Nicholas Carlson, at Business Insider , on the day AOL’s CEO briefly interrupted a motivational post-layoffs session with staff to fire one of them on-the-spot —and the business pressures that led to it. The impulsive firing on the heels of this statement made Armstrong sound unhinged — “schizophrenic in his thinking” is how a source close to him later described it. Several days later, Armstrong apologized privately to Abel Lenz and then publicly to AOL employees. But, by then, mainstream outlets including Yahoo and the Daily Mail had picked up the news. Some people viewed the public firing as a bad-ass CEO move, the kind of thing that a famously demanding executive like Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison might have done. But most people across the country and world saw it as gratuitous and humiliating: What’s wrong with Tim Armstrong, people wondered? What kind of CEO fires some poor guy in front of all his colleagues? What did this say about what was going on at AOL?
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Why AOL’s chief fired a man in front of 1,000 colleagues
An anonymous “US intelligence source” told a German newspaper that Obama had been briefed on the fact that the NSA had tapped German chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone in 2010, and that he’d personally let it go. Expect a lot more of this, as spooks who are sick of being kicked around for conducting the spying that high-ranking administration officials had been delighted to green-light start to whisper the names of their collaborators in government. Bild am Sonntag newspaper quoted US intelligence sources as saying that National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander had briefed Obama on the operation against Merkel in 2010. “Obama did not halt the operation but rather let it continue,” the newspaper quoted a high-ranking NSA official as saying. News weekly Der Spiegel reported that leaked NSA documents showed that Merkel’s phone had appeared on a list of spying targets since 2002, and was still under surveillance shortly before Obama visited Berlin in June. Obama aware of Merkel spying since 2010: German media [Deborah Cole/AFP] ( via /. ) 
Researchers at Finland’s Tampere University have identified a set of viruses they believe to be responsible for Type 1 diabetes , and they have formulated a vaccine for it that has had promising results in mice. The enterovirus in question attacks the pancreas, and is similar to the virus that causes polio. They’re forming a research syndicate to raise the €700m needed for human trials. Researchers have looked at more than a hundred different strains of the virus and pinpointed five that could cause diabetes. They believe they could produce a vaccine against those strains. ”We have identified one virus type that carries the biggest risk,” said professor Heikki Hyöty. ”A vaccine could also protect against its close relatives, to give the best possible effect.” Finnish team makes diabetes vaccine breakthrough ( via /. ) 
Jeff Atwood loves everything about his Surface Pro 2 except for its terrible battery life . The Windows light usage battery life situation has not improved at all since 2009. If anything the disparity between OS X and Windows light usage battery life has gotten worse. Microsoft positions Windows 8 as an operating system that’s great for tablets, which are designed for casual web browsing and light app use – but how can that possibly be true when Windows idle power management is so much worse than the competition’s desktop operating system in OS X – much less their tablet and phone operating system, iOS? A typical data point: Windows, on a 13″ MacBook Air, lasts about half as long per charge as OS X. What’s the deal? 
Research from UC Berkeley’s Kater Murch and team has allowed fine observation of a quantum waveform collapse. Observing single quantum trajectories of a superconducting quantum bit , published in Nature , describes the experiment, which used indirect observations of microwaves that had passed through a box containing a circuit where a particle was in a state of superposition, allowing the researchers to view the collapse in slow-motion. 
Full Screen Mario is Josh Goldberg ‘s complete remake of the classic Super Mario Brothers in HTML5. You can play re-creations of the original levels, make your own in an HTML5-based level editor, or play any of an infinite number of randomly generated levels. 
From Adrian Chen’s Gawker long-read about that recent bust of the web’s biggest online illegal drug marketplace: The lesson of the Silk Road takedown isn’t that Ulbricht was sloppy about security. 
NOVA’s Tim De Chant posted this awesome photo of the Kilby Solid Circuit, the first working example of a miniaturized electric circuit that combined all the necessary structures onto a single chip. 
Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them , a bestiary of the world of Harry Potter, is to be filmed by Warner Brothers.