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The company used their solid propellant Minotaur I rocket to place the payloads into a low Earth orbit with a liftoff from Pad-0B at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia occurring on Tuesday, June 15 at 13:35 UTC (09:35 EDT). Due to the classified nature of the launch, nothing is publicly known about the payloads. However, the mass must be less than 580 kg, which is the max payload capacity of the Minotaur I. In keeping with NRO tradition, the mission patch consists of a whimsical piece of artwork, a mission motto, and some clues as to the...

Once in a while, Chris Matthews deviates from the extreme liberalism that has captured the left, exemplified by the abolish-ICE talk so in vogue among liberals. On Monday evening's Hardball, Matthews took a surprisingly firm stance on immigration, actually siding more with Adolfo Franco of the RNC than with Neera Tanden, head of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress.Noting that there are "two-thirds of a billion" people living in poverty in South America who would like to emigrate to the United States, Matthews acknowledged that "at some point, there's going to have to be enforcement."Get the rest of the story...

The tea party, he says, consists of "people who are angry and upset at government—and I agree with them." But "I think, honestly, many of them have been misled. . . . They've been told the reason we can't get to better outcomes than we've gotten is not because the Democrats control the Senate and the White House but because Republicans have been insufficiently feisty. Well, that's just not true, and I think that the folks that I have difficulty with are the leaders of some of these groups who basically mislead them for profit. . . . They raise...

If a recently leaked document is any indication, the US National Security Agency -- or its UK counterpart -- appears to have put on a Google suit to gather intelligence. CNET got a "no comment" from the NSA in response to our request for more information.

Why all the monitoring when you're a good boy/girl,  following TOS...  Well, here's your answer: likely it wasn't Google at all, rather highly-politicized NSA snoops, hiding in the grass like the venomous snakes they are: __________________________________________________________ ...the US National Security Agency had apparently impersonated Google on at least one occasion to gather data on people.... Brazilian site Fantastico obtained and published a document leaked by Edward Snowden, which diagrams how a "man in the middle attack" involving Google was apparently carried out. A technique commonly used by hackers, a MITM attack involves using a fake security certificate to pose as a...

Excerpt - REDMOND, Wash. -- Jim Allchin, a senior Microsoft Corp. executive, walked into Bill Gates's office here one day in July last year to deliver a bombshell about the next generation of Microsoft Windows. "It's not going to work," Mr. Allchin says he told the Microsoft chairman. The new version, code-named Longhorn, was so complex its writers would never be able to make it run properly. The news got even worse: Longhorn was irredeemable because Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Throughout its history, Microsoft had let thousands of programmers each produce their...

Microsoft has cancelled one of the most anticipated features in its next Windows operating system, code-named Vista, which is slated for release next year. Microsoft previously planned to ship the WinFS file system shortly after Windows Vista. In a weblog entry on Friday, however, Quentin Clark -- an executive of the project -- wrote that WinFS would not ship separately, and that some of the feature will be included in a later product. Investors considered WinFS the crucial feature that would encourage upgrades to Vista when Microsoft separated the technologies in 2004 in order to complete Vista by 2006, according...