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The High Court of England and Wales has ruled that bookmaker Betfred must pay a Lincolnshire blackjack player £1.7m ($2.3m) in winnings that the betting site withheld because of a supposed software glitch. In a statement emailed to The Register, a Betfred spokesperson said, "Mr Green won the jackpot three times whilst playing a game provided by one of our third party suppliers. The supplier reported a software problem to us and advised that we should withhold payment." "However, we will abide by the court's decision and not appeal. We would like to apologize to Mr Green for the delay in receiving his money." Betfred's spokesperson declined to elaborate on whether this purported payment multiplication error has since been addressed in the app. The case started in January 2018 when Andrew Green, 54, a resident of the small British village of Washingborough, won the jackpot playing Frankie Dettori’s Magic Seven, a blackjack app. But Betfred refused to honor the payout, claiming that there had been a software error. Instead, the company proposed to pay Green £60,000, provided he signed a non-disclosure agreement and promised not to make a fuss. Green refused and in April 2019, he filed a claim against Betfred's parent company, Gibraltar-based Petfred, for £2m – to cover interest on his withheld winnings – with the High Court in London. On Wednesday, the court agreed. "Along with my family, I have been through some very low times and become very down," Green told the BBC. "My physical health has also suffered badly, and I sometimes wished I'd never won this money, because it was just making my life a misery. But today, I feel like the world has been lifted off my shoulders and I feel so incredibly happy and relieved - for me, my family and my legal team. The champagne can finally come off ice and be savoured." The High Court found that Betfred must meet its contractual obligations and that the company's terms and conditions, said to be 49 pages long, were insufficient to dissolve that commitment. High Court judge Mrs Justice Foster dismissed the company's legalese, saying it was "inadequate," and "not transparent or fair and Betfred were not entitled to rely upon them." Frankie Dettori’s Magic Seven is made by Playtech, a gambling technology company based on the Isle of Man that was not involved in the litigation.

My vote goes to V3, good text and effect.

Hello again, According to your activity, It's good. Your attitude is awesome. You started well. My advice is to take your time when writing something important like an application or things that may have an action on your future. My vote is PRO. Good Luck.

Hello, When you described yourself, you said that you don't smoke! Could you please explain what is the mentioned defect in your application?

Game Information: Initial release date: 1 Mar, 2005. Software Developer: LucasArts. Publisher: LucasArts, Lucasfilm, Disney. Platform: PlayStation 4, Windows Microsoft. When Star Wars Republic Commando launched in 2005, it was ahead of its time. It found a perfect balance between the tactical, detail-intensive gameplay of shooters like Rainbow Six and the cinematic bombast of Call of Duty. It nailed this so well, that now, 16 years later, the game holds up shockingly well. Telling Delta Squad what to do and how to do it feels visceral in a way that many modern shooters aren’t even able to achieve. These commandos are the best of the best, and they act like it. Your AI squadmates – in most games, a nuisance to be coddled – are capable of holding their own, sometimes more effectively than you. This is best personified by the game not ending the second you get taken out. Your squad carries on and finishes the job before picking you back up. Even the shooting has aged surprisingly well, especially when paired with a more modern control scheme via preset or custom mapping. Everything just feels good. Sure, some of the enemies might be a little too spongey, but the sheer variety and versatility of the tools offered is impressive, chief among them your DC-17 – a modular rifle that can shift between RPG, AR, and sniper. Of course, being Star Wars, sound is a big factor, and Republic Commando is one of the IP’s highest points. Jesse Harlin’s score remains as immaculate as the day the game first released and all the sound effects you’d expect out of Star Wars are front and centre. This is all further solidified by the great work of Temuera Morrison, the actor responsible for bringing the entire clone army to life in the films. Each of the game’s three “campaigns” distinguishes itself from each other as well. From the sandy canyons of Geonosis, the eerie halls of the Prosecutor, or the densely forested Kashyyyk, they all feel distinct. While it may not be a visual feast anymore, the takeaway with Republic is less look how far we've come but rather look how far ahead it really was. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: OS: Windows 2000, XP or Vista Processor: Pentium III or Athlon 1.0 GHz or faster CPU Memory: 256MB RAM Graphics: 64MB 3D Graphics card with Vertex Shader and Pixel Shader (VS/PS) capability DirectX®: 9.0b Hard Drive: 2.0GB Sound: 100% Directx 9.0c

Big Island, the first 'cloud training GPU' out of China, is getting ready for mass market after almost four years under the radar. And manufacturer Shanghai Tianshu Intellectual Semiconductor Co. has finally released the pics to prove it. According to Tianshu Zhixin, as the company is commonly known as in Asia, this sleek looking, 7nm AI and HPC focused monster has the potential to spit up "twice the performance of mainstream manufacturers' products." Not only could Big Island's numbers compete with AMD and Nvidia's commercial chips in terms of performance, Tianshu Zhixin claim it'll do so with a more impressive price-to-performance ratio, as well as lower power consumption. This could mean an epic boost to sectors such as education, medicine, and security that utilise such powerful graphics solutions for important work. Big Island supports a boatload of floating point formats. These include, but are not limited to, FP32, FP16, BF16, INT32, INT16, and INT8. As noted by Tom's Hardware, Big Island products have the potential to hit up to 147 TFLOPS on an FP16 test platform. These are numbers teased by the company itself, so should be taken with a pinch of salt, but with the current generation Nvidia A100 and AMD Instinct MI100 managing up to 77.97 TFLOPS and 184.6 TFLOPS, respectively, it sure sounds competitive. Though it must be said that Nvidia and AMD both have tricks up their sleeves to juice their cards up further. Still, 147 TFLOPS isn't a bad ballpark number, all things considered. There's no word on pricing as yet, so we cant really comment on the price-to-performance. After years in development, the design for Big Island was actually finalised some time in 2020, but was then stalled for some time. This is likely due in part to the component shortage the tech industry has found itself in over course of the pandemic. The company has since managed to manoeuvre itself back into a decent spot, and production will be underway as soon as possible. It's not yet clear whether Big Island will see a release outside of China. With a focus on championing domestic manufacturing, reducing the country's reliance on foreign tech, we'd suspect this chip to stay within the country.

Deno, the JavaScript runtime from the creator of Node.js, is now a company with nearly $5m to fund development – though its developers say it will remain "permissively free." Deno 1.0 was released in May 2020 by Ryan Dahl, Bert Belder, and Bartek Iwańczuk. Dahl, the original developer of Node.js, had reflected on what he considered to be his design mistakes, some of which he saw as unfixable, and therefore created Deno. The new runtime ticks boxes for modern development trends, including being part-coded in Rust and having first-class support for TypeScript. Like Node.js, the project depends on the Chromium V8 JavaScript runtime. The TypeScript element caused some debate when, in June 2020, the Deno team decided to "use JavaScript instead of TypeScript for internal Deno code," citing performance and cleaner code as reasons. This was seen as a dilution of the original intent, to use TypeScript everywhere, but the developers said it was "only applicable to a very particular, very technical situation in the internals of Deno." Dahl and Belder have now "raised $4.9m of seed capital" from investors including Mozilla and Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of JAMstack company Vercel. The investment will enable "a staff of full-time expert engineers," though Deno is to remain MIT-licensed. "We do not want to find ourselves in the unfortunate position where we have to decide if certain features are for paid customers only," they said. Dahl and Belder claimed the server-side JavaScript ecosystem (which is dominated by Node.js) is "hopelessly fragmented, deeply tied to bad infrastructure, and irrevocably ruled by committees without the incentive to innovate." Server-side JavaScript has not kept pace with the browser platform, they said. They also believe that for many of today's developers, the browser is in effect the client operating system. "Many are more familiar with the Chrome DevTools console than they are with a Unix command-line prompt. More familiar with WebSockets than BSD sockets, MDN than man pages," they said. In this context, "JavaScript and TypeScript scripts calling into WebAssembly code" is the equivalent of scripts calling platform APIs from an operating system shell. Deno can be used in many contexts, including serverless functions, desktop applications using Electron or similar, scripting for databases, and more. Michael Dawson, Node.js lead for Red Hat and IBM and a member of the Technical Steering Committee, told us in October: "All projects are going to end up with some legacy, it's the price of success that you can't go back and just change all those things." As you would expect, though, Dawson takes the line that Node should be improved rather than replaced. How will Deno Company make money? Dahl and Belder spoke vaguely about "commercial applications of this infrastructure," which will build on the open-source project. One example already available is Deno Deploy, which allows you to run Deno code on a hosted server with automatic deployment from GitHub. The irony is that in attempting to fix the "hopelessly fragmented" JavaScript ecosystem, Dahl and Belder are fragmenting it further.

We love a good animal blocks traffic story here at Autoblog. See the recent mama llama trauma incident in Oregon and koala behind the wheel in Australia stories as examples. Today, the news concerns a steer blocking traffic in the suburbs of Atlanta. Local news outlet WSB-TV Atlanta reported over the weekend that the bovine escaped its trailer on a metro freeway. It reportedly roamed free for over an hour on the highway (I-285 West), causing traffic to pile up and even potentially causing a crash or two. Local news outlets were unable to confirm that the steer was the source of the crashes, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it was. Police were called in to corral the animal. It took multiple officers to get the job done, but they couldn’t have done it without the assistance of a citizen who had rope. What methods of capture were the police attempting before some genius with rope came along, you ask? We’re not sure. The police’s Facebook post (below) doesn’t say. You can see photos of the steer tied up to an officer’s Chevy Tahoe. Police confirmed that the animal simply fell out of a livestock trailer (c’mon people, secure your cows). The steer has since lost its sweet, sweet freedom and was returned to its owner. There’s no doubt that the grand escape and time on the run has made it the most legen-dairy steer on the farm.

Harrow is one of the most religiously diverse places in the country with over 40 different religions practised in the borough. Of these 40 plus religions, Zoroastrianism is one of them. Zoroastrianism doesn't carry the same religious po[CENSORED]rity as the Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In fact, in the 2011 census, there were only 4,100 people reported to follow Zoroastrianism in the UK. Not widely known itself, the ancient religion does, however, have some very well known associations. Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara) was of Parsi heritage. The Parsi community were an ethnoreligious group that settled in west India after the Muslim conquest of Persia. They distinctively followed the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism which Freddie's parents also followed. When the Queen singer passed away in 1991 his funeral procession was conducted by a Zoroastrian priest at West London Crematorium. Although the Zoroastrian faith is one of a small following, in the grade II listed former Ace Cinema is the Zoroastrian Centre in Rayners Lane, Harrow. The centre serves as the main hub for the Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe and has been visited by notable figures such as the Archbishop of Canterbury and Prince Phillip.

Calls are growing in Germany for the introduction of nationwide coronavirus restrictions amid confusion and frustration over patchwork arrangements across the country as the infection rate continues to rise. The majority of Germans are in favour of a more unified approach to tackling the virus, now in its third wave, according to a poll, ahead of an expected tightening of rules after the holiday weekend. Fifty-three per cent of Germans have said they would like to see the government setting the rules without the support of the 16 states, according to a poll by YouGov, in order to introduce more clarity. The chancellor, Angela Merkel, has persistently called for tighter, more unified rules across the country, but has frequently been overruled by the leaders of the states, leading to a weakening of her standing. The interior minister, Horst Seehofer, said a nationwide approach was the only way for the country to effectively fight the virus’s spread. “There is a great desire among the po[CENSORED]tion for unified rules,” he told the newspaper Welt am Sontag. “Therefore my proposal is to establish uniform rules with a federal law … which would prescribe which measures have to be taken according to the incidence value”. A lag in reporting new infections over the holiday period is thought to be the reason for an apparent fall in the number of incidents. The Robert Koch Institute said Monday’s figure – 8,500 new infections, about 1,400 less than a week ago, was likely to be higher in reality due to the ‘Easter effect’, which meant fewer people were being tested. Fifty deaths were also reported. More than 4,100 patients with coronavirus, the highest figure since the start of February, are being treated in intensive care, 55% of whom are on ventilators. During the pandemic, the highest level of patients admitted to ICU so far was at the start of January. More than 4,600 ICU beds remain unoccupied.

Name of the game: Elite Dangerous Price: 7.49$ Link Store: Steam Offer ends up after X hours: 8 April Requirements: MINIMUM: OS: Windows 7/8/10 64-bit Processor: Quad Core CPU (4 x 2Ghz) Memory: 6 GB RAM Graphics: Nvidia GTX 470/AMD R7 240 DirectX: Version 11 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 25 GB available space RECOMMENDED: OS: Windows 7/8/10 64-bit Processor: Intel Core i7-3770K Quad Core CPU or better / AMD FX 4350 Quad Core CPU or better Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: Nvidia GTX 770 / AMD Radeon R9 280X DirectX: Version 11 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 25 GB available space Additional Notes: Supports SteamVR, Oculus Rift and TrackIR

Game Information: Initial release date: 26 Mar, 2021. Software Developer: Square Enix, ARZEST Corp. Publisher: Square Enix. Platform: PlayStation 4, Windows Microsoft. Gamers have been treated to a 3D platformer renaissance over the past few years. The likes of Yooka-Laylee and A Hat in Time have shown the world that 3D platformers aren’t just a genre of the past, but a formula that can still be iterated upon. Enter Square Enix and legendary game designer Yuji Naka, best known for his work on the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. Together they set out to create a brand new 3D platformer like the world has never seen before. To that extent, they have succeeded, as the mediocrity of Balan Wonderworld stands out as one of the worst and underdeveloped platformers in recent memory. From start to finish, Balan Wonderworld feels like a fever dream, and not in a good way. Nothing in this world makes sense, there’s no real story, and there’s nothing motivating you to keep going. The game stars Leo and Emma, two kids who feel like social outcasts, as they wander into a theater run by Balan, a mysterious being in a white hat known for his positivity. They are then transported to the Isle of Tims, a hub filled with adorable creatures that connects each of the twelve worlds. Each world is actually a troubled person’s heart, which Leo and Emma need to free from Lance, Balan’s evil counterpart. While the plot attempts some dark tones, there is little actual story outside of the opening and ending cutscenes. There is no dialogue between the inhabitants of this world, no character development, and no raised stakes to keep the player motivated. Brief interactions, such as the musical number at the end of each world attempts to add some personality to the characters, but they end up feeling as soulless as the rest of the game. As lacklustre as the story is, the controls are easily the worst part of Balan Wonderworld. Unlike Mario and Crash Bandicoot, who have evolved their gameplay styles over the years, Balan feels as if it is a long lost PS1 game, and not in a good way. Much like the original Sonic the Hedgehog, the game only utilizes only one button. Whether you press any of the face buttons or use the adaptive triggers, every input will result in the same action. In theory, this is not necessarily a bad design philosophy, especially if you are catering the game to a younger crowd. Unfortunately, the game’s signature feature, costumes, meshes with the controls like water and oil. There are 80 unique costumes throughout the game that give Leo and Emma different powers. These can range from the power to float in the air to shooting tornadoes as a projectile. On their own, these costumes present some great ideas to spice up the gameplay. However, since your costume’s abilities are activated with the same button that you would normally use to jump, and all buttons do the same action, this causes you to lose the ability to jump in certain costumes. If the game was built around this limitation of not being able to jump at all times, this may not have been such a huge issue, but since this is a platformer, losing the ability to jump can be the most frustrating feeling. Combine that with the slow movement speed, and you’re left with one of the least fun controlling characters in a platformer. The problems with the game’s design don’t end there, however, as the core level design in Balan Wonderworld is incredibly basic, blocky, and boring. Each world is divided into two acts followed by a boss fight. The goal of each stage is to utilize the different costumes available to reach the purple heart at the end of the stage, while collecting Tims, gems, and Balan Trophies along the way. Each level has two to three unique costumes to find, with each one being encased in a locked crystal. Before activating one, you will need to find and use a key. These are usually within a few meters of the crystal anyway, making their inclusion feel completely arbitrary. Once collected, you will gain access to the costume’s powers. You can hold three costumes at a time, including duplicates. All additional costumes are sent to the dressing room, which can be travelled to from any checkpoint. However, the decision to not make the costumes permanent upgrades ultimately hurts the game, as costumes also function as your health. If you take any damage, that costume and its respective power will disappear until you find it again in a stage. This is incredibly frustrating when the game wants you to bring costumes back to previous worlds to find hidden collectibles like Balan Trophies. If you get hit once, it’s back to the previous level to find the costume you lost, and that gets incredibly tedious. One of the most baffling inclusions, however, is that Balan Trophies are required to progress the story. Every few worlds, the game will require a certain amount of Balan Trophies to progress, leading to lots of backtracking to get enough to move on. There are seven Balan Trophies hidden in each world. Six of them are hidden throughout the stage, some of them requiring costumes you won’t have acquired as of yet. The seventh trophy requires you to find the Balan’s Bout minigame in each stage and complete it with an excellent rank. Each time, the minigame consists of Balan smashing debris, with the player performing four quick time events. Since they are nearly the same every time, the minigame gets old very quickly. Having the Balan Trophies be required is the epitome of padding, and it brings the pace of the game to a crawl more than it already is. That’s not to say all of Balan Wonderworld is a complete mess. In addition to some great costume ideas, such as the Dusk Butterfly, which lets you fly at night, the game also has a pretty decent soundtrack. While not all tracks are winners, and the game tends to repeat them quite often, the music is definitely the highlight here. Additionally, on PS5, the game supports the DualSense’s adaptive triggers and haptic feedback. Each costume has a different feeling, particularly when you use the adaptive triggers instead of the face buttons. This was a pleasant surprise, but using the face buttons was still far more comfortable than the extra effort needed to use the triggers for every action. The game also supports full co-op, but there is a weird quirk where players are magnetized together and controlled as one if they get too close to one another, turning the game into an incredibly frustrating experience in multiplayer. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: OS: Windows® 10 64-bit Processor: AMD Ryzen™ 5 1400 / Intel® Core™ i5-6400 Memory: 16 GB RAM Graphics: AMD Radeon™ RX 480 / NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 20 GB available space Additional Notes: 1920x1080 @ 60FPS (High Quality Settings). Local Co-Op requires two controllers.

There was a time when shopping for a gaming monitor meant choosing between speed (TN panel) or image quality (IPS panel). Not anymore. Case in point, LG's 27-inch UltraGear offers the best of both worlds, and better yet, it's on sale for $296.99 at Amazon right now. That's a $103 discount over its list price and around $85 below its average street price. You get quite a bit for your money, too. In keeping with the 'best of both worlds' theme, this is a FreeSync Premium display certified by Nvidia as G-Sync Compatible. This means it's mostly GPU agnostic when it comes to syncing the monitor's refresh rate with your graphics card (the only real exception would be most onboard graphics) to keep the action smooth and tear-free. It also has a 2560x1440 resolution, 144Hz refresh rate, and 1ms response time. Taking full advantage of the fast refresh rate at its native resolution can be a tall ask of some GPUs, but for less demanding games (like many esports titles), hitting triple-digit framerates is certainly doable. LG's display offers 99 percent coverage of the sRGB color space, suggesting accurate image reproduction (certainly more so than a cheaper TN screen). It also serves up HDR10 support, though, with a modest 350 nits brightness rating; I wouldn't buy this specifically for HDR content (in LCD land, you really want 1,000 nits to do HDR visuals justice).

Top datasets used to train AI models and benchmark how the technology has progressed over time are riddled with labeling errors, a study shows. Data is a vital resource in teaching machines how to complete specific tasks, whether that's identifying different species of plants or automatically generating captions. Most neural networks are spoon-fed lots and lots of annotated samples before they can learn common patterns in data. But these labels aren’t always correct; training machines using error-prone datasets can decrease their performance or accuracy. In the aforementioned study, led by MIT, analysts combed through ten po[CENSORED]r datasets that have been cited more than 100,000 times in academic papers and found that on average 3.4 per cent of the samples are wrongly labelled. The datasets they looked at range from photographs in ImageNet, to sounds in AudioSet, reviews scraped from Amazon, to sketches in QuickDraw. Examples of some of the mistakes compiled by the researchers show that in some cases, it’s a clear blunder, such as a drawing of a light bulb tagged as a crocodile, in others, however, it’s not always obvious. Should a picture of a bucket of baseballs be labeled as ‘baseballs’ or ‘bucket’? Annotating each sample is laborious work. This work is often outsourced work to services like Amazon Mechanical Turk, where workers are paid the square root of sod all to sift through the data piece by piece, labeling images and audio to feed into AI systems. This process amplifies biases and errors, as Vice documented here. Workers are pressured to agree with the status quo if they want to get paid: if a lot of them label a bucket of baseballs as a 'bucket', and you decide it's 'baseballs', you may not be paid at all if the platform figures you must be wrong, as you're going against the crowd, or deliberately trying to mess up the labeling. That means workers will choose the most po[CENSORED]r label to avoid looking like they've made a mistake. It’s in their interest to stick to the narrative and avoid sticking out like a sore thumb. That means errors, or worse, racial biases and suchlike, can snowball in these datasets. The error rates vary across the datasets. In ImageNet, the most po[CENSORED]r dataset used to train models for object recognition, the rate creeps up to six per cent. Considering it contains about 15 million photos, that means hundreds of thousands of labels are wrong. Some classes of images are more affected than others, for example, ‘chameleon’ is often mistaken for ‘green lizard’ and vice versa. There are other knock-on effects: neural nets may learn to incorrectly associate features within data with certain labels. If, say, many images of the sea seem to contain boats and they keep getting tagged as ‘sea’, a machine might get confused and be more likely to incorrectly recognize boats as seas. Problems don't just arise when trying to compare the performance of models using these noisy datasets. The risks are higher if these systems are deployed in the real world, Curtis Northcutt, co-lead author of the study and a PhD student at MIT, and also cofounder and CTO of ChipBrain, a machine-learning hardware startup, explained to The Register. "Imagine a self-driving car that uses an AI model to make steering decisions at intersections," he said. "What would happen if a self-driving car is trained on a dataset with frequent label errors that mislabel a three-way intersection as a four-way intersection? The answer: it might learn to drive off the road when it encounters three-way intersections.

My vote goes to DH2, I liked the couple, the video clip, and the rhythm.

Publishing their results in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the team discovered that female monkeys use alarm calls to recruit males to defend them from predators. The researchers conducted the study among 19 different groups of wild putty-nosed monkeys, a type of forest guenon, in Mbeli Bai, a study area within the forests in Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, Northern Republic of Congo. The results promote the idea that females' general alarm requires males to assess the nature of the threat and that it serves to recruit males to ensure group defense. Females only cease the alarm call when males produce calls associated with anti-predator defense. Results suggest that alarm-calling strategies depend on the sex of the signaler. Females recruit males, who identify themselves while approaching, for protection. Males reassure their female of their quality in predation defense, probably to assure future reproduction opportunities. Males advertise their commitment to serve as hired guns by emitting general "pyow" calls while approaching the rest of their group -- a call containing little information about ongoing events, but cues to male identity, similar as to a signature call. Hearing his "pyow" call during male approaches enables females to identify high quality group defenders already from a distance. This might contribute to long-term male reputation in groups, which would equip females to choose males that ensure their offspring's survival most reliably. Said the study's lead author Frederic Gnepa Mehon of WCS's Congo Program and the Nouabalé-Ndoki Foundation: "Our observations on other forest guenons suggest that if males do not prove to be good group protectors, they likely have to leave groups earlier than good defenders. To date, it remains unclear whether female guenons have a saying in mate choice, but our current results strongly suggest this possibility." In the course of this study, a new call type was consistently recorded named "kek." They found that the males used the "kek" call when exposed to a moving leopard model created by researchers for field experiments. Previous studies of putty-nosed monkeys in Nigeria never reported "keks." This new type of call could thus be po[CENSORED]tion-specific or it could be uttered towards moving threats. If "kek" calls are po[CENSORED]tion specific, this could suggest that different "dialects" exist amongst putty-nosed monkeys -- a strong indicator for vocal production learning, which is fiercely debated to exist in the animal kingdom. Said co-author Claudia Stephan Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) Congo Program and the Nouabalé-Ndoki Foundation: "Sexual selection might play a far more important role in the evolution of communication systems than previously thought. In a phylogenetic context, what strategies ultimately drove the evolution of communication in females and in males? Might there even be any parallels to female and male monkeys' different communication strategies in human language?" The authors say that current results considerably advanced the understanding of different female and male alarm calling both in terms of sexual dimorphisms in call production and call usage. Interestingly, although males have more complex vocal repertoires than females, the cognitive skills that are necessary to strategically use simple female repertoires seem to be more complex than those necessary to follow male calling strategies. In other words, female putty-nosed monkeys' alarms may contain little information, but they do so by purpose, namely to facilitate the mani[CENSORED]tion of male behavior.

MG has revealed images of its Cyberster Roadster Shanghai concept car before its full reveal in a few weeks. MG’s heritage might be steeped in small roadsters like this brushing hedgerows on British back roads, but it’s reality in 2021 is driven more by compact SUVs than the iconic British sports car. To bring together its past and present, MG has revealed this electric roadster concept, designed in-house at parent company SAIC’s London-based design studio. The MG brand was purchased by Chinese manufacturing giant SAIC in 2006, and reintroduced to the UK as a budget brand in 2011. Since then, although the product has been steadily improving, the brand hasn’t quite had a tendency to blip our radar. Until now. The concept as seen in these sketches is a traditionally proportioned roadster with a long bonnet and small cabin just ahead of the rear axle. Despite retro nods to graphic elements such as the round headlights and illuminated body line down the car’s flanks, the overall design is far more muscular and modern than many a retro-pastiche roadster of the recent past (looking at you, Fiat). The LED-heavy rear end, and a glimpse of some Mini-like Union Jack rear light graphics reinforce the contemporary overtone, something that’s mirrored by its inevitable electric powertrain. While the notion of an electric roadster might not immediately raise the pulse rate for enthusiasts at the moment, its chance of becoming a production model is more likely than one powered by traditional internal combustion means considering MG’s investment in EV tech. With the electric performance car quickly escalating in weight, price and size, a small electric roadster might actually be what the sports car market needs for a recharge.

The dilemma I am a 50-year-old gay man. When I was young I was cast in the role of the “good” child – my mother’s antidote to my rebellious siblings. I behaved well, did fine at school and sought my mother’s approval and love. As a result I hid my sexuality. I was left in no doubt from her that being gay was “dirty”. She frequently told me I should not go to her if I had any worries as she would not be able to cope if all her children had problems. I came out to her when I was 19. She sought to control the narrative, requesting that I didn’t tell anyone until she felt the time was right. Relieved, as she told me she still loved me, I complied. I don’t know if my mother’s love for me was conditional, because I didn’t test it. I recognise that she worked extremely hard with four young children and a husband setting up a business. I am still bound up in many of the same patterns of behaviour as when I was a child. She just wants to hear I am happy, but doesn’t if I am not. I smile, regardless of how I am actually feeling. So she doesn’t really know me and loves a vision of me that isn’t who I am. I wonder if I have the right, at this stage in our lives, to change a relationship that she appears content with? Mariella replies Certainly you have the right. It’s not your responsibility as an adult to be compelled to present a fictional life in order to maintain the status quo with your mum. But, although it may assuage your frustrations to have it out with her, changing the dynamic may create insurmountable problems. You have reason to feel frustration and anger, having had to compromise your sexuality and curtail your self-expression in order to “protect” your mother. But the consequences of that must surely have ebbed as you grew older and embarked on a life lived on your own terms? Philip Larkin famously wrote, “They [CENSORED] you up, your mum and dad” but, as we grow older, we can also choose how much we allow their influence to prevail. The complicated relationship you describe sounds like it’s remained in stasis throughout your life. It’s worth pondering why it continues to be a preoccupation for you that she confront the “real” you. Could it be that we overload the parental bond with heightened emotional expectations when parents are simply human like the rest of us? Love is a remarkable force, capable of inspiring extraordinary self-sacrifice and delivering untold pain but, for most of us, our lives play out on a more micro-scale than the epic tragedy. My mother is so far into the grip of debilitating dementia that I’m sadly at liberty to share indiscretions. All my life I’ve waited for just a nod that she noticed my uphill trek as I dragged myself from ignorance to autodidact, from poverty to self-sufficiency, from the smallest life to a sometimes uncomfortably public one. Now it’s too late and she’s barely able to follow her own thoughts let alone look beyond them. So when my brother revealed recently that she has a secret trunk of my press clippings, I was floored. My mother has never mentioned a single article I’ve written, anthology I’ve compiled, programme I’ve made… and yet she’s hoarded my entire career’s worth. I offer you that to highlight how common it is for us to not get everything we want from our parents – and sometimes not to get anything at all. Your mother has developed a way of coping familiar to many, turning away from emotional challenge rather than exploring her prejudices and feelings. Of course you have the right to drag her from her cosy fictional corner and present the reality of your life and the price you’ve paid for keeping it palatable to her. But to what purpose? I imagine all she wants is to know that you love her and she doesn’t have to worry about you. Her failings are her failings and she’s probably just as aware of them as you are. What you’ll achieve by such confrontation is unlikely to be the denouement you imagine – where she admits that what’s she’s given you has been too little and what she’s expected of you has been too much. Most animals are happy to raise their young only as long as they are entirely dependent – after which the cut-off is complete. Anyone who’s seen a dog with puppies will have witnessed the brutality of the moment the mother loses interest. We, on the other hand, have evolved into the most demanding species on the planet. We want lifestyle luxuries, emotional understanding, complicated interaction and that most unfulfillable of goals, closure. The most rewarding investment for your energies has to be in your own emotional life right here and now, ensuring that the bad habits you’ve been forced into adopting are not recurring themes in your relationships. Your mother has loved you as best as she is capable of and you are in the majority in finding fault with what you had. But to paraphrase LP Hartley, the past is a foreign country where they did things differently. For most of us the change we can make is in our future.

The American rapper DMX was hospitalised on Saturday evening after falling ill, his New York-based lawyer Murray Richman said. “He had a heart attack. He’s quite ill,” Richman said. Richman said he could not confirm reports that DMX, 50, overdosed on drugs and was not sure what caused the heart attack. “I’m very sad about it, extremely sad. He’s like my son,” Richman said. “He’s just a tremendous person, tremendous entertainer, tremendous human being. And so much to offer, so much to say. Not the run-of-the-mill rapper. A person of great depth.” Earlier reports had said DMX, 50, had been on life support. Richman told Pix11 that DMX was breathing on his own, but later said he was “given wrong information” and clarified that DMX was on life support. A representative for the rapper told TMZ that the rapper “remains in ICU in critical condition. Earl has been a warrior his entire life. This situation represents yet another road he must conquer … the Simmons family appreciates the overwhelming outpouring of heartfelt love, encouragement, support and prayers for Earl.” DMX, whose real name is Earl Simmons, has had five US No 1 albums, featuring hip-hop anthems such as Party Up (Up in Here), What’s My Name and X Gon’ Give It to Ya. His first two albums were released months apart in 1998, each going multi-platinum and attracting critical acclaim for bringing a gothic darkness to an increasingly glitzy rap scene. He has released seven albums in all, and earned three Grammy nominations. He began an acting career in 1998 in the crime drama Belly, alongside hip-hop stars including Nas and Method Man. Specialising in crime thrillers, he took a lead role alongside Steven Seagal in Exit Wounds (2000) and another with Jet Li for Cradle 2 the Grave (2003). Over the years, DMX has battled with substance abuse. The rapper canceled a series of shows to check himself into a rehabilitation facility in 2019. In an Instagram post, his team said he apologised for the cancelled shows and thanked his fans for the continued support. In 2015, he was sentenced to six months in prison for failing to pay child support. Simmons has 15 children. The most recent, Exodus, was born in 2016. In 2018, he served a year-long sentence for tax evasion. Last year, DMX faced off against Snoop Dogg in a Verzuz battle, which drew more than 500,000 viewers.

Name of the game: Dead by Daylight Price: 9.99$ Link Store: Steam Offer ends up after X hours: 13 April Requirements: MINIMUM: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 10 64-bit Operating System Processor: Intel Core i3-4170 or AMD FX-8120 Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: DX11 Compatible GeForce GTX 460 1GB or AMD HD 6850 1GB DirectX: Version 11 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 50 GB available space Sound Card: DX11 compatible RECOMMENDED: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: Windows 10 64-bit Operating System Processor: Intel Core i3-4170 or AMD FX-8300 or higher Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: DX11 Compatible GeForce 760 or AMD HD 8800 or higher with 4GB of RAM DirectX: Version 11 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 50 GB available space Sound Card: DX11 compatible

Game Information: Initial release date: 15 Nov, 2005. Software Developer: Aspyr. Publisher: Aspyr. Platform: PlayStation 4, Windows Microsoft. At its most basic level, Stubbs the Zombie is a relatively simple game. You play the titular monster, and you need to eat your way through the art deco utopia of Punchbowl. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, after the first couple of levels, you’ve been introduced to all the abilities and powers that Stubbs has at his disposal. You can throw your internal organs as explosives, throw your head like a bowling ball, and detach your arm to possess regular humans. And of course, you can pass gas as an area-of-effect stun attack. This lack of growth creates a very bizarre difficulty curve. Most of the experience is trivially easy. The environments change and the number of baddies increases, but that final portion is brutal. Enemies suddenly become damage sponges, and Stubbs loses a lot more health seemingly out of nowhere. This is the biggest issue with the game, ultimately. The last few levels are an absolute slog and almost completely strip away any of the charm or strangeness present at the start. This applies mechanically, too. There are so many strange one-off moments earlier in the game, like a rhythm game, or a stealth segment to perpetrate a jail-break. This is all stripped away and reduced to a series of hallways with enemy after enemy to chomp through, and that’s about it. Possessing enemies and using their guns to kill soldiers and scientists helps a little bit, but it doesn’t take long to stop being fun. These are all problems that were present in the title upon its 2005 launch, so the port can only do so much. With this in mind, the game is solid — stable frame rate, the assets look as good as they possibly could without an overhaul, and the modernised controls are a demonstrable improvement. Hit detection is a little sluggish, but it's worth the price of entry for getting a peek at such an oddity. While saying the game lacks focus could be construed as an insult, it’s truly fascinating to see a game made with, for its time, such a high level of quality that wears so many different hats. And for that, we appreciate the opportunity to experience it in the modern era. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: Operating System: Windows 10. Processor: Intel Core i3-4170 @ 3.7 GHz, AMD A8-7600 @ 3.1 GHz. Memory: 8 GB. Hard Drive Space: 5 GB. Video Card (ATI): Radeon R9 M270. Video Card (NVIDIA): GeForce GTX 660. VRAM: 2 GB.

Huawei is expanding its product portfolio to include PC monitors, the first of which is a modest 23.8-inch display with an IPS screen and a 1920x1080 resolution. It's fairly basic from top to bottom, but an appropriate model to gets its feet wet in a new product segment. Meanwhile, NZXT is on the hunt for a monitor engineering lead. More on that in a moment. First, let's talk about the new 'Huawei Display 23.8' that just launched. Taken what it's good at in the smartphone sector, Huawei's first monitor trims the bezels to where they are almost nonexistent. "At a time when purchase decisions are primarily driven by user experiences, consumers demand more from not just the displays equipped on smartphones, but also from PC displays," Huawei notes. The top and side bezels measure a scant 5.7mm, giving the display a 90 percent screen-to-body ratio. I've only seen renders, but it looks attractive enough for a no-frills monitor. By no frills, I mean it lacks things like G-Sync or FreeSync support, you won't find a built-in USB hub or speakers, and it doesn't offer HDR visuals or a crazy-high refresh rate (just 60Hz). My hope is that Huawei builds on this and comes out with a competitively priced gaming monitor at some point. As it stands, the Huawei Display 23.8 is available direct from Huawei for £150 with a free MateDock 2 thrown in. Additionally, the product page touts a £30 off coupon code, A30DY. As for NZXT, the company recently posted a job listing for a full-time Display/Monitor Engineering Lead, Principle Engineer, who will be responsible for developing and qualifying flat panel displays for desktop monitors and unspecified portable products (perhaps laptops). "This individual will be working on flat panel displays, both at the component and system level. This role will work with the system design team, the EE team, mechanical team, the supply base management team and the display suppliers and will be managing all activities necessary to deliver the display system from initial concept into final products / mass production," the job listing states. I have many questions about this effort, such as when NZXT hopes to launch its first gaming monitor and what features it will focus on. Will it support FreeSync or G-Sync, and will serve up a fast refresh rate?

It's the end of the line for the Android and iOS incarnations of Microsoft's AI assistant Cortana. “After March 31, 2021, the Cortana mobile app on your phone will no longer be supported,” the Windows giant warned on Wednesday. "The Cortana content you created – such as reminders and lists – will no longer function in the Cortana mobile app, but can still be accessed through Cortana in Windows. Also, Cortana reminders, lists, and tasks are automatically synced to the Microsoft To Do app, which you can download to your phone for free." We joke that no one used Cortana on Android and iOS though truth be told: it had over a million installs on Google's mobile OS, and had an average Play Store rating of 4.2 from 40,000 reviews. It also had a score of 4.2 on Apple's software store from 2,700 reviews. So, clearly, it wasn't terrible. Pulling the plug on Cortana-in-your-pocket shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, though. In July, Microsoft stated it would end support for the apps come “early 2021." And last month, it killed off its digital assistant for the Harman Kardon Invoke speaker. Now owners of the Invoke are left with a bog-standard Bluetooth speaker. A Redmond spokesperson told El Reg that the software goliath is still keen on its AI-powered assistant: “Microsoft is continuing to invest in Cortana as a personal productivity assistant more deeply ingrained in Microsoft 365 and Windows. We see the value in creating an assistant that can truly help you get things done where you need it the most. "You’ll continue to see Cortana show up in places like Outlook, Teams, Windows and more as we expand the assistant across our productivity tools and services to help with the mundane tasks like scheduling meetings, managing your inbox and meetings, and more.” It was seemingly difficult for Microsoft’s chatty assistant to get ahead of its rivals on smartphones since Apple and Google install their own alternatives. And we don't talk about Windows Phone anymore. The Azure biz was also left in the dust on the home speaker front as Amazon and Google slipped into living rooms around the world. Microsoft previously styled its decision to scale back parts of Cortana as “changes to some US consumer-centric features and functionalities with lower usage.”