I hate to be a party pooper, but you're really adding credence to the old dog "Libertarians are Anarchists who want just enough government to police their slaves".
Now imagine 3-4 computers in the house, each one with someone seperately watching netflix or Hulu....
*looks around his house* I don't need to imagine it, that's what I have right now. I'm also a Time Warner customer, albeit in another market. My cable television experience from them was horrible, but even after canceling that my internet connection has been fine, I hit 1 MB/s (that's a big B) for the first time the other day. I live in the Charlotte market, and so far I haven't seen any shenanigans, but the little fiasco in Greensboro freaked me out a bit.
I hope you Austin people really squeeze their wallet over this so that the rest of us don't have to suffer with you. Hit them hard and change their minds, for all of our sakes.
I first installed an early version of slackware, back in 95 or so. I don't quite remember how many floppies it was, but a couple friends and I were able to split the downloads up between us. One boot floppy, one root floppy and a significant number of installation floppies (that we soon learned to copy to the HD before installing). We got this through a hole in the state library system's gopher access number.
I spent a large number of sleepless nights chatting on the 50 person(!) BBSs, facinated by the ability to chat with so many people at once instead of the one or two that I could with the better set-up local dialup BBSs. A little later I learned about ytalk and got to have more "personal" (wink wink, nudge nudge) chats with 1 or 2 people at a time again.:-D
Eventually, I met my wife on the Illinois Institute of Technology computer club's BBS, shadow. Yep, that annoying sound a modem makes was "the handshake o' love" to me.
Now excuse me while I go see if there are any kids on my lawn.
Do you have any financial data from Stardock to back that up? Of course not, because Stardock is making money hand over fist.
Cries proclaiming the death of media companies (especially the recording and film industries) would be far more convincing if I didn't keep hearing the words "record profits" bandied about whenever a story doesn't mention piracy.
The PC gaming industry as a whole MAY be the exception to this, but Stardock isn't.
In addition, I'd say to do a nice clean install of Windows on the VM, install all the programs she needs from work and save a backup of that file. Set up a shared directory tree between the host and virtual OSs and make sure she saves her important work data to that directory tree.
If you do that then you can either let her boot her VM until the Windows craps out then delete it and restore from the backup copy, or delete the VM image after she shuts down Windows and copy-from-backup whenever she starts it.
I just wanted to say that I agree with you fully and find your style of writing to be easily accessible and quite clear. I'd also like to mention that if you substitute "North Carolina" for "Texas" in your last paragraph, that paragraph could have come right from my own autobiography.:-D
More topical though, I'd like to say that I -DID- see the news reporting that the Democrats were supporting the Bush wiretapping agenda, but it was called "bipartisanship" and "courage" at the time.
I hate to link to another post of mine in another thread, but I think it's appropriate here. I very much DO believe in intangible, imaginary friends, and frankly find myself MORE enlightened for trusting in my Gods to deliver me to the truth.
Some people call me wacko for that, but those people also invariably bask in the works my Gods have allowed to be through Their Divine Influence. Personally, I find it hypocritical, but not blasphemous. I would guess that blasphemy is hard to actually pull off in my religion, but I think it could be possible, if you try hard enough.
Hey, I'm just sayin, it's not as crazy as it sounds, when it's obviously true.
This thread is all about how they got his IP in the first place. They couldn't have arranged a special package for his IP in order to find out what his IP was.
Your problem is that you believe the game to be contained in the box (an idea that the OP was trying specifically to nullify). If you consider the server-side backend to be a part of the product, and it is, then there is nothing "false" about the delay imposed. One part of a multi-part product being in place does not magically make the other part(s) irrelevant. The "ahead of time" you chose to put in quotes is the date the server portion would be in place. There is nothing at all twisted about that.
You seem like a reasonably bright person, (though not as bright as your rude dismissals indicate you think you are) this concept isn't that hard. The game is a complete package, client and server, without the server, there is no complete game and therefore Gamestop was selling something that didn't technically exist at that point. Because there DID exist the physical portion of the game many people who couldn't see the difference (you're on slashdot so I'll assume you're not one of those people) thought that they actually had a working game.
Actually, having just done this a couple weeks ago, I can tell you that at least in my case they send you a little booklet for each TV that you use and you're supposed to write down what you watch on that TV.
Interestingly, I don't have cable (television, I do get my internet access from Time Warner over a coax cable), I don't have satellite TV, and I don't watch OTA broadcasts. I DO however watch movies and television shows via my internet connection. The interesting part is that I told the nice lady who called and asked me about being a Nielsen family all of this and she actually sounded excited. She informed me that they really wanted some perspective on the viewing habits of people who do that, but for some reason (I suspect it has to do with Nielsen's mission statement) only if they pipe the video to a TV to watch it. I do exactly that in 3 rooms of my house, so they sent me the packets.
I wonder how Thundercats and He-Man are going to enjoy their ratings boosts... The late, great George Carlin is going to be highly rated this month too, as well as some online-only media outlets that probably have never seen a rating point.
The fact that they were highly interested in my survey suggests to me that some media companies see the writing on the wall, and want accurate information about my viewing habits in spite of the fact that they keep screaming that I'm killing them by watching online content exclusively. A small critique I have is that if they're going to start recording activities of people who use their TV like I do, they're going to have to make the box for you to write the channel name into bigger, so I can properly fit a URL into it.
Finally, I'd like to say that I don't know how large of a sample they take any given week, but I hope it's low enough that a media company or two takes notice that someone out there is seriously using sites like Hulu and netflix, and considers expanding the content available via such channels.
Don't just blow me off as foolish, back up your claims or withdraw them. I asked a simple question and instead of either answering it or properly blowing me off by ignoring it you chose snide derision. Well, I -DO- get it, and your factless (and tactless) claim notwithstanding, the OP seems to as well.
I believe it was a wonderful thing precisely due to your last point. People were property at the time, the EP served to end that state of affairs in the eyes of the law, with the full backing of the government. In the end, the South was forced to comply with its edict, in my opinion a very good thing. Treating people as property because it can be justified as the natural state of things is, well, more wrong than the government forcing someone to give up people that they consider property.
You say they've been "bitten" by piracy, but I'm of the opinion that Stardock in particular would not be 1/10th the company it is now if not for their DRM stance.
Some people aren't going to want to hear this, other people will point at this for justification for far and away more than it implies, but Stardock boomed BECAUSE of piracy. it went like this: Stardock games are easy to pirate, so people do. Pirates played their free games, and talked about them to their friends. A certain percentage of these friends wanted to play too, and acquired the games somehow. Some (maybe most) of these people downloaded the game, but some of them bought it. Some people that would have never heard of this tiny company bought games from them due to the piracy of their friends. In fact, enough people bought games from them that they grew into a midsized gaming company, complete with fancy amenities for executives and everything.
Is it fair to say this wouldn't have happened without them being so copyfriendly (or at least copyneutral)? No, but I fully believe (especially in this particular case) that it's fair to say that it wouldn't have happened anywhere close to as quickly as it did.
I'm not one to make personal anecdotes a statistical analysis, but I wouldn't have bought that game that looked like a Masters of Orion or Civilization knock off, but I might (and did) download it to check it out at no cost. I WOULD (and did) buy the excellent game that is Galactic Civilizations 2. That's exactly one sale gained DUE to piracy. Not much in the way of a sample size, but it's a datum to ad to the pile.
Good commercial games get bought, and they always will. Piracy will A) take some sales from people that would have paid, B) let some people who wouldn't have paid play AND C) get some people who wouldn't have paid due to sheer lack of information (either about the game itself or its quality) to pay for the game. The actual breakdown of those numbers can only be done on a case-by-case basis, and in THIS case, I would guess that category C greatly offsets or even exceeds A.
I'll give you 3 that jumped into my head in less than 1 second, I've already thought of more, but these 3 are pretty convincing to me (as well as being examples from my own government).
1: Emancipation Proclamation 2: Eisenhower Interstate System 3: ARPANet.
IMHO by the time Voyager hit the screen the whole Star Trek franchise had been run through the commercialization mill back and forth so many times that whatever was the original spirit of the show was completely replaced by a profit motive. I'm not claiming that The Original Series wasn't created to make money, I'm just saying that it was about more than that, closer to "art" than to "product". When you have scenes with Starfleet officers sitting in front of personal piles of gold-pressed latinum, something has been lost in translation. The very prevalence of gold-pressed latinum on the show demonstrated (to me at least) that the newer authors had forgotten how Federation economics worked.
Either that or a legitimate reason why AT LEAST one customer (make that 2, Starforce ate one of my DVD burners, now I crack software that I've bought, not that I buy very many games anymore (apt-get is sufficient for me)) will be hesitant to buy anything with DRM on it.
Yeah, go with post-hoc fallacy, that'll make the sales numbers look better somehow. *shakes head*
I had a problem with my Wii too (sounds like something I should be saying to my doctor, but I digress), the laser got dirty or something and stopped playing Super Smash Bros Brawl (because it's 2 layer, I think). After searching on the internet for likely causes I discovered that it's a fairly common problem. Well, it's what USED to be called a "fairly common" problem before the XBox360 redefined "fairly common" to mean "almost everyone".
Hanlon's razor is a tool for both the simpleminded (to avoid the responsibility of looking for information) and the malicious (to avoid the responsibility for their actions). It's provably false in a large number of cases, and you've probably used it yourself to cover some malicious act. I know -I- have, and I've seen countless other people do it themselves.
How many people do you know (including yourself) that used the word "accident" to describe something you know for a fact they did on purpose? I've seen enough of that to see Hanlon's "razor" for the smokescreen it really is.
This isn't a commentary on Amazon, what they did could have been an accident (even though the code paths that would entail are lost on me, is there really a "gay" flag assigned to each book that could accidentally be referenced?), just a general statement of the uselessness (indeed, possible detriment) of using Hanlon's razor for anything OTHER than to justify your own malicious actions.
Well, think of it this way, many people rely on Amazon's ranks as part of their "should I buy this" equation. This breaks that.
Actually, a specific analogy struck me as I read this that I think might let some people see it from another point of view. How would you feel if Amazon contacted Gallup or Ipsos to get reviews for them from Amazon's userbase, then after they saw those results chucked many of them out (including many high-ranking ones) and released the edited list as accurate. I know that -I'D- feel like Amazon was acting in the same manner as a politician, would be curious to know WHY, and would (of course) assign a very low trust factor to Amazon in the future. I'm not the type to accept spoon-feeding thank you, unless I step to a spoon-feeding trough of my own accord (you know, like the news channels). I assume that a significant chunk of Amazon's regular userbase may feel the same way (avid readers are more likely to be independent thinkers, IMHO)
That's some mighty fine hypocrisy there, coming from one of slashdot's most prolific and whiny recent posters.
So, really, why are you here? Everything I see from you is an obnoxious too-sure-of-itself rant about how everyone except people who think exactly like you is an idiot.
If you hate it so much, just GTFO and be happier in your life. Find something that's more to your tastes and interests, maybe you'll like the people there better. Good luck finding a new online hangout, I wish you all the best.
No, NOT believing something is a function of, well, not doing something. True agnostics DON'T believe in a deity, they're not sure. Atheists believe fully in a LACK of deity. That's a belief.
BTW, as far as believing in invisible friends who have no physical component yet somehow have massive effects on real life, I'd like you to meet some of MY imaginary friends (my pantheon of Gods, if you will). Two (and all his buddies, up and down), pi, addition, division, integration, etc. None of these concepts are "real" in any physical sense, none offer a method of demonstration or (more importantly) falsification without relying on self-referential methods that require believing at some level that these invisible, intangible entities do exists. Hell, sqrt(-1) is yet ANOTHER step further from existing in our reality than the others I've mentioned, but damned if the bugger doesn't keep effecting real life.
I BELIEVE in these things, in their existence outside and irrelevant of the time-space field. I'm not normally one to push my religion on people, but in this case I'll offer a slight bit of "witnessing"... You should believe in them too, because they are real. "Realer" than you are actually, as you're naught but some chemicals that are obeying my Gods' rules, and will outlast your corpus (and the physical reality you seem to think is the standard by which "real" is measured) by, well, they'll outlast your meat by eternity.
Whether these entities have a consciousness attached to them, I don't know, and I think we'll have to figure out more about our own consciousness (and whether it's a trick of chemistry or it's own phenomenon) to be sure. Personally, I think it's possible that any self-referential system may attain consciousness at a certain level of complexity, but that's not a belief, that's a weak theory backed by not much more than "that would be neat".
In conclusion, beliefs can be proven wrong, non-beliefs can be proven at most incomplete. Anyone who specifies that "there is no God, according to me" has shown a belief, not a lack thereof.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to be a party pooper, but you're really adding credence to the old dog "Libertarians are Anarchists who want just enough government to police their slaves".
Now imagine 3-4 computers in the house, each one with someone seperately watching netflix or Hulu....
*looks around his house*
I don't need to imagine it, that's what I have right now. I'm also a Time Warner customer, albeit in another market. My cable television experience from them was horrible, but even after canceling that my internet connection has been fine, I hit 1 MB/s (that's a big B) for the first time the other day. I live in the Charlotte market, and so far I haven't seen any shenanigans, but the little fiasco in Greensboro freaked me out a bit.
I hope you Austin people really squeeze their wallet over this so that the rest of us don't have to suffer with you. Hit them hard and change their minds, for all of our sakes.
I first installed an early version of slackware, back in 95 or so. I don't quite remember how many floppies it was, but a couple friends and I were able to split the downloads up between us. One boot floppy, one root floppy and a significant number of installation floppies (that we soon learned to copy to the HD before installing). We got this through a hole in the state library system's gopher access number.
I spent a large number of sleepless nights chatting on the 50 person(!) BBSs, facinated by the ability to chat with so many people at once instead of the one or two that I could with the better set-up local dialup BBSs. A little later I learned about ytalk and got to have more "personal" (wink wink, nudge nudge) chats with 1 or 2 people at a time again. :-D
Eventually, I met my wife on the Illinois Institute of Technology computer club's BBS, shadow. Yep, that annoying sound a modem makes was "the handshake o' love" to me.
Now excuse me while I go see if there are any kids on my lawn.
Do you have any financial data from Stardock to back that up? Of course not, because Stardock is making money hand over fist.
Cries proclaiming the death of media companies (especially the recording and film industries) would be far more convincing if I didn't keep hearing the words "record profits" bandied about whenever a story doesn't mention piracy.
The PC gaming industry as a whole MAY be the exception to this, but Stardock isn't.
Yeah, that's the right plan.
In addition, I'd say to do a nice clean install of Windows on the VM, install all the programs she needs from work and save a backup of that file. Set up a shared directory tree between the host and virtual OSs and make sure she saves her important work data to that directory tree.
If you do that then you can either let her boot her VM until the Windows craps out then delete it and restore from the backup copy, or delete the VM image after she shuts down Windows and copy-from-backup whenever she starts it.
It wasn't, and I will. Thank you for the recommendation.
I just wanted to say that I agree with you fully and find your style of writing to be easily accessible and quite clear. I'd also like to mention that if you substitute "North Carolina" for "Texas" in your last paragraph, that paragraph could have come right from my own autobiography. :-D
More topical though, I'd like to say that I -DID- see the news reporting that the Democrats were supporting the Bush wiretapping agenda, but it was called "bipartisanship" and "courage" at the time.
I hate to link to another post of mine in another thread, but I think it's appropriate here. I very much DO believe in intangible, imaginary friends, and frankly find myself MORE enlightened for trusting in my Gods to deliver me to the truth.
Some people call me wacko for that, but those people also invariably bask in the works my Gods have allowed to be through Their Divine Influence. Personally, I find it hypocritical, but not blasphemous. I would guess that blasphemy is hard to actually pull off in my religion, but I think it could be possible, if you try hard enough.
Hey, I'm just sayin, it's not as crazy as it sounds, when it's obviously true.
This thread is all about how they got his IP in the first place. They couldn't have arranged a special package for his IP in order to find out what his IP was.
Your problem is that you believe the game to be contained in the box (an idea that the OP was trying specifically to nullify). If you consider the server-side backend to be a part of the product, and it is, then there is nothing "false" about the delay imposed. One part of a multi-part product being in place does not magically make the other part(s) irrelevant. The "ahead of time" you chose to put in quotes is the date the server portion would be in place. There is nothing at all twisted about that.
You seem like a reasonably bright person, (though not as bright as your rude dismissals indicate you think you are) this concept isn't that hard. The game is a complete package, client and server, without the server, there is no complete game and therefore Gamestop was selling something that didn't technically exist at that point. Because there DID exist the physical portion of the game many people who couldn't see the difference (you're on slashdot so I'll assume you're not one of those people) thought that they actually had a working game.
Have I managed to untwist the mystery or what?
Actually, having just done this a couple weeks ago, I can tell you that at least in my case they send you a little booklet for each TV that you use and you're supposed to write down what you watch on that TV.
Interestingly, I don't have cable (television, I do get my internet access from Time Warner over a coax cable), I don't have satellite TV, and I don't watch OTA broadcasts. I DO however watch movies and television shows via my internet connection. The interesting part is that I told the nice lady who called and asked me about being a Nielsen family all of this and she actually sounded excited. She informed me that they really wanted some perspective on the viewing habits of people who do that, but for some reason (I suspect it has to do with Nielsen's mission statement) only if they pipe the video to a TV to watch it. I do exactly that in 3 rooms of my house, so they sent me the packets.
I wonder how Thundercats and He-Man are going to enjoy their ratings boosts... The late, great George Carlin is going to be highly rated this month too, as well as some online-only media outlets that probably have never seen a rating point.
The fact that they were highly interested in my survey suggests to me that some media companies see the writing on the wall, and want accurate information about my viewing habits in spite of the fact that they keep screaming that I'm killing them by watching online content exclusively. A small critique I have is that if they're going to start recording activities of people who use their TV like I do, they're going to have to make the box for you to write the channel name into bigger, so I can properly fit a URL into it.
Finally, I'd like to say that I don't know how large of a sample they take any given week, but I hope it's low enough that a media company or two takes notice that someone out there is seriously using sites like Hulu and netflix, and considers expanding the content available via such channels.
Don't just blow me off as foolish, back up your claims or withdraw them. I asked a simple question and instead of either answering it or properly blowing me off by ignoring it you chose snide derision. Well, I -DO- get it, and your factless (and tactless) claim notwithstanding, the OP seems to as well.
I believe it was a wonderful thing precisely due to your last point. People were property at the time, the EP served to end that state of affairs in the eyes of the law, with the full backing of the government. In the end, the South was forced to comply with its edict, in my opinion a very good thing. Treating people as property because it can be justified as the natural state of things is, well, more wrong than the government forcing someone to give up people that they consider property.
You say they've been "bitten" by piracy, but I'm of the opinion that Stardock in particular would not be 1/10th the company it is now if not for their DRM stance.
Some people aren't going to want to hear this, other people will point at this for justification for far and away more than it implies, but Stardock boomed BECAUSE of piracy. it went like this: Stardock games are easy to pirate, so people do. Pirates played their free games, and talked about them to their friends. A certain percentage of these friends wanted to play too, and acquired the games somehow. Some (maybe most) of these people downloaded the game, but some of them bought it. Some people that would have never heard of this tiny company bought games from them due to the piracy of their friends. In fact, enough people bought games from them that they grew into a midsized gaming company, complete with fancy amenities for executives and everything.
Is it fair to say this wouldn't have happened without them being so copyfriendly (or at least copyneutral)? No, but I fully believe (especially in this particular case) that it's fair to say that it wouldn't have happened anywhere close to as quickly as it did.
I'm not one to make personal anecdotes a statistical analysis, but I wouldn't have bought that game that looked like a Masters of Orion or Civilization knock off, but I might (and did) download it to check it out at no cost. I WOULD (and did) buy the excellent game that is Galactic Civilizations 2. That's exactly one sale gained DUE to piracy. Not much in the way of a sample size, but it's a datum to ad to the pile.
Good commercial games get bought, and they always will. Piracy will A) take some sales from people that would have paid, B) let some people who wouldn't have paid play AND C) get some people who wouldn't have paid due to sheer lack of information (either about the game itself or its quality) to pay for the game. The actual breakdown of those numbers can only be done on a case-by-case basis, and in THIS case, I would guess that category C greatly offsets or even exceeds A.
Offtopic, but I can't help but reply to your sig.
I'll give you 3 that jumped into my head in less than 1 second, I've already thought of more, but these 3 are pretty convincing to me (as well as being examples from my own government).
1: Emancipation Proclamation
2: Eisenhower Interstate System
3: ARPANet.
You've just invoked a vision of the most well-paid slaves EVER! Gucci manacles... priceless.
Your analogy is stretched so thin as to be transparent. Try harder next time.
IMHO by the time Voyager hit the screen the whole Star Trek franchise had been run through the commercialization mill back and forth so many times that whatever was the original spirit of the show was completely replaced by a profit motive. I'm not claiming that The Original Series wasn't created to make money, I'm just saying that it was about more than that, closer to "art" than to "product". When you have scenes with Starfleet officers sitting in front of personal piles of gold-pressed latinum, something has been lost in translation. The very prevalence of gold-pressed latinum on the show demonstrated (to me at least) that the newer authors had forgotten how Federation economics worked.
Either that or a legitimate reason why AT LEAST one customer (make that 2, Starforce ate one of my DVD burners, now I crack software that I've bought, not that I buy very many games anymore (apt-get is sufficient for me)) will be hesitant to buy anything with DRM on it.
Yeah, go with post-hoc fallacy, that'll make the sales numbers look better somehow. *shakes head*
How? That was actually one of the more concise and straightforward arguments -I've- seen in this whole thread. What part of it is "twisted" to you?
I had a problem with my Wii too (sounds like something I should be saying to my doctor, but I digress), the laser got dirty or something and stopped playing Super Smash Bros Brawl (because it's 2 layer, I think). After searching on the internet for likely causes I discovered that it's a fairly common problem. Well, it's what USED to be called a "fairly common" problem before the XBox360 redefined "fairly common" to mean "almost everyone".
Nintendo is good about fixing it though.
Hanlon's razor is a tool for both the simpleminded (to avoid the responsibility of looking for information) and the malicious (to avoid the responsibility for their actions). It's provably false in a large number of cases, and you've probably used it yourself to cover some malicious act. I know -I- have, and I've seen countless other people do it themselves.
How many people do you know (including yourself) that used the word "accident" to describe something you know for a fact they did on purpose? I've seen enough of that to see Hanlon's "razor" for the smokescreen it really is.
This isn't a commentary on Amazon, what they did could have been an accident (even though the code paths that would entail are lost on me, is there really a "gay" flag assigned to each book that could accidentally be referenced?), just a general statement of the uselessness (indeed, possible detriment) of using Hanlon's razor for anything OTHER than to justify your own malicious actions.
Well, think of it this way, many people rely on Amazon's ranks as part of their "should I buy this" equation. This breaks that.
Actually, a specific analogy struck me as I read this that I think might let some people see it from another point of view. How would you feel if Amazon contacted Gallup or Ipsos to get reviews for them from Amazon's userbase, then after they saw those results chucked many of them out (including many high-ranking ones) and released the edited list as accurate. I know that -I'D- feel like Amazon was acting in the same manner as a politician, would be curious to know WHY, and would (of course) assign a very low trust factor to Amazon in the future. I'm not the type to accept spoon-feeding thank you, unless I step to a spoon-feeding trough of my own accord (you know, like the news channels). I assume that a significant chunk of Amazon's regular userbase may feel the same way (avid readers are more likely to be independent thinkers, IMHO)
That's some mighty fine hypocrisy there, coming from one of slashdot's most prolific and whiny recent posters.
So, really, why are you here? Everything I see from you is an obnoxious too-sure-of-itself rant about how everyone except people who think exactly like you is an idiot.
If you hate it so much, just GTFO and be happier in your life. Find something that's more to your tastes and interests, maybe you'll like the people there better. Good luck finding a new online hangout, I wish you all the best.
No, NOT believing something is a function of, well, not doing something. True agnostics DON'T believe in a deity, they're not sure. Atheists believe fully in a LACK of deity. That's a belief.
BTW, as far as believing in invisible friends who have no physical component yet somehow have massive effects on real life, I'd like you to meet some of MY imaginary friends (my pantheon of Gods, if you will). Two (and all his buddies, up and down), pi, addition, division, integration, etc. None of these concepts are "real" in any physical sense, none offer a method of demonstration or (more importantly) falsification without relying on self-referential methods that require believing at some level that these invisible, intangible entities do exists. Hell, sqrt(-1) is yet ANOTHER step further from existing in our reality than the others I've mentioned, but damned if the bugger doesn't keep effecting real life.
I BELIEVE in these things, in their existence outside and irrelevant of the time-space field. I'm not normally one to push my religion on people, but in this case I'll offer a slight bit of "witnessing"... You should believe in them too, because they are real. "Realer" than you are actually, as you're naught but some chemicals that are obeying my Gods' rules, and will outlast your corpus (and the physical reality you seem to think is the standard by which "real" is measured) by, well, they'll outlast your meat by eternity.
Whether these entities have a consciousness attached to them, I don't know, and I think we'll have to figure out more about our own consciousness (and whether it's a trick of chemistry or it's own phenomenon) to be sure. Personally, I think it's possible that any self-referential system may attain consciousness at a certain level of complexity, but that's not a belief, that's a weak theory backed by not much more than "that would be neat".
In conclusion, beliefs can be proven wrong, non-beliefs can be proven at most incomplete. Anyone who specifies that "there is no God, according to me" has shown a belief, not a lack thereof.
Signed,
A proud believer in imaginary friends.
Oh, they can handle melee too.