Perhaps they kept them around for initializing more fobs if necessary without having to transfer the root key again. Granted, it would probably be better to use a new root key and have a system support multiple, but then you have a key distribution problem where you need to distribute another key as well. It might not have been the most secure choice, but it seems it could have a lot of benefits for the sake of convenience if they thought they had it protected enough. Everything in security is about trade offs of usability versus security. You may not agree with where they drew the line and hind sight is always 20/20, but it still doesn't make it a wrong choice necessarily.
I'm way more annoyed with the lack of good information about the nature of the data compromised than I am about the fact the breach was able to happen.
They are offering transaction monitoring to financial providers. The difference is distribution of the tokens. The tokens themselves are probably pretty cheap, but securely distributing millions of tokens to remotely located users is a non-trivial task with a lot of additional cost. Also, distributing new tokens doesn't gain a lot over monitoring in that case. Unless you know the particular id of the token in use by a given user, you would have to guess from the pool of tokens used by that organization. Monitoring the transactions for valid values for the wrong token on the wrong user would quickly detect a breach and let the system lock down.
"Yes they are, that would be politicians and Sony's lobbyists making them on Sony's behalf." Fixed that for you. (Also some of it is really them inventing their own unique ways of abusing consumers.) If Sony and other companies like them were not pushing for this kind of stuff, it wouldn't be happening. That said, Sony as a whole is a very large organization, so I tend to only ignore the parts of the organization that I find particularly bad at the time. I don't see any reason to alter my TV or optical drive buying habits when it's the PS3 or music group being a tool. Hurting the bottom line of a particular group for the behavior of that group is at least as effective if not more so than a blanket boycott (since it makes that group look bad within Sony) and it has a whole lot less impact on me than writing off a major technology manufacturer entirely.
It is also worth pointing out that most rooting methods on Android seem to stay in until they are exploited by malware and then are rapidly removed. A perfect example is the rageagainstthecage vulnerability with elevation of a debugging connection that was only fixed after the Market malware issue.
Yes, some features on Android do require rooting, but it is possible to run non-elevated applications that are not distributed through Google's market. Rooting is also left more up to the carrier and device manufacturer. Carriers like to have devices locked, but some devices are rooted by default. Android as a whole doesn't put a lot of effort in to protecting or trying to break root and can actually always be rooted (as far as I know) through ODIN or similar flashing. The culture of carriers makes this something that you don't see clearly unless you get in to the nitty gritty details, but in general, it is far easier, with fewer barriers or attempts to break rooting on Android vs jail breaking on an iPhone. Also, the level of customization you can do to an Android device after rooting is completely different from the level of changes you can make to an iPhone. Jailbreaking may let you run other apps and have more device permissions for those apps, but as far as I know you can't then put other versions of the OS or other builds on (particularly seeing as iOS itself isn't open for their to be other builds of it.)
My perception of Apple has always been "you will do things our way whether you like it or not, because really, why would you want to do things any other way, cause we're Apple, savy." Where as Android's philosophy just feels like it is much more about trying to make a device for consumers and giving them control over their device to whatever level is appropriate for them.
The law reads that Apple can't do anything to people for jailbreaking their phones and they don't want to open themselves up to lawsuits, but their entire business model depends on iTunes sales. It is like licensing fees for video games. Their business model is to charge both the content creators and the consumers for access to the same hardware which they want to control. They make it as difficult as possible to do and it is a philosophy I hate. I also generally buy video games for PC whenever possible for the same reason.
That's kind of what this is talking about though. In the case of a 40+ person MMO guild, how many of the people do you actually regularly talk to outside of a group setting? They are talking about the number of people you can have regular meaningful contact with. At their peaks, I was a leader in a WoW guild with about 80 people and a leader in a Planetside Alliance with about 200, but I didn't actually have regular meaningful 1 on 1 discussions with more than 5 or 10 of them tops, in either situation. That's the nice thing about groups, they let you interact with multiple people at the same time and don't take up these slots directly, but they also don't result in the same kind of depth of relationship as 1 on 1 discussions.
Some of us don't believe we should have to fight our device manufacturer to be able to use it. It is for primarily this reason I will never buy or recommend an iPhone or iPad.
I can echo a lot of what you're saying too. I'm still a subscriber, but only because I have a core of people I've been playing with for the last 5 years. If I lost that core, I'm not sure I'd keep playing. The PVP stuff doesn't really effect me as I've never been a fan of overkill victories or random chance victories (those are your only two options in any game like WoW since either your skill lets you destroy the opponent or if you are close in skill, it comes down to pure random numbers.) Phasing to be with the lowest member of your group and rating players like XBox Live would definitely go a long way towards fixing the issues.
Personally, I like the game flow in general and the raids a lot better in Cataclysm, it is just too bad that they haven't fully thought through the impact of some of the features and taken the necessary steps to counteract the drawbacks.
The super nodes are themselves P2P. Yes, it is possible for someone to connect and leach off the P2P network by refusing to be a supernode (bit torrent equivalent would be refusing to share any fragments or any locations of those fragments), however any client could also behave as a true P2P node participating in a distributed network topology. I'm really not sure how better to describe it as I do not think you have a solid understanding of what a "supernode" really is in Skype's network or how it is the network actually operates, but the fact is the network is mesh growing and any client can, if they want to, participate in the network, it just isn't mandatory as part of the Skype protocol and normally will limit itself. This limitation causes the ability of the network to collapse, but it does not make it not P2P, it simply makes it a P2P protocol that is susceptible to being overloaded. You can debate the merits or demerits of the protocol design all you want, but it is irrefutably a P2P network in every sense of the term. At best you can only argue that not all clients participate in the P2P network. You could argue that non-participatory clients are accessing a P2P backbone as centralized clients, but that argument really fails when any of those nodes could be tapped to be supernodes (baring specific technical measures on their local network to prevent the function) This can be seen by the fact the only way to actually alter the network is to deploy new client software so that client nodes will update their behavior.
Sorry, I screwed up my bit torrent terminology by some definitions. Yes, you could have no seeds (full file), but if you don't have people sharing fragments and truly leaching by only grabbing fragments, then bit torrent would not work either. I would agree with your assessment of clients that access supernodes and don't act as super nodes, they are light clients and not behaving in a P2P manner, but those super nodes are behaving in a P2P manner and the network will build itself out again if the supernodes don't shutdown (and actually the network would stay minimally available if the supernodes didn't have limits either). This is why the network rebuild approach had been to deploy a bunch of altered supernodes that don't have the resource consumptions caps in place.
You can draw fault at the light clients or the resource consumption management putting faults in to the system, but it is still a P2P system.
No, because the supernodes can be anywhere and can not be centrally managed, it is P2P. Think of it like a bit torrent network with too many leachers and not enough seeders. Are you going to claim that torrents are not P2P because they require people to run seeds? Any P2P system needs some type of command and control or it can not function. When a new node joins the network, it must be able to discover the rest of the network. Any user could be a supernode if they wanted to be, Skype just allows you to behave as a leach in a lite mode where you will never be a supernode. Perhaps you should learn what P2P is and how it actually operates before you incorrectly critique an industry professional trying to give you a simplified explanation. Skype is just about as P2P as it gets. P2P systems are more prone to failure than centralized if they are designed to require full network awareness since problems spread with no central means to fix it. (The last time it went down, the only way to get it back up was running a bunch of modified supernodes that would break the normal supernode rules so as to get other users back up and running and in supernode mode without getting overloaded.) A supernode is simply a client that has good awareness of the network by having been around long enough to have an up to date view of the topolology that hasn't already been over utilized by the configuration built in to the local Skype client.
They explained this after the last outage if you read their blog. Basically they have a defensive measure in their P2P system to prevent client machines from getting overworked and burning through bandwidth, so after a supernode hits a certain level of use, it shuts down for a period. This increases the load on other super nodes which then shut down, etc, etc until it results in a waterfall collapse of the network because there are too many clients and not enough coordinators. Since new clients can't reach a supernode (coordinator in my terms), they can not connect to the network and once enough super nodes go down, the network fractures and collapses. That's always been the problem with decentralized systems, they can only deal with so much change before they break. Some break more gracefully in to sub-networks to isolate themselves, but in the case of Skype, that doesn't really make sense. Instead they designed it to all work or all break. To some extent it will break gracefully by not allowing new connections, but some situations still will break it regardless.
Put another way, if you don't know why you need a workstation graphics card, you probably don't need one. Particularly since the OpenGL support has gotten much better in both ATI and Nvidia cards as of late.
Probably not worth it as X-Plane would still be optimized geometries. In workstation graphics, you have far weirder, less optimal situations that you encounter while working on modeling and such before optimizations are applied. Both NVidia and ATI have gotten better at having solid OpenGL native support in their gamer cards. As a general rule of thumb, if you don't know why you need a workstation graphics card, you don't need a workstation graphics card.
At that point you are really kind of comparing apples and oranges. If the housing market was such that it was more expensive for equivalent properties to buy than it was to rent after factoring in how much interest goes to the bank, then yes, renting would be better, but in my experience I've never found a situation where that is the case. Basically your total housing cost - whatever principal your paying towards the house needs to be higher than the cost of renting an identical property for renting to be a better deal. If you can find that, then yes, you would want to rent and save on your own until you could purchase outright (or until the above equation returns in your favor.)
If Netflix is 30% of Internet content and an average user uses 40GB of bandwidth for NetFlix, then that users overall bandwidth should be about 134GB a month. I'm not sure how a limit of 150GB to 250GB isn't at least covering average use. It might have been an underestimate that only 2% would be effected, but that also largely depends on what the Netflix usage data looks like in terms of distribution.
I would never want to read from a tablet, but I'm starting to see a pretty high number of e-ink devices popping up around me. (Personally, I am an extremely early adopter of e-ink. Followed the tech from it's first announcement and purchased the first Sony e-Reader that had the technology.) I've always felt that e-ink is the future of e-books and don't really expect tablets to have much staying power for e-book reading as they never caught on despite the availability of similar devices for decades. (Emitted light displays simply are not conducive to reading for long periods of time. Too much eye strain.)
Hmm, so if I can put $850 a month in to renting or $850 a month into paying a mortgage, you are saying putting the $850 into rent is better how? I'm giving my $850 away as opposed to getting something back for it (even if it is only $400 after the bank takes their share). How exactly does your understanding of economics work?
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I was not saying that an atheist would not believe in a god if one could be rationally proven, just as I would be willing to change my beliefs if someone was to rationally prove I was wrong. I was simply stating that to me, an atheist believes that there is no god without proof either way. I had no intent of implying that they would be irrational if proven incorrect. (Though I think that whole notion is irrelevant as I do not believe it is possible to rationally prove or disprove the existence of a god as even the definition of a god is subjective vs a non-godly ultra-powerful/advanced being.)
My understanding is that the belief you describe is agnosticism. We are effectively just talking semantics at this point, but I wouldn't group what you view as a religion or as a belief beyond the belief that you don't see sufficient evidence of any particular god to believe in them. (Truly at it's most basic level, not believing in someone is the belief that they don't exist, again without evidence, but I would agree that simply saying you haven't seen enough evidence to support the existence of any particular god is perfectly rational as it is a "passive" belief.) Atheism as a statement "there is no god" is as active of a belief as claiming there is any one (or more) true gods. I guess that is where I see the line between agnostic and atheist. An agnostic says "I do not believe in any god" or "I do not believe there is enough evidence to find a god to my satisfaction." An atheist says "I believe that there is no god. (higher power, etc)"
I agree with most of what you said, but would argue that an atheist who says they do not believe there is a god because they have not seen evidence of one but are open to the idea are not really truly atheists, but rather agnostics. I would agree that any particular theism requires more assumptions, but it becomes a whole different philosophical debate over what constitutes rationality in philosophy. One could argue that personal experiences could make it more rational to believe there is a particular god if your experiences seem to be in line with it, but because it is based on belief and philosophy and not science and is not measurable, there is no real way to determine which is more rational. (Though clearly blind adherence to any view is not rational.)
Ironically, my view of the Christian God actually runs fairly close to yours with exception that I think he is interested and involved, but I see God in the universe and the laws thereof and really view the Biblical version of hell as simply being the removal of God from maintaining anything. (A world with none of what we generally see as order in the universe and the people going there being given what they want (to be on their own independent from God.) And heaven being a world free of entropy and decay, working in perfect balance. It gets a little more complicated than that, but at it's simplest I've found that that view seems to be consistent with Biblical theology.
Atheism isn't a religion so much as a belief. A religion is more of an organization with a collection of beliefs. Atheism is a singular belief (there is and can not be a god) without a formal organization. To say that atheism is a religion is just as inaccurate as saying that atheism is purely rational or scientific. (For full disclosure, I am a Christian.)
I read about this years ago. How is this news? It's a cool idea that I find works well in some situations, but you wouldn't want to use it everywhere. I do think it is a cool technology though.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps they kept them around for initializing more fobs if necessary without having to transfer the root key again. Granted, it would probably be better to use a new root key and have a system support multiple, but then you have a key distribution problem where you need to distribute another key as well. It might not have been the most secure choice, but it seems it could have a lot of benefits for the sake of convenience if they thought they had it protected enough. Everything in security is about trade offs of usability versus security. You may not agree with where they drew the line and hind sight is always 20/20, but it still doesn't make it a wrong choice necessarily.
I'm way more annoyed with the lack of good information about the nature of the data compromised than I am about the fact the breach was able to happen.
They are offering transaction monitoring to financial providers. The difference is distribution of the tokens. The tokens themselves are probably pretty cheap, but securely distributing millions of tokens to remotely located users is a non-trivial task with a lot of additional cost. Also, distributing new tokens doesn't gain a lot over monitoring in that case. Unless you know the particular id of the token in use by a given user, you would have to guess from the pool of tokens used by that organization. Monitoring the transactions for valid values for the wrong token on the wrong user would quickly detect a breach and let the system lock down.
"Yes they are, that would be politicians and Sony's lobbyists making them on Sony's behalf." Fixed that for you. (Also some of it is really them inventing their own unique ways of abusing consumers.) If Sony and other companies like them were not pushing for this kind of stuff, it wouldn't be happening. That said, Sony as a whole is a very large organization, so I tend to only ignore the parts of the organization that I find particularly bad at the time. I don't see any reason to alter my TV or optical drive buying habits when it's the PS3 or music group being a tool. Hurting the bottom line of a particular group for the behavior of that group is at least as effective if not more so than a blanket boycott (since it makes that group look bad within Sony) and it has a whole lot less impact on me than writing off a major technology manufacturer entirely.
It is also worth pointing out that most rooting methods on Android seem to stay in until they are exploited by malware and then are rapidly removed. A perfect example is the rageagainstthecage vulnerability with elevation of a debugging connection that was only fixed after the Market malware issue.
Yes, some features on Android do require rooting, but it is possible to run non-elevated applications that are not distributed through Google's market. Rooting is also left more up to the carrier and device manufacturer. Carriers like to have devices locked, but some devices are rooted by default. Android as a whole doesn't put a lot of effort in to protecting or trying to break root and can actually always be rooted (as far as I know) through ODIN or similar flashing. The culture of carriers makes this something that you don't see clearly unless you get in to the nitty gritty details, but in general, it is far easier, with fewer barriers or attempts to break rooting on Android vs jail breaking on an iPhone. Also, the level of customization you can do to an Android device after rooting is completely different from the level of changes you can make to an iPhone. Jailbreaking may let you run other apps and have more device permissions for those apps, but as far as I know you can't then put other versions of the OS or other builds on (particularly seeing as iOS itself isn't open for their to be other builds of it.)
My perception of Apple has always been "you will do things our way whether you like it or not, because really, why would you want to do things any other way, cause we're Apple, savy." Where as Android's philosophy just feels like it is much more about trying to make a device for consumers and giving them control over their device to whatever level is appropriate for them.
The law reads that Apple can't do anything to people for jailbreaking their phones and they don't want to open themselves up to lawsuits, but their entire business model depends on iTunes sales. It is like licensing fees for video games. Their business model is to charge both the content creators and the consumers for access to the same hardware which they want to control. They make it as difficult as possible to do and it is a philosophy I hate. I also generally buy video games for PC whenever possible for the same reason.
That's kind of what this is talking about though. In the case of a 40+ person MMO guild, how many of the people do you actually regularly talk to outside of a group setting? They are talking about the number of people you can have regular meaningful contact with. At their peaks, I was a leader in a WoW guild with about 80 people and a leader in a Planetside Alliance with about 200, but I didn't actually have regular meaningful 1 on 1 discussions with more than 5 or 10 of them tops, in either situation. That's the nice thing about groups, they let you interact with multiple people at the same time and don't take up these slots directly, but they also don't result in the same kind of depth of relationship as 1 on 1 discussions.
Some of us don't believe we should have to fight our device manufacturer to be able to use it. It is for primarily this reason I will never buy or recommend an iPhone or iPad.
I can echo a lot of what you're saying too. I'm still a subscriber, but only because I have a core of people I've been playing with for the last 5 years. If I lost that core, I'm not sure I'd keep playing. The PVP stuff doesn't really effect me as I've never been a fan of overkill victories or random chance victories (those are your only two options in any game like WoW since either your skill lets you destroy the opponent or if you are close in skill, it comes down to pure random numbers.) Phasing to be with the lowest member of your group and rating players like XBox Live would definitely go a long way towards fixing the issues.
Personally, I like the game flow in general and the raids a lot better in Cataclysm, it is just too bad that they haven't fully thought through the impact of some of the features and taken the necessary steps to counteract the drawbacks.
The super nodes are themselves P2P. Yes, it is possible for someone to connect and leach off the P2P network by refusing to be a supernode (bit torrent equivalent would be refusing to share any fragments or any locations of those fragments), however any client could also behave as a true P2P node participating in a distributed network topology. I'm really not sure how better to describe it as I do not think you have a solid understanding of what a "supernode" really is in Skype's network or how it is the network actually operates, but the fact is the network is mesh growing and any client can, if they want to, participate in the network, it just isn't mandatory as part of the Skype protocol and normally will limit itself. This limitation causes the ability of the network to collapse, but it does not make it not P2P, it simply makes it a P2P protocol that is susceptible to being overloaded. You can debate the merits or demerits of the protocol design all you want, but it is irrefutably a P2P network in every sense of the term. At best you can only argue that not all clients participate in the P2P network. You could argue that non-participatory clients are accessing a P2P backbone as centralized clients, but that argument really fails when any of those nodes could be tapped to be supernodes (baring specific technical measures on their local network to prevent the function) This can be seen by the fact the only way to actually alter the network is to deploy new client software so that client nodes will update their behavior.
Sorry, I screwed up my bit torrent terminology by some definitions. Yes, you could have no seeds (full file), but if you don't have people sharing fragments and truly leaching by only grabbing fragments, then bit torrent would not work either. I would agree with your assessment of clients that access supernodes and don't act as super nodes, they are light clients and not behaving in a P2P manner, but those super nodes are behaving in a P2P manner and the network will build itself out again if the supernodes don't shutdown (and actually the network would stay minimally available if the supernodes didn't have limits either). This is why the network rebuild approach had been to deploy a bunch of altered supernodes that don't have the resource consumptions caps in place.
You can draw fault at the light clients or the resource consumption management putting faults in to the system, but it is still a P2P system.
Start saving your bottle caps now...
No, because the supernodes can be anywhere and can not be centrally managed, it is P2P. Think of it like a bit torrent network with too many leachers and not enough seeders. Are you going to claim that torrents are not P2P because they require people to run seeds? Any P2P system needs some type of command and control or it can not function. When a new node joins the network, it must be able to discover the rest of the network. Any user could be a supernode if they wanted to be, Skype just allows you to behave as a leach in a lite mode where you will never be a supernode. Perhaps you should learn what P2P is and how it actually operates before you incorrectly critique an industry professional trying to give you a simplified explanation. Skype is just about as P2P as it gets. P2P systems are more prone to failure than centralized if they are designed to require full network awareness since problems spread with no central means to fix it. (The last time it went down, the only way to get it back up was running a bunch of modified supernodes that would break the normal supernode rules so as to get other users back up and running and in supernode mode without getting overloaded.) A supernode is simply a client that has good awareness of the network by having been around long enough to have an up to date view of the topolology that hasn't already been over utilized by the configuration built in to the local Skype client.
They explained this after the last outage if you read their blog. Basically they have a defensive measure in their P2P system to prevent client machines from getting overworked and burning through bandwidth, so after a supernode hits a certain level of use, it shuts down for a period. This increases the load on other super nodes which then shut down, etc, etc until it results in a waterfall collapse of the network because there are too many clients and not enough coordinators. Since new clients can't reach a supernode (coordinator in my terms), they can not connect to the network and once enough super nodes go down, the network fractures and collapses. That's always been the problem with decentralized systems, they can only deal with so much change before they break. Some break more gracefully in to sub-networks to isolate themselves, but in the case of Skype, that doesn't really make sense. Instead they designed it to all work or all break. To some extent it will break gracefully by not allowing new connections, but some situations still will break it regardless.
Put another way, if you don't know why you need a workstation graphics card, you probably don't need one. Particularly since the OpenGL support has gotten much better in both ATI and Nvidia cards as of late.
Probably not worth it as X-Plane would still be optimized geometries. In workstation graphics, you have far weirder, less optimal situations that you encounter while working on modeling and such before optimizations are applied. Both NVidia and ATI have gotten better at having solid OpenGL native support in their gamer cards. As a general rule of thumb, if you don't know why you need a workstation graphics card, you don't need a workstation graphics card.
At that point you are really kind of comparing apples and oranges. If the housing market was such that it was more expensive for equivalent properties to buy than it was to rent after factoring in how much interest goes to the bank, then yes, renting would be better, but in my experience I've never found a situation where that is the case. Basically your total housing cost - whatever principal your paying towards the house needs to be higher than the cost of renting an identical property for renting to be a better deal. If you can find that, then yes, you would want to rent and save on your own until you could purchase outright (or until the above equation returns in your favor.)
If Netflix is 30% of Internet content and an average user uses 40GB of bandwidth for NetFlix, then that users overall bandwidth should be about 134GB a month. I'm not sure how a limit of 150GB to 250GB isn't at least covering average use. It might have been an underestimate that only 2% would be effected, but that also largely depends on what the Netflix usage data looks like in terms of distribution.
I would never want to read from a tablet, but I'm starting to see a pretty high number of e-ink devices popping up around me. (Personally, I am an extremely early adopter of e-ink. Followed the tech from it's first announcement and purchased the first Sony e-Reader that had the technology.) I've always felt that e-ink is the future of e-books and don't really expect tablets to have much staying power for e-book reading as they never caught on despite the availability of similar devices for decades. (Emitted light displays simply are not conducive to reading for long periods of time. Too much eye strain.)
Hmm, so if I can put $850 a month in to renting or $850 a month into paying a mortgage, you are saying putting the $850 into rent is better how? I'm giving my $850 away as opposed to getting something back for it (even if it is only $400 after the bank takes their share). How exactly does your understanding of economics work?
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I was not saying that an atheist would not believe in a god if one could be rationally proven, just as I would be willing to change my beliefs if someone was to rationally prove I was wrong. I was simply stating that to me, an atheist believes that there is no god without proof either way. I had no intent of implying that they would be irrational if proven incorrect. (Though I think that whole notion is irrelevant as I do not believe it is possible to rationally prove or disprove the existence of a god as even the definition of a god is subjective vs a non-godly ultra-powerful/advanced being.)
My understanding is that the belief you describe is agnosticism. We are effectively just talking semantics at this point, but I wouldn't group what you view as a religion or as a belief beyond the belief that you don't see sufficient evidence of any particular god to believe in them. (Truly at it's most basic level, not believing in someone is the belief that they don't exist, again without evidence, but I would agree that simply saying you haven't seen enough evidence to support the existence of any particular god is perfectly rational as it is a "passive" belief.) Atheism as a statement "there is no god" is as active of a belief as claiming there is any one (or more) true gods. I guess that is where I see the line between agnostic and atheist. An agnostic says "I do not believe in any god" or "I do not believe there is enough evidence to find a god to my satisfaction." An atheist says "I believe that there is no god. (higher power, etc)"
I agree with most of what you said, but would argue that an atheist who says they do not believe there is a god because they have not seen evidence of one but are open to the idea are not really truly atheists, but rather agnostics. I would agree that any particular theism requires more assumptions, but it becomes a whole different philosophical debate over what constitutes rationality in philosophy. One could argue that personal experiences could make it more rational to believe there is a particular god if your experiences seem to be in line with it, but because it is based on belief and philosophy and not science and is not measurable, there is no real way to determine which is more rational. (Though clearly blind adherence to any view is not rational.)
Ironically, my view of the Christian God actually runs fairly close to yours with exception that I think he is interested and involved, but I see God in the universe and the laws thereof and really view the Biblical version of hell as simply being the removal of God from maintaining anything. (A world with none of what we generally see as order in the universe and the people going there being given what they want (to be on their own independent from God.) And heaven being a world free of entropy and decay, working in perfect balance. It gets a little more complicated than that, but at it's simplest I've found that that view seems to be consistent with Biblical theology.
Atheism isn't a religion so much as a belief. A religion is more of an organization with a collection of beliefs. Atheism is a singular belief (there is and can not be a god) without a formal organization. To say that atheism is a religion is just as inaccurate as saying that atheism is purely rational or scientific. (For full disclosure, I am a Christian.)
I read about this years ago. How is this news? It's a cool idea that I find works well in some situations, but you wouldn't want to use it everywhere. I do think it is a cool technology though.