KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--Running two weeks late because of an electrical glitch, the repaired shuttle Endeavour finally blasted off and rocketed into orbit for the last time Monday, putting on a spectacular, if brief, show for the several hundred thousand spectators who were estimated to have come to watch NASA's next-to-last shuttle launch.

Carrying a $2 billion particle physics experiment, critical supplies, and spare parts bound for the International Space Station, Endeavour's three main engines flashed to life and throttled up to full power while computers monitored their performance 50 times per second.

Six-and-a-half seconds later, at 8:56:28 a.m. EDT (GMT-4), Endeavour's twin solid-fuel boosters ignited with a rush of 5,000-degree exhaust, instantly pushing the spacecraft away from pad 39A.

Accelerating through 100 mph--straight up--in just eight seconds, Endeavour climbed away and quickly disappeared from view as it knifed through low-level clouds, wheeling about to line up on a northeasterly trajectory paralleling the East Coast.

Shuttle commander Mark Kelly's wife, Arizon Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, watched Endeavour's ground-shaking takeoff from the roof of the Launch Control Center 3.4 miles from pad 39A, with her mother, Mark Kelly's twin brother Scott, and other family members. Giffords was shot in the head during a January assassination attempt and her recovery has generated intense media interest.

She flew to Florida for Endeavour's initial launch attempt April 29, but the ship was grounded by an electrical problem with the shuttle's hydraulic system. She flew back Sunday for Kelly's second launch try; privacy screens shielded her from view. A spokeswoman said she was relieved Endeavour got off, saying "good stuff" after the shuttle climbed away.

"I think relief was her biggest feeling," said Pia Carusone, Giffords' chief of staff. "She was very proud, is always proud of Mark and what he does; it was an exciting moment for her to watch."

The early stages of Endeavour's climb to space appeared normal as the shuttle rocketed away atop a churning cloud of exhaust from its solid-fuel boosters. Two minutes and five seconds later, the boosters, their propellant depleted, were jettisoned, falling to the Atlantic Ocean 30 miles below where recovery ships were standing by.

Endeavour continued toward orbit on the power of its three hydrogen-fueled main engines.

A camera mounted on the side of the ship's external tank showed spectacular views of the clouds dropping away below and later. No major debris could be seen falling away from the tank during the first two minutes and 15 seconds of flight, when the dense lower atmosphere can cause high-velocity impacts with the shuttle's fragile heat shield.

But Bill Gerstenmaier, chief of space operations at NASA headquarters, said engineers spotted two small pieces of foam insulation falling away between two minutes and 6 seconds into flight and two minutes and 14 seconds. He said neither piece appeared to strike the orbiter, but engineers will carry out a detailed photo assessment as usual.

Endeavour's external tank--ET-122--was damaged when a roof collapsed at the Lockheed Martin Michoud Assembly Facility manufacturing plant in New Orleans. The tank was repaired, but NASA managers said before launch they expected to see more foam than usual break away during launch. But overall, the tank appeared to perform well and 8.5 minutes after liftoff, Endeavour separated and slipped into its planned preliminary orbit. Scott Kelly gave Giffords and Mark Kelly's two daughters red roses after the shuttle's main engines shut down.

"There were hugs all around, absolutely, it was very celebratory," Carusone said.

Mike Moses, chairman of NASA's Mission Management Team, said the countdown and launch went well and jokingly apologized for the low clouds that obscured the view of most spectators.

"It was a fantastic launch, a really great day for us, a good example of us watching the weather and getting right down to our flight rule and our launch commit criteria limits," he said. "And you can see we don't have any flight rules or launch commit criteria that dictate how long you can see the launch before it goes out of sight!"

Kelly, pilot Gregory Johnson, European Space Agency flight engineer Roberto Vittori, and Mike Fincke, veteran of two previous long-duration stays aboard the International Space Station, made the climb to orbit strapped into seats on Endeavour's upper flight deck.

Strapped in on the shuttle's lower deck were Andrew Feustel and Gregory Chamitoff, another station veteran.

After adjusting the shuttle's orbit, the astronauts opened Endeavour's cargo bay doors around 10:15 a.m. and began rigging the ship for orbital flight, breaking out computers and other gear as they worked through a busy first few hours in orbit.

If all goes well, Kelly will guide Endeavour to a docking at the space station's forward port around 6:15 a.m. Wednesday. A pallet of spare components will be robotically bolted to the left side of the station's power truss a few hours later. The next day, the 7.5-ton Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, the mission's showcase payload, will be attached to the right side of the power truss.

Using a massive magnet to bend the trajectories of high-energy cosmic rays--charged particles from supernovas, neutron stars, black holes, and other cosmic enigmas--scientists will look for evidence of antimatter and as-yet-undetected dark matter, believed to make up a quarter of the mass of the universe.

AMS may even find evidence of strange particles made up of quarks in different arrangements than those found on Earth--or something completely unexpected.

The AMS "really probes the foundations of modern physics," said Sam Ting, a Nobel laureate who manages the multinational experiment. "But to my collaborators and I, the most exciting objective of AMS is to probe the unknown, to search for phenomena that exist in nature but yet we have not the tools or the imagination to find."

AMS will operate autonomously after it is connected to station power, beaming down a continuous stream of data for at least 10 years and possibly longer if the lab is funded past 2020.

Fincke, Feustel and Chamitoff, working in alternating two-man teams, plan to carry out four spacewalks--on May 20, 22, 25, and 27--to retrieve one experiment on materials science exposure and to install another; to refill the ammonia coolant reservoir in the station's far left-side solar array; to lubricate a solar array rotary joint; to install a robot arm attachment fitting on the Russian Zarya module; and to perform needed maintenance.

Endeavour is scheduled to land back at the Kennedy Space Center around 2:32 a.m. on Wednesday, June 1.

"It is an extremely complex mission," said shuttle Program Manager John Shannon. "It's a long period of time docked to the station, four EVAs, a tremendous amount of activity internal to the ISS, we're going to put a world-class experiment on the ISS and get it all hooked up.

"I think the missions we are executing now in complexity are the most difficult missions that not just NASA, but any nation has ever flown in space. And I would include Apollo in that discussion. I think the missions we do right now are more complicated than what we were doing even during the moon landings."

NASA attempted to launch Endeavour April 29, but the countdown was called off when a "string" of fuel line heaters used by one of the shuttle's three hydraulic power units failed to activate.

Engineers were unable to immediately determine what might have caused a short in a power switching box in the shuttle's aft engine compartment. Playing it safe, the box, called an aft load control assembly, was replaced, along with thermostats and associated wiring.

While that work was going on, engineers reviewing data from thermostat tests last June noticed a brief, previously undetected current spike. A close inspection of the thermostat in question revealed damaged insulation and an exposed conductor.

Engineers believe the exposed conductor likely triggered the short that prevented the heaters from powering up April 29. The repaired heater system worked normally during the countdown Monday and there were no obvious problems during the climb to space

Sony said today most PlayStation Network services are working now. For real, this time.

On Saturday, Sony announced that after almost four weeks its entire portfolio of online games, game forums, and Web sites would go back online. After service resumed in the Americas, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the Middle East, however, heavy traffic on the network caused it to be inaccessible again. Sony said it had to "turn the service off for 30 minutes in order to clear the queue" of too many password resets submitted at once.

But today most things are back to normal, said Sony Social Media Manager Jeff Rubenstein in a blog post. That includes signing in to PSN and Qriocity, the ability to reset passwords, playing online with the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable, and watching unexpired video rentals. Third-party services like Vudu, Hulu Plus, MLB.TV, and Netflix are accessible now, as well as Friends Lists, chat, trophies, in-game leaderboards, and PlayStation Home.

For those still waiting to receive their new passwords following the reset, Rubenstein asked customers to be patient.

"Please note that the very large number of requests has caused certain ISPs to slow the rate at which recipients get e-mails from us. Please be patient as the systems work through the backlog," he wrote.

The service had been offline for nearly four weeks after several of Sony's servers were attacked between April 17 and April 19, leading to the exposure of the personal data of more than 100 million customers who signed up for PlayStation Network, Qriocity, and Sony Online. The company has said repeatedly that there is no evidence that credit card information was stolen.

Sony said today that games that were scheduled to be released on PSN during the four-week period that the network was inaccessible will eventually be added. Instead of once per week as usual, Sony says it will post new games "multiple times per week" to catch up on the backlog of unreleased games once the PlayStation Store is back online. Sony has said previously it expects that to return by May 31.

The company had announced on May 5 a free identity theft monitoring program for customers, and said today that specific details of how to enroll are still forthcoming.

Also today Sony said PSN customers will get to choose a free video game to download. PS3 owners can choose from a list that includes Dead Nation, inFAMOUS, LittleBigPlanet, Super Stardust HD, and Wipeout HD + Fury, all titles that would normally cost between $10 and $20. PSP owners can choose one free game from among LittleBigPlanet (PSP), ModNation Racers, Pursuit Force, and Killzone Liberation. The offer lasts for 30 days once the PlayStation Store returns, but once downloaded the game can be kept forever.

Once the PlayStation Store comes online over an unspecified weekend there will be "a selection" of free movies to rent. Current PlayStation Plus subscribers will get 60 days free tacked on to the subscription they've already paid for, nonsubscribers get 30 days free of PS Plus. Music Unlimited by Qriocity Premium Trial subscribers will get 30 days free of premium service, Premium and Basic level subscribers will get 30 days free plus the same amount of time lost while the service was inaccessible. PlayStation Home will offer users 100 free virtual items as compensation.

The company said it is also working with the gamemakers behind popular titles SOCOM 4 and Call of Duty to offer in-game bonuses as compensation.

Rubenstein did not mention when Sony's home country of Japan and other Asian countries will resume PSN service.

A second U.S. Senate hearing over location privacy has been scheduled, a move intended to highlight how well companies notify their customers about when and how their whereabouts are stored and transmitted.

Following the U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing about mobile privacy last week, representatives from Apple and Google are expected to again appear in Washington, D.C., on Thursday to answer questions from U.S. lawmakers in a new hearing that will also include Facebook.

The topic of a hearing, put on by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Insurance, is "consumer privacy and protection in the mobile marketplace." It's being led by chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia).

On the docket to testify as part of a witness panel is Bret Taylor, the chief technology officer for Facebook; Catherine Novelli, Apple's VP of worldwide government affairs; and Alan Davidson, Google's director of public policy for the Americas. Joining them is Morgan Reed, the executive director of the Association for Competitive Technology, and Amy Guggenheim Shenkan, the president and COO of Common Sense Media. Ahead of that panel is David Vladeck, the director of the bureau of consumer protection for the Federal Trade Commission.

Notably missing is the U.S. Department of Justice, which made up part of the opening act in last week's hearing, as well as a representative from Microsoft, which also collects location information from Windows Mobile 7 devices with a unique ID. During last week's hearing, the Justice Department discussed forward-looking policy initiatives to require mobile providers to collect and store information about their customers, which is likely to be a topic at Thursday's hearing.

Location tracking has become a particularly high-profile area of interest for consumers and lawmakers alike. Last month, researchers highlighted a location database file that was being stored on iOS devices including the iPhone and iPad. The file contained information like nearby Wi-Fi hot spots and cellular towers, which Apple later came out to say was a smaller part of a private, crowd-sourced database it maintains and makes use of on its devices to help them more quickly locate where they are.

Along with describing what the database did and what its intentions were, Apple promised to secure the location data, fix a bug that kept it from being logged for more than a few days, and delete the entire database when users disabled location services--all things it did with a software update released a week later. The company has also promised to fully encrypt this database on the phone itself as part of the next major iOS software update.

Despite those actions, and an extended testimony from Apple vice president for software technology Bud Tribble, lawmakers like U.S. Rep. Edward Markey still have questions for Apple, particularly about who else can access its location database. In a letter to Markey last week, Bruce Sewell, Apple's general counsel and senior vice president of legal and government affairs, noted that the company was indeed sharing the anonymized location information with a partner, something Markey said he was following up with the company about. That topic could be broached once again this week.

Google, for its part, has similar crowd-sourced efforts on its Android platform that grabs Wi-Fi hot spots and MAC addresses, as well as location information to help source traffic information for its mapping service. That traffic component is also built into the Google Maps application that ships on Apple's iOS, which Apple hinted that it might be working to replace later on down the line with its own data.

As for Facebook, which is a newcomer since last week's hearing, location has become an increasingly important part of the service since it unveiled its "places" feature late last year. That feature lets users check themselves and their friends into locations like restaurants, movie theaters, and other businesses by using the Facebook app on their mobile phone. More recently location has played a part in the company's deals service, which offers coupons, discounts, and other rewards to users nearby participating businesses, competing with Groupon and other sites like it.

Still, Facebook would definitely seem the odd company out compared with Google and Apple, which both create the system software and marketplaces that allow customers to acquire applications on their phones. Late last year, a report suggested Facebook was working toward that goal itself, though that did not come to fruition. Nonetheless, Facebook is integrated into millions of mobile devices, both as an app and a way to sync contact information, which could end up being the focus of the Senate's inquiry.

Microsoft is trying to make it easier for iOS developers to bring their creations to its Windows Phone 7 platform.

A newly announced service called the iOS to Windows Phone 7 API mapping tool, acts as an interchange for developers to take applications they've already written for Apple's platform, and figure out ways to get the code work with Microsoft's standards.

"With this tool, iPhone developers can grab their apps, pick out the iOS API calls, and quickly look up the equivalent classes, methods and notification events in WP7," said Jean-Christophe Cimetiere, Microsoft's senior technical evangelist in a blog post announcing the tool. The database is also able to direct users to a directory of code samples, where they can learn to do some of the same things using Microsoft technologies.

"The code samples allow developers to quickly migrate short blobs of iOS code to the equivalent C# code. All WP7 API documentations are pulled in from the Silverlight, C# and XNA sources on MSDN," Cimetiere said.

Right now, Cimetiere says the translation tool is designed to work with just a handful of iOS APIs (application programming interfaces), with more to be added in the future. Even so, the two platforms will not line up "one to one" because of basic differences in user interface and architecture, the company said.

Along with this new service, Cimetiere mentioned that the company is working on a similar offering for Google's Android, though did not provide a date on its arrival.

Porting games and applications from one platform to another is nothing new, though providing first-party documentation to help get the job done is a tactical gesture on Microsoft's part. It's clearly in Microsoft's interest as the company nears the launch of the first wave of devices it's collaborated on with Nokia as part of the two companies' strategic partnership. A report released by market research firm Distimo earlier this week noted that Microsoft's application marketplace is on track to be larger than Nokia's Ovi store and BlackBerry App World in less than a year since its launch, based on current growth rates