While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age.Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman."Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems.Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.

    Topics include Java Foundation Classes (JFC), Abstract Windowing Toolkit, Applets vs Applications, Multi-Threading, Security, and Networking. At the end of the book, the reader builds a useful contact manager, applying concepts learned throughout the book.

    Step-by-step tutorials and code examples from expert developer Eric Smith enable you to program and combine Web site applications to meet your specialized needs. With easy-to-follow steps and clear examples, Active Server Pages Bible is your key to unlocking the world of ASP by presenting the following topics: * The essentials you need to better understand how ASP works with HTML * Concepts of the VBScript language * Web programming and how it differs from traditional client/server computing * Integrating client/server computing with an ASP engine and making the most of its features * Building commonly used applications that make it easier to publish data from a database * Integrating ASP with other components, libraries, and tools like Index Server, Visual Basic, and Microsoft Transaction Server * Developing an idea from concept to application As an added feature, many of the topics discussed in Active Server Pages Bible are cross-referenced to other parts of the book or external Web sites to maximize your understanding of the material.