3, Turtles 2, ‘MLB’ and Family Fitness Stadium Events.
As awesome as Turtles 2 and Mario 3 is; they’re not the game that’s banging in the $13,000 on this auction. The rare game of the 5 is Stadium Events. Some have suggested only about 2,000 were produced and sold. A recall has reduced the total amount in households to maybe 200. The numbers are only estimates, the actual figure is unknown. The box itself is about 75% of the of the $13k and according to Wikipedia, Stadiun Events is named #6 on a list of 20 “Holy Grails of Console Gaming”, a list that covered all gaming systems in all countries.

From the auction:
Up for auction is an original Nintendo NES gaming system with 1 hand control. There are 5 games with it. They are, Family & Fitness Stadium Events in the original box with the dust jacket inside of the box, Major League Baseball in the original box with the dust jacket inside of the box, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 the arcade game in the original box with the dust jacket inside of the box, Super Mario 3 in the original box with the dust jacket inside of the box and the original game, Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt. I have had this stored in the closet for years for my kids to play but the way that electronics come & go and change from one year to the next they wanted all of the new hot items of their own now and now it’s time to get rid of things that are no longer being used or wanted. This system worked perfect when i stored it but somehow over the years, we have managed to misplace the AC cord & the television hook up. I am listing this and selling without hook up but it I find them, i’ll send them along with the rest at no additional charges to you. Please keep in mind though that any ac cord will work with this and the hook up from a VCR would hook it up just as well as the original cords!

Top 12 Celebrity Plastic Surgeries Gone Wrong

By Lilah Albaba 
From: http://www.stylecaster.com 

Find out which celebrities make our cosmetic surgery wall of shame.
Top 12 Celebrity Plastic Surgeries Gone Wrong
Image: About.com

Aesthetic plastic surgery is performed to enhance or restore one's appearance through medical and surgical procedures. This practice has become the drug of choice to many celebrities who go under the knife and is best demonstrated recently by junkie Heidi Montag, who claims she has an addiction to plastic surgery along with her substance abuse of dumb boyfriends. While many of these celebs undergo plastic surgery in order to transform into a better and more desirable version of themselves (well a tighter, bigger breasted, fuller-lipped version of themselves), sometimes the results are anything but desirable.

To illustrate examples of celebrity plastic surgeries gone wrong, here are 12 celebs that should go on the cosmetic surgery wall of shame:

1. Carrot Top
Images: SuzanneEnglandPhotography.com and INF.com
Carrot Top's transformation definitely makes our list. We can only wonder -- are those eyebrow tattoos?

2. Joan Rivers
Images: NNBD.com and INF.comJoan Rivers' motto is "Better a new face coming out of an old car than an old face coming out of a new car." We normally agree with your fashion verdicts, Joan, but this time we have to disagree.

3. Bruce Jenner
Images: TheHollywoodGossip.com
Oh Bruce, you are one of our favorites on Keeping Up With the Kardashians so we won't hold it against you, but you looked ten times better prior to your surgical stint.

4. Dolly Parton
Images: Flickr.com and INF.com
The country signer's transformation has got us singing, "Goodbye Dolly."

5. Donatella Versace
Images: HitDaWall.com and INF.comAlthough the designer took her makeover a bit too far, we still love the clothes she puts onto the runway.

6. Heidi Montag
Images: HollyWire.com and ShowBizGalore.com
Montag is officially the poster child for bad celebrity plastic surgery. Why Heidi, why?!


7. Michael Jackson
Images: VirginMedia.com A list of plastic surgery blunders is not complete without the King of Pop. RIP MJ.

8. Pamela Anderson
Images: Izismile.com and INF.comBeach Babe Pam Anderson is infamous for her large breasts, but we think they looked pretty good to begin with.

9.Tara Reid
Images: Fundromeda.com and TopNews.inInspiration to young girls everywhere to stay sober.

10. Melanie Griffith
Images: StarPulse.comThis is a classic case of celebrities taking it too far. Melanie Griffith looked great -- oh, 12 botox injections ago.

11. Jocelyn Wildenstein
Images: TheFabLife.com
More feline than female, this makeover has dubbed Jocelyn Wildenstein the "Cat Lady" -- and rightly so.

12. Amanda Lepore

Images: TheFabLife.comAmanda Lepore (or should we say Armand Leopre) began life as a man, but he has officially become a she -- but might we add, not a very good looking one. We have no more words.

18 Fantastic Finds for Beer Lovers

From: http://coolmaterial.com

Beer is like bacon, you can add it to anything and it will improve in quality exponentially, but you can only make so many clock, bottle opener, and beer queso dip variations before you have to start getting creative. These products are the result of ingenious engineering, baking, botany, and – in some cases – mad science. Feast your eyes on the products you probably thought about making that someone else is getting rich off of.

Beer Soap

Giving showers a nice hops or malt aroma makes the daily ritual more of a party than the chore it really is. With Beer Soap you might actually want to take a shower before the game on Sunday.

Beer Shampoo

Integrating beer into every aspect of your life isn’t so much a goal as it is a calling. With Regenerativ beer shampoo you can make your hair harder, better, faster, stronger without making your stomach jealous.

Beer Candle

Now you can get that fresh brewery smell without all the equipment, botany, and waiting and at a cost that will still leave you a couple of bucks for a sixer to enjoy.

Beer Coffin

Talk about planning for the future, this dude isn’t even dead yet. Hopefully PBR hooked this guy up with free cases for life because if he loves it enough to get it on his coffin it’s probably not going to last too much longer.

Beer Cupcakes

Men love cake almost as much as they love beer. Cupcakes remove the need for a fork and adding beer is like adding bacon to ice cream – you don’t need it, but damn is it good.

Beer Lights

Instead of recycling beer bottles on the curb, Barlite chose to green them into light fixtures. Because it’s art and she will have to might let you hang it in the living room.

Beer Handle

Putting a handle on a can of beer is the beverage equivalent of tits on a bull – totally unnecessary and mostly insane – but we still love it. Keeps your beer cold, your hands warm, and comes in a six pack – just like beer.

Beer Box Books

You could keep all your daily thoughts, musings, and phone numbers in a moleskin, but these days those things are as ubiquitous as iPods. Plus you don’t really want your black book to actually be a black book, it’s just too easy. If your journal is made out of your favorite beer case your much more likely to write in it and less likely to lose it.

Remote Control Beer Cooler

The name says it all; it’s a remote control beer cooler. R2D2 version coming soon from Lucas Enterprises.

Beer Tie

This is one tie no man would have a problem wearing to work (Just make sure you buy one for your boss so he doesn’t have a problem with you wearing it). Then, when you get home – or to lunch – you won’t even have to worry about finding an opener.

Beer Christmas Trees

We’ve all lived around that one guy that made everyone else look bad when it came to decorating for the holidays. These trees make that guy look like the Grinch. These are technically individual products so much as they are a testament to what you can do with a weekend, a few buddies, and a dozen (or so) cases of beer. Next time she takes a “spa day,” make something out of the empties (she might not be as pissed when she gets back).

The Beer Belly

This is one beer belly none of us would mind having. In what is sure to become the “next big thing” at sporting events, this covert apparatus allows you sneak up to 80oz into whatever event you want. Don’t get drunk on power and try to sneak it into the baby shower or you’ll ruin it for the rest of us.

Beer Cuff Bracelets

Cuffs are no longer just for rock stars and Wonder Woman. Now you can help support your favorite brewery and stop errant quarters, darts, or bags with style. Well, as much style as you can possibly have while essentially wearing a beer can on your wrist.

Beer Hoodie

The hoodie is man’s go-to piece of clothing for lounging around. When you’re lounging, nothing hits the spot like an ice cold brew, but bad things happen when you leave rings on the table. Abstain no longer because now you can keep your arms and legs inside the recliner and still work on that buzz.

Beer TV Tap

Is there any greater combination than beer and football? No; so why not permanently combine the two by showing NFL Network through your home bar. If you wired it creatively you would never even have to leave your barstool for a refill.

Beer Garden

Sometimes even Delirium Tremens cannot fill the beer sized void in your stomach. When that time comes, it’s time to get down and dirty and start brewing your own. With a Beer Garden, you can grow your hops, barley, and wheat in something so manly the only words out of your buddies mouths will be “when can we drink it?”

Beer USB Drive

God only knows what crazy combination of geek and engineer dreamed up (and created) a beer filled usb drive, but he’s a genius in our book. The only question that remains is how you get the beer out after a hard day at the office.

Beer Wraps

Not looking forward to attending the great nephew’s Christening? Now with Tiger Piss, Clown Tears, and Diet Wow! you can still get your Tecate on without incurring the wrath of the wife or mother-in-law. Just make sure you bring enough for all the boys or you’ll end up off the Vegas list.

The Return of Jean-Claude Van Damme: Dark, Meaningful, Splits!

Sylvester Stallone is making an action movie called The Expendables. It stars himself, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Mickey Rourke and Danny Trejo as mercenaries in South America. Hold on, my spell checker just told me that the last sentence should actually be spelled, “Impossible eyeball orgasm.” The Expendables is almost terrifying since it’s exactly what the human race would put on its bucket list if you told it that it had six months to live.
Stallone asked Jean-Claude Van Damme to be a part of The Expendables, but he passed. Not only because that would implode the awesometinuum but because JCVD wanted to know details about his character and Stallone kept telling him about the big money they would make. Well, Jean-Claude is done being a naked-bunned karate puppet for big money. He wants dark and meaningful roles that stretch his acting ability. Besides, Van Damme is going to have his first pro fight next month against a gold-medalist Thai boxer. What’s he going to spend big money on? A sportscoffin?
So rather than joining Hollywood’s Greatest Cast Ever Assembled, Jean-Claude made the fourth sequel to a movie about zombie super soldiers that ignores the first, second and third sequels and is set in the ruins of Chernobyl which are filled with UFC fighters and kidnapped children and set to fucking explode.
That’s the plot to Universal Soldier: Regeneration, and it’s even better than it sounds. It’s not Van Damme’s first or even 15th attempt at a gritty reboot, but it’s the first one that has generated a great action movie instead of a love letter to clinical depression.

The Gritty Reboot of the JCVD Rating System
For years I’ve been using a JCVD movie rating system based around four main criteria: sassy female reporter, buns, a second Jean-Claude Van Damme and the splits. It’s measured on a Splits scale that goes from 0 percent Splits for “No” to 100 percent Splits for “Yes.” However, since Van Damme has become a grim and serious actor, this system doesn’t work. That’s why I’ve developed a modern JCVD rating system that uses four new criteria: moody soul searching, kickfighting, gunfighting and a lack of value of human life. This new system is measured by the length of Jean-Claude’s grim and unfakeable 1000-yard stare. His eyes have eaten things that would make yours puke.

The survival rate for characters in this movie is so low that people still die when you have it paused. There are no periods in the script because every sentence gets finished with a knife in the neck or an exploded chest. There was so much fake blood on the set that they had to film it from canoes. The board game Travel Operation has more respect for human life than Universal Soldier: Regeneration. It’s like Jean-Claude Van Damme set out to create the first truly honest documentary of where Happy Meals come from.

There’s only one Van Damme. There are no twin brothers, no time traveling and the only clones in the movie are of completely non-Jean-Claude-Van-Damme characters. As for buns… I’m not gay, but is it really fair to all the people who are to keep his underpants on for 90 whole minutes?

A normal movie fight looks like a mix of ballet and jump cuts that ends either when one guy lands something with a backflip or when someone gets their head yanked to the side. Universal Soldier: Regeneration is a little more realistic. The evil super soldier is former UFC Heavyweight Champion and current Russian werewolf Andrei Arlovski, and judging by the fight scenes, I don’t think Russians have a word for “pretend.” His attacks have such a brutal practicality that I think they might have just put body armor on the stuntmen, turned the camera on and told Arlovski that he had to catch and cook his own dinner.
This movie really thought about how a perfect soldier would kill someone, and decided it wouldn’t be very complicated. For example, five people are killed by a super soldier sitting on them and punching their face until it’s soup. Five. And these killings don’t take place off-camera while we hear sloppy thuds and see the horrified face of an onlooker. We ARE the horrified face of an onlooker.


Jean-Claude adds a fun element of spin-kickery to the otherwise realistic fight scenes, but he never quite does the full splits. And you can forget about him punching anyone in the balls. He doesn’t do that anymore. One of the main reasons there are so many mean fifth graders in the world today is because Jean-Claude Van Damme stopped punching bad guys in the dick a decade ago.

The gunfights are built around the idea that human bodies are only there to hold bullets. But there seems to be some sort of gentleman’s agreement that no one ever shoots the expensive resurrected karate soldiers. Arlovsky and Van Damme each dodge through blizzards of lead to kill gunmen with punches and knives. Which is even more ridiculous when you consider that Andrei Arlovsky is the size of a tractor. Arlovsky is so massive that kids lose baseballs on him. He’s so big that scientists use him to get panda bears horny. And 50 guys with assault rifles can’t hit him? At one point I thought they might have been trying to suffocate him by killing all the air around him, but it’s more likely that bullets are just scared of Andrei Arlovsky.

During a covert mission or a secret underground karate tournament, Jean-Claude usually meets 15 to 20 lady reporters. Because they have an old saying in the newspaper business: “If a story doesn’t belong in the karate section, get the fuck out of my office.” Strangely, in this film, when a daring kidnapping leaves one million zillion dead and the kidnappers flee to Chernobyl to broadcast terrorist manifestos about undead super soldiers, the press never gets wind of it. Filmmakers, I know your movie moves a lot faster if you leave out all the dialog and setting and character development, but there’s an old saying in the movie business: If Jean-Claude Van Damme goes more than 24 hours without his dick in a reporter, you better remember one thing…
And then you wait for someone to ask what, and then you go:
“A good supply of body bags.”

When we’re reintroduced to the former zombie super soldier Luc Deveraux, a doctor is trying to rehabilitate him for civilian life. How can he live a life when all he knows is killing? This kind of duality is exactly what the modern Jean-Claude looks for in an acting role. Unfortunately, the first thing his character does in civilian life is go to a cafe and kick a man to death for no reason. It’s so violent and meaningless that it’s like the movie is committing a hate crime on the gay part of your brain that wanted that introspection bullshit to go somewhere. Universal Soldier: Regeneration really doesn’t care what’s happening in the scene you’re watching– someone is going to die every 20 seconds even if it makes no sense. Nobody even survives the audio commentary of this movie.
Any RoboCop will tell you that when you bring someone back to life with a reprogrammed brain, you’re going to find a couple existential crises that weren’t there before. But like any RoboCop will also tell you, you don’t spend more than six or seven seconds of your movie on that crap. You won’t believe how well this movie follows RoboCop’s advice. When they unfreeze Dolph Lundgren, he manages to kill 10 people before he’s even done with the second sentence of his identity crisis. This movie is that efficient.

A+