Windows Central reports: Microsoft is working on a software solution that would allow app developers to bring their Android apps to Windows 10 with little to no code changes by packaging them as an MSIX and allowing developers to submit them to the Microsoft Store. According to sources familiar with the matter, the project is codenamed 'Latte' and I'm told it could show up as soon as next year. The company has toyed with the idea of bringing Android apps to Windows 10 before via a project codenamed Astoria that never saw the light of day. Project Latte aims to deliver a similar product, and is likely powered by the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL.) Microsoft will need to provide its own Android subsystem for Android apps to actually run, however. Microsoft has announced that WSL will soon get support for GUI Linux applications, as well as GPU acceleration which should aid the performance of apps running through WSL. It's unlikely that Project Latte will include support for Play Services, as Google doesn't allow Play Services to be installed on anything other than native Android devices and Chrome OS. This means that apps which require Play Services APIs will need to be updated to remove those dependencies before they can be submitted on Windows 10.

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Global giants such as Amazon and Apple should be made responsible for helping to collect, recycle and repair their products to cut the 155,000 tonnes of electronic waste being thrown away each year in the UK, MPs say. From a report: An investigation by the environmental audit committee found the UK is lagging behind other countries and failing to create a circular economy in electronic waste. The UK creates the second highest levels of electronic waste in the world, after Norway. But MPs said the UK was not collecting and treating much of this waste properly. "A lot of it goes to landfill, incineration or is dumped overseas. Under current laws producers and retailers of electronics are responsible for this waste, yet they are clearly not fulfilling that responsibility," the MPs wrote. About 40% of the UK's e-waste is sent abroad, according to estimates -- something the MPs point out is often done illegally. The tsunami of electronic waste was throwing away valuable resources vital to a sustainable future, the report published on Thursday said. Globally, thrown-away computers, smartphones, tablets and other electronic waste have a potential value of $62.5bn each year from the precious metals they contain, including gold, silver, copper, platinum and other critical raw materials such as tungsten and indium. MPs accused online retailers including Amazon and eBay of freeriding as they are not considered retailers or producers, and are therefore not legally liable to contribute to the collection and recycling of e-waste. "For all their protestations of claimed sustainability, major online retailers and marketplaces such as Amazon have so far avoided playing their part in the circular economy by not collecting or recycling electronics in the way other organisations have to," MPs said. "Given the astronomical growth in sales by online vendors, particularly this year during the coronavirus pandemic, the EAC calls for online marketplaces to collect products and pay for their recycling to create a level playing field with physical retailers and producers that are not selling on their platforms."

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The World Health Organization's top emergency expert said on Friday it would be "highly speculative" for the WHO to say the coronavirus did not emerge in China, where it was first identified in a food market in December last year. From a report: China is pushing a narrative via state media that the virus existed abroad before it was discovered in the central city of Wuhan, citing the presence of coronavirus on imported frozen food packaging and scientific papers claiming it had been circulating in Europe last year. "I think it's highly speculative for us to say that the disease did not emerge in China," Mike Ryan said at a virtual briefing in Geneva after being asked if COVID-19 could have first emerged outside China. "It is clear from a public health perspective that you start your investigations where the human cases first emerged," he added, saying that evidence might then lead to other places.

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A huge cache of fresh water found beneath the sea floor off the western coast of Hawaii's Big Island could lift the threat of drought for people living there. From a report, submitted by reader schwit1: Eric Attias at the University of Hawaii and his colleagues discovered the reservoir, which is contained in porous rock reaching at least 500 metres beneath the sea floor, using an imaging technique similar to an MRI scan. They used a boat towing a 40-metre-long antenna behind it to generate an electromagnetic field, sending an electric current through the sea and below the sea floor. As seawater is a better conductor than fresh water, the team could distinguish between the two. They found that the reservoir extends at least 4 kilometres from the coast and contains 3.5 cubic kilometres of fresh water. Most of Hawaii's fresh water comes from onshore aquifers, which are layers of rock and soil underground that collect water after rainfall. The team believes that this newfound reservoir is replenished by water flowing out of these aquifers.

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Back in 2001, the U.S. was the dominant country when it came to cross-border data flows. It was the early days of the internet boom, and America was where tech companies and tech-savvy consumers were. But the global data order is changing rapidly. From a report: China now accounts for 23% of cross-border data flows, nearly twice the share of the U.S., which ranks a distant second with 12%. And the Chinese lead could turn into a dominant advantage as the formerly world-spanning internet shatters into the "splinternet": a balkanized mosaic of information networks marked off by national borders. A Nikkei survey of information on cross-border data flows from the International Telecommunication Union and U.S. research firm TeleGeography showed that cross-border data flows of China, including Hong Kong, in 2019 far outstripped any of the other 10 countries and regions examined, including the U.S. (Click here for a graphic-rich version of this article.) The source of Beijing's power lies in its connections with the rest of Asia. While the U.S. accounted for 45% of data flows in and out of China in 2001, that figure dropped to just 25% last year. Asian countries now make up more than half the total, particularly Vietnam at 17% and Singapore at 15%. Beijing has used its Belt and Road infrastructure initiative to encourage private-sector tech companies like Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings to expand abroad. Alibaba spinoff Ant Group's Alipay mobile payment platform is available in more than 55 countries and used by 1.3 billion people. China surged past the U.S. in 2014, and its influence outside its borders has only grown in the ensuing years. What does that mean? As China becomes a global data superpower, it will control huge quantities of a resource that will be invaluable to its future economic competitiveness. Data from foreign sources can provide an edge in developing artificial intelligence and information technologies.

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Non-native quagga mussels, which can block pipes, have been discovered in the East Midlands.

Non-native quagga mussels, which can block pipes, have been discovered in the East Midlands.

I'm going to get the vaccine as soon as I can. If I get vaccinated, now you aren't my problem, not personally. I might urge you to get the vaccine or wear a mask because I care about other people, but it's not about me anymore.

I'm going to get the vaccine as soon as I can. If I get vaccinated, now you aren't my problem, not personally. I might urge you to get the vaccine or wear a mask because I care about other people, but it's not about me anymore.

Nathaniel Popper, reporting for The New York Times: One by one, they left. Some quit. Others were fired. All were Black. The 15 people worked at Coinbase, the most valuable U.S. cryptocurrency start-up, where they represented roughly three-quarters of the Black employees at the 600-person company. Before leaving in late 2018 and early 2019, at least 11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment, five people with knowledge of the situation said. One of the employees was Alysa Butler, 25, who worked in recruiting. During her time at Coinbase, she said, she told her manager several times about how he and others excluded her from meetings and conversations, making her feel invisible. "Most people of color working in tech know that there's a diversity problem," said Ms. Butler, who resigned in April 2019. "But I've never experienced anything like Coinbase." In Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurs and investors often preach high-minded missions and style themselves as management gurus, Coinbase has held itself up as a model. Since the start-up was founded in 2012, Brian Armstrong, the chief executive, has assembled memos and blog posts about how he built the $8 billion company's culture with distinct hiring and training practices. That has won him acclaim among influential venture capitalists and executives. But according to 23 current and former Coinbase employees, five of whom spoke on the record, as well as internal documents and recordings of conversations, the start-up has long struggled with its management of Black employees. One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes. Another said a co-worker at a recruiting meeting broadly described Black employees as less capable. Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees. The accumulation of incidents, they said, led to the wave of departures. On Wednesday, before publication of this article, Emilie Choi, Coinbase's chief operating officer, wrote an email to employees to preemptively question the article's accuracy and said, "We know the story will recount episodes that will be difficult for employees to read." The company posted the email to its public blog. "As Brian shared with the ColorBlock ERG this morning, we don't care what The New York Times thinks. "

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Something I wrote on Facebook in 2018. "I hear a lot of baby boomer blame tonight. I just have one thing to say to you younguns. NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON. There I let you in on the secret. Now go "run" the world. Hahah."

In the early days of the virus I said it would make us smarter because there's no way out that doesn't require us to be smarter. It was true, we did get smarter. But we didn't have to work together. We will be able to get out of this, individually, even if people are in it only for themselves and some immature misguided sense of what their rights are.

In a way it's a shame the vaccines are coming, because if they weren't, we would have to learn to trust and work together, all of us, without exception. The virus would be like AIDS, which transformed sexuality in the 80s and 90s. There wasn't much of a "safe sex" concept before AIDS. Back then, if we were as crazy as we are now, people would say it's my right not to wear a condom. You're infringing on my civil liberties. A condom to protect against STDs is fairly analogous to wearing a mask. There is no vaccine for AIDS, roughly 40 years later. So we had to transform and learn new societal norms. We apparently will not have to do that for Covid-19. Shame. Because we really do need to learn how to work each other, for many other reasons. This is not the last crisis we're going to be facing collectively, and a new understanding of what our rights are is called for.

The lame duck had a eruption yesterday, a very rude one, where he said he was the president of the United States and you don't talk to the president of the United States that way. Then I thought, is he really the president of the United States? He plays golf and other than that probably not much more. Can you say you're president of the United States if you aren't doing the job?

A question for the Lincoln Project. Do you still live rent-free in Trump's head? I always wondered why campaigns stop entertaining us with videos when the election is over. That's when the fun starts, esp if you won.