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Ants Invade iBook
xkranda writes "Seriously ... this is off the Apple Discussions site. Apparently some poor sap's iBook became infested with ants. All I have to say is ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!!!"
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Funny because a colony of Ants is kind of like Mother Nature's Beowulf Cluster.
Also, please don't mod me into oblivion for making a lame joke =)
OS X is full of bugs.
iAnts? *rimshot*
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
It seams that the server is infested also or is it /.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Your pants were buggy before the ants showed up though.
"question = (to) ? be : !be;" --Shakespeare
I looked down and saw the ants on my computer.
I was like... hnuh...
The ants de-voured my computer.
It was a really good computer.
---
Ellen, once you feel the ants crawling on your skin, darling, it's time to seek help.
i had ants eat my alarm clock once, went right past the pizza and infested my clock (was fun drowning them later, but thats a different story)
something about the electric hum that attracts them i belive.
Ants are supposed to have a strange sense of magnetic fields and electric fields. Electronics give off a lot of stuff, animals are especially attuned to it. They have been known to short out traffic lights etc., by crawling inside and bridging connections. They use these fields for navigation and stuff. They are pretty precise.
big deal. What's next in the news: Birds fly into Windows server?
Could they be Moore's Ants [slashdot.org]?
How would one "debug" this? I know, that was really lame...
Come on, editors, watch those duplicate posts.
======================================
Writers get in shape by pumping irony.
(Spooky voice)"Wait, Captain--these are no ordinary ants. Your iBook has... Java ANTS!".
Well, that's okay then.
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
All I have to say is ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!!!
It's ok, you can get down off of the chair now, Daisy.
I know more than you drink.
Dude!
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Maybe the iBook was just on acid.
My deviantArt site
Thats one rotten apple!
In macs, the bugs infest the computer casing. In windows, the bugs infest the software!
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
True story -- I remember a report a dozen years ago of a person who took in her buggy Macintosh SE. It was full of cockroaches, eggs and everything. I have no idea how that could happen, or what the owner's concept of hygeine was. Maybe she left too many muffins sitting on top to warm.
I heard once about a problem like this before. A few cities in the southern US were having. Apparently, red ants would get into traffic lights' circuitry and completely destroy the stuff, costing a great deal of money.
It turns out that a few ants had got in there and fried. Upon their deaths, their bodies released pheremones, attracted more ants, who promptly got fried, releasing even more pheremones, attracting more ants... You get the idea.
I use to keep a P133 out in the garage workbench. I One day, I went out and the screen was black. I powered down for a hard reboot and got a few odd beeps and nothing else. I live in the middle of the Arizona desert and expected dust would eventually kill the machine. Turns out a fat ass black widow spider decided to melt her fat self on my processor.
I had something I thought was funny to post, but it turned out not to be so funny on reflection. So I'm just posting instead to say I'm really, really, really hyper about the TiBook I replaced my iBook with today. I'd let the ants have my iBook, but that has a new home next week. :)
:)
What kind of discussion on-topically is even -possible- with this post? Aiee.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Heh, I was browsing the apple discussion boards when things slowed down to a halt... So I thought, hell, I'll just read slashdot while I'm waiting for this to clear up... Lo and behold, I found the reason. ;)
— darco
iMac: Colonize Different.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
i used to have a 7200/120 that housed a roach family. that was pretty fucking gross.
i eventually had to take everything in my house and shake it out over a plastic tarp that i ringed with roach killer. some stuff had to be submerged.
moral of the story: never pay $180 a month in rent, anywhere.
go get it
Original Message (Posted Nov 12, 02 8:46 pm) bookmark* mail* reply* New Posts: 2 iBook 600mhz Mac OS X (10.0.x) Has anyone had this problem? I hope not . . . After the first rain of the year, the ants outside were restless (and homeless). My wife had left her ibook on the mantle charging overnight. The next morning we noticed a large number of ants milling around it. Upon inspection we discovered ants crawling in and out of every hole in the computer. I grabbed my can of compressed air and started blowing! To my horror hundreds of ants started pouring out carrying eggs! I knew this was bad. I took the computer out to the garage and completely disassembled the thing layer by layer . My stomach turned when I exposed the main circuit board and saw thousand of ant and eggs (and a queen or two), writhing across every inch! Argh! After several hours with a vacuum and a can of air I finally got the thing clean. I put it back together (only a few extra screws) and luckily it works fine. Any theories on why ants would decide to move an entire colony into an ibook? Warmth? Sweet circuit boards? I think they were attempting to colonize the ultimate frontier: cyberspace.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Imagine if it were infested with nmake!
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
I prefer my ants to be of the marching variety bred by Adobe, thankyouverymuch.
Lowmag.net
Because it's an apple!
(yea i read the post about the other laptop having the same problem, sue me)
-Bugs?!?
If anything OS X dosen't have enough!
Sets a bad example.
Go ants go!
-"I ate what?"
I had something like this happen once before to me to a cordless phone charging stand that was in my kitchen. Something with sugar in it got underneath the charger and the ants made the charger their home. I'd guess someone left something sweet was around the computer. I haven't seen the comment since Apple's site isn't responding.
:)
I just take the charger apart. Sprayed it with Lysol (yes this will kill ants). Put it in a plastic bag and left it. Next morning lots of dead ants. Then came cleanup followed by lots of drying. I also had to keep spraying for ants
until eventually they quit coming back.
However the charger is still working nicely for me.
to a windows-based notebook, instead of a macintosh based one. :)
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
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I just remembered, the second (or was it third?) big game released by Maxis on the Mac, long before the PC, was "Sim Ant"...
Revenge is a dish best served with mandibles and insect appendages...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
eom
Maybe the ants were in fact PC enthusiasts, set out to destroy every Mac in sight. Thank god this guy was able to stop the invasion in time, or this would have been the end of Apple.
VIVA LA REVOLUTION!
I don't see why this kind of thing should cause revulsion. Ants are extremely useful and interesting and they are usually harmless. If there is anything disturbing about this it's that such useful critters needed to be destroyed.
I remember when I used to work for Ikea, Singapore in their electrical dept, we used to get about a customer a week bringing back their power transformer to fix, and in nearly every case there was a gecko and her nest of eggs residing within.
The first time I opened one of those puppies up and got savaged by those viscious little buggers I was surprised to say the least, considering they have no teeth, or claws, or any aggresive instincts whatsoever.
An Apple clear-case iBook could double as an ant farm. You'd be the envy of the office!
You're getting an infestation!
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Most disgusting tech support job I've ever done was cleaning ants out of an Epson ink-jet printer. This lady ate a lot of meals at her computer. Some food crumbs, like bits of jelly from her PB&J sandwiches, had fallen under the printer. The ants found this nice, warm place with a ready food source and moved in. And I had to get them out. Bleagh!
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
well, thats why mommy says not to drink juice whilst using one... its not a creamsicle!
Anybody see the independent movie PI? The mathematician's "super computer" gets infested with ants in the beginning and prompts him to make a deal with someone for the best chip out there in return for research into the magic number (sort of like the unified theory but different).
Was this guy looking for order in chaos? Did it spit out a 216-digit number before the ants infested it? Does he have intense migraine headaches?
But it does sound like some of the people in tech support. Between the human Bio-Hazards and the Goth's walking through the support department is quite an experience. customers are lucky it phone support.
Maybe MS has hired any of ants to take over competitors os's leaving only wink2k and xp unharmed.
and I was building a new colony in this Thinkpad, and, uh, like someone put a floppy disk in and it was like, beep boop bop, and our colony was, like, gone...
this sig deleted by another sig
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The ants outside my house measure in inches, they're red and they bite like a mother fucker. Did I mention they number in the trillions? On a hot day in september you can't see the ground.
Hippies in the 60's and 70's often recal tripping quite hard on the "moving ground" that happened to take their picnic away with them.
Mybe you like an ant farm. Sure they are cool to look at when they are a little 12x12 inch plastic picture frame type farm. However it's a very different thing when your entire 10 acres of land are swarmed by the fuckers who eat your horses alive.
they're features.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
downloaded the new update to OS 10.2.2!
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
All I have to say is ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!!!
<Ali G voice>
Now, isnt dat bein a littul racialist?
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
I dunno, but for what it's worth, there's a green plastic $3 chair I got at Target that I keep out on my back deck. It's clean (plus I've cleaned it several times just in case) but for whatever reason, it has ALWAYS got ants running all over it. It's like they're attracted to the plastic or something, and it's really weird. I've always got a few ants on me after I sit in it. It's not like they're trying to set up shop there (it is, after all, a plastic molded chair and there's nowhere to hide)--- it's more like they just like to cruise around on the stuff. Weird.
Better than finding a worm in your Apple.
Or half a worm for that matter.
Ba bum bump
The interesting thing was they must have been using them for quite a while because many of the phones had damaged circuit boards in them which caused the phones to stop working, this is how the infestations were discovered initially. We had recieved no reports of ants in guests rooms from guests or housekeeping staff prior to the failures. A coincidence, perhaps. But very strange just the same.
They should have taken over a Graphite iMac. Then the owners would have had a combination computer / ant farm.
ok so now we know ibooks emit emf signals that enchance the neurological processes of ants. But will these super-ants get infested with ibooks?
Take a look at her switch ad. The second I read the parent, I was LMAO. Oh, if only I had points to mod it (+5,Funny).
Oh, he should have saved all that jelly stuff and used it to decode the secret name of god. Maybe the Hassids got to him first.
Voodoo Girl is the bomb!
...with this problem. I really didn't want to read the flame war over the GNU/Ants vs Ants name. And If I use a patented bug spray to kill the ants will RMS refuse to speak to me? And if it was Microsoft we'd have Visual Ants, AntXP, .ANT OK...I'll shut up now...
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
Anyone else reminded of that scene from PI when he opens up his computer to find that goo and ants?
Probably the first time a bug-induced crash was fixed just by turning on the Raid, rather than vice versa.
Come on, it's funny. I hear you snurfling...
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Click "Preferences", check "Apple", click "Save" and stop your bitching. Yes, it is a big conspiracy to advertise Apple products. Hell until I knew that someone's iBook got infested with ants I wasn't going to buy an iBook. rofl So you're what, 12, 13 years old maybe?
By the looks of the dead, slashdotted link, any ants inside the server are no longer a problem...
A significant geeky improvement on the ole' magnifying glass
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Another Steve Jobs company attacked by Antz.
Is Dreamworks responsible?
What are the odds?
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
the first shippments of xboxes had roaches in them. my girlfriend works at funcoland, and when they cut into the boxes to unpack them roaches came skittering out and scared the shit out of them.
I want 2D games back.
there is an easy explanation:
read Ruckers Book: "The Hacker and the ants"
see also http://www.fourmilab.ch
I had a buddy of mine ask me to take a look at his computer. It had begun to make thumping/ticking noises when he would turn it on, and would not stop till he turned it off. I cracked the case, to find a quite dead and petrified rat inside his case, that thumped against his cpu fan. fuckin sick.. how it got in, and died in such a way to not stink to high heaven, I will never know, though I suspect someone put it there..
I'm a little tea pot.
Mike Myers was introducing another segment of "Germany's most disturbing home videos" when his computer was found inoperable, lying on the ground. He turned it over to find....Ants!
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 09:07:26 -0800 ...
...
From: TechSupp
To:
Subject: RE: ants in omniview switchboxes
Thanks for the feedback. This is a new one to us. If you have any problems
down the road let us know and we will replace them. I have forwarded this
info to the President of Belkin and the Product Managers.
Technical Support Manager
Belkin Components
-----Original Message-----
From:
Sent: Monday, November 27, 2000 10:24 AM
Subject: ants in omniview switchboxes
came back to work from the holiday weekend. noticed a stream of ants
going up the cables in the back of a rack in the server room. oddly, this
stream of ants was carring larva up the omniview cables, and appeared to
be entering the omniview via the dip switch hole, and then exiting withot
the larve. I traced the stream out of the building, then traced a smaller
stream down a hallway and to another room with another system with an
omniview. here as well ants were streaming in from outside with larve,
depositing them in the omniview, and exiting. I took both omniviews
outside and opened them. hundreds of ants and hundreds of tiny white ant
larve were in each omniview, apparently storing and guarding the ants
under the bottom circut board. nothing was hurt, so I shook/knocked/blew
the ants out, dissasembled the omniview, coated the case with ant spray,
let dry, reassembled, reinstalled, everything works fine.
it dosen't appear the ants were after food in either case. I think
something about the omniview gave them a home they felt compelled to store
their larva in. I just can't explain why they would pick those, and how
the so effectivley found the only two omniviews on that side of our
building. the omniviews involved are both SE 4 port, and are still
working fine.
-J.R.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
More like a bunch of choir boys start toting Unix.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
Not exactly the same thing.
I had stopped using my Kenwood portable CD player for a few weeks, and a rather large spider made its home just inside of the CD viewing window.
I remember thinking, "What a terrible place to hunt for insects," but apparently I was wrong.
The spider was quite surprised when I pressed the play button...
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Hiya. Just wanted to let you know that this can happen to anyone...all ya need is some food stuck in the keyboard. This happened to me a couple months ago...I was typing till I noticed a couple of black ants on my finger. I was wondering where they came from and looked around. I finally saw a small stream of black ants under the keyboard keys. They were after the food pieces that accumulated there after months of usage by various people. Popped the keys out, unscrewed the keyboard, then washed the food pieces offa the plastic cover. The ants never came back afterwards. Keep your keyboard clean guys! Ya never know what'll come to get that piece of food stuck in there ;)
As is "aqua" or "carbon" or whatever it's called.
Those Evil Geniuses at slashdot have "themed" this thread so that it has the visual look-and-feel of a Mac!
Nice work, lads.
I recall reading a story about something quite similar, only years and years ago. Supposedly, a college/university student had one of the original Mac powerbooks, and it suddenly died. Upon inspection, it turned out it was infested with thousands of ants that entered when it was in use outside, on the grass, someplace on the campus.
It just seems suspiciously familiar that this basic story has come back again, only this time with an Apple iBook notebook. (Statistically, you'd think you'd hear about this with a "Wintel" laptop, wouldn't you? Or do ants only like to eat Apple branded notebooks?)
I'm starting to wonder if this one's completely true, or just a rehash of an urban legend.
Back when I was a Mac hardware repair guy, this person came in with an SE30 that would fail "only in the mornings". We thought it might be an odd time-sensitive extension like an anti-virus app, but we opened it up, and it had some big bug habitat in there. Even though the bugs seemed absent, their nests would collect the morning dew and short out the board.
i had an old apartment that i moved into, not suspecting the truth. the ants lived under the shoddy foundation of the place. infested the whole damn bedroom, found my liquor. but they stayed away from my mac!
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
So, I was doing my time, paying my dues and doing what I could to bring quality to the lifeless void that is a Best Buy black shirt technician (well, we became black shirts while I worked there). Anyhoo, this "woman" brought in a very old packard bell that was covered in yellow dust. A smoker. Some of the worse shit comes from smokers. As soon as she walked in the door, the AV tech told me to tell her to go away. My manager heard this and got pissy. She later recanted.
She brought her computer up and slapped down her PSP that had 20 or so days left and demanded a new computer because this one would no longer turn on. So I said okay, checked it in and put it in the back. When we opened it, a whole cock-a-roach family came running out. I almost vommited right then and there. It took WEEKs to get rid of those fuckers, adn even then we knew they were not gone.
Aparently about two months earlier this same nasty lady came in to the av area with a vcr for a "cleaning." When the AV tech opened it he found a dead mouse and silverfish. To this day you can find silver fish in that best buy :
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
when you leave an apple laying around.
This reminds me of the November 4th entry (scroll down a bit) on Paul Lujan's site entitled, "Ants Ate My Hub!". Pretty funny(?)...
--
http://www.aikiweb.com - AikiWeb Aikido Information
1) Power on laptop
2) Wait for smoke and insect screams to die down
3) Ventilate Area
Slashdot comments can be accurate, highly modded, or posted quickly. Pick two.
After attempting to visit Apple Discussions and failing (now /.ed), where else do ya go?
Must be infestious - oops infectious...
The Mothership
Crickets are the consciences of little wooden children? What aspect of my liberal arts eductaion has been severely neglected to the point that I have no idea what you're talking about??
You'll find it between the "1880s Italian century children's literature" section and the "1940s American feature animation" section.
Have you ever read the story of Pinocchio?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Wan't this a problem with that Pumpkin-puter that ran linux in halloween? I'm surprised that it's the second year I see this on /. without bug complaints. Other than OS bugs, that is ;)
;)
By the way, it looks like we'll have to replace that old kernel panic comment... "Penguin on the Bus?" to a more realistic "Pathway bug?"
"Wireless : LAN
"But what a disaster that laptop was. My god. I mean, it was near biblical proportions. Well, maybe not as bad as that, and certainly not as bad as the whole big thing with, you know, General Mandible, but still, it was pretty bad. I mean, we couldn't do anything we wanted, it was like the whole thing was fighting us. When we tried to build something it would crash down on us, and the whole thing was far too hard to defend. It was totally unsecure and just about anyone could waltz right in and make themselves at home. It was just, you know, bad.
"So we tried a new iBook. We love it. It's warm, and clean, and dry, and everything just works. It's the best, really. It's saved my butt. We moved the whole colony in there last week, and we're never going back.
"My name's Z and I'm an ant."
So when insects infect a Mac, can you just use ordinary Raid, or do you have to wait for Apple's soon-to-be-released xRaid? Do I detect the start of a sales campaign? 8^)
---
I have Unix underpants.
Karl-Heinz: The next video was sent in by Geurgud Gardner from Baden-baden. Here they have come across the an iBook, which in itself is not so disturbing. Until its case is opened to reveal.... ANTS! ANTS! ANTS!
Dieter: Now that's an ant farm of a different color.
just imagine what her car is like. i bet she cleans her house once every 6 months or so, but honestly, would a person like that EVER clean their car? not likely
I've seen outrageous shit in peoples cars. Used condoms, doggy bag dinners from weeks earlier forgotten in the back seat, roachs (the ones you smoke and the ones you dont).
These are the same people that shit on the floor at gas station restrooms. Natural selection hasn't quite caught up with them yet.
I had a similar thing happen to me about a month ago. My brother's iMac started smelling really funny and then stopped booting. I pulled out the hard drive and saw a dime sized patch of melted surface mount chip material stuck to the hard drive carrier. Upon further examination, I found the head of a termite sticking out of a crevasse in the drive.
Then we tried the visualizer, which really freaked it out. it was running all over trying to get away from the waves of color. We didn't see it again after that, so either we had finally coerced it into leaving or it dropped dead of a seizure.
Either way, Ant: 0, iTunes Visualizer:1!
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
Maybe they were just looking to play SimAnt against the computer AI?
I'd like to remind them that as a trusted web personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
Last week a friend of mine's electronic gate stopped working. Ants had built a nest inside the control box shorting a bunch of stuff out. Just now I cleaned out about a quantrillion baby ants from under my BSD box.. Must've been some food crumbs under there or something. I first noticed them 'cos there was a trail of ants going from under the computer up to my modem and back. I can't see any food on the modem either so I have no idea what they were doing there!
I think they just like warm dry places to nest, and inside electronic devices is usually warm and dry.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
I fix iBooks in the computer store for Brown Uni and we had someone bring in an iBook that apparently had been vomited on copiously at some party. ALL over the keyboard, and inside the circuits. For some reason, it wasn't working! And they brought it in about 3 days after it happened....
shame on us / for all we have done / and all we ever were / just zeroes and ones
They're undocumented creatures.
I kid you not...
I once worked as a tech for an Apple Authorized Service Provider. One day we received a box from Apple containing a PowerBook we had sent in for service earlier in the week. Nothing unusual about that, we usually got one or two every other day.
Upon opening the box, however, we noticed something very unusual: something was moving...then another one, and another...the box had several huge worm like larvae crawling around in it! The buggers were a good inch-and-a-half long, a quarter inch in diameter, looked sort of shiny and soft, and they were just racing around the bottom of the box. Top speed looked to be around an inch per second... Fortunately they were too big to actually get inside the PowerBook. (How would we explain that to the customer?: Sir, your PowerBook is fixed, please come pick it up ASAP because it's full of huge shiny nasty worm-like larvae and we want it out of our shop...)
The closest we could figure out was that they came from Apple, unless they grew inside the PowerBook in less than three days (turn around time from Apple). Also, presumably someone at Apple would have noticed larvae while fixing the computer if the bugs had been living in the PB.
For the next few weeks we were kind of careful opening those boxes...
When I was doing my time as a bench tech, a guy brought in his IBM desktop, complaining that it had turned itself on, smoked and will not work anymore. We figured lightening. When he brought it in, it had the yellow staines of a smoker, but nothing else to tip us off. I opened the box and dozens of roaches came pooring out. We had to bag it up and call the guy, telling him that we couldn't work on his PC under warranty because IBM refused to pay for bug bomb! The roaches had curled up in his power supply, nested there and started eating the cables. To this day my skin still crawls when I see one of those IBM desktops.
www.linux-skunkworks.com
only problem is the dumb thing has those retarded "sleep" and "wake" buttons.
Username taken, please choose another one.
Any real computer geek would have put them to work.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I used to work in a floorcovering store. We pulled out a roll of carpet during the winter and discovered dozens of LIZARDS within the wraps. Eww! They crawled in there for the winter and were alive but dormant in the cold.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
aha! I knew it -- they really are big gumdrops!
oh wait, or maybe it was all the eyecandy in OSX?
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
1) Boiling at least 2 qts. water.
2) Open iBook
3) Pour boling water in any available opening until it runs out another opening, preferably on the other side.
4) Call insurance agent to recount story of horrific bathroom incendent.
5) Go shopping for new iBook and Boric Acid
Hex lives !
...then imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
*ducks and runs*
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Eww? C'mon, any self respecting nerd thinks lizards are cool.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Some kid is crying because his SimAnt game just wiped out his entire colony with Bottled Air. He didn't even think that something like that would even be in the game.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
I had a logitech ScanMan color - one of those sheet feeding scanners - it was great.
One day , though I noticed it had a trail of ants going to it... sure enough it was full of ants , nesting. They had completely covered the inside of the scanner window and were having a great time.
Solution? I unplugged it and took it outside and left it in the sun for a few hours (this was in summer, so it was about 30 degrees C). I just left it out on the grass in the sun.
The ants decided that roasting in a scanner wasn't good, so they packed up house and moved out. They did a pretty good job of tidying up, I just had to clean the optical path a bit, but all the eggs (and ants) were gone. Beat the hell out cleaning a bunch angry (or dead, after spraying) ants out of inaccessible scanner insides.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
..or maybe their server got infested with ants as well?
mmmmm.... unexplained petrified rodent... *drool*
My sister used to work in a fabric store, and quite a bit of product from India was sold there. Rolls would arrive all bound up tightly in hessian and card, and need unwrapping/rerolling to remove the inevitable kinks in the rolls from shipping. In the middle of a roll of cream fabric were dark red stripes - which sometimes happens when ink is spilled, and that part is marked and avoided when it comes to selling. At the end of the red marks however, was a 2" sliver of finger, complete with partial fingernail and bone. ugh. At least it had dried up enough not to stink out the place.
:)
My own personal worst was an eBay buy - a Mac IIcx that was bought "as is" as the seller had no way of testing it. No wonder, as it had been through a flood, was packed up with silt, and had a mouse nest up under the power supply, with lil mousey droppings n pee all over the place.
It worked after a (very thorough) cleaning
a grrl & her server
Ever read The Hacker and the Ants by Rudy Rucker? Covers this sort of thing exactly though his ants were a lot harder to kill.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Ants are attracted to the heat and dry conditions inside of electronics. Ants are not the only bugs that like electronics. I used to work as an electronic technician for a company that did rent to own. The nastiest things I ever had to deal with were VCR's that were full of roaches, and by full I mean getting a quart jar or more in them. Any guesses as to why they needed repairs? :)
I think it's pretty obvious why the ants went for the iBook. Whenever i go on a picnic, the ants always go after the fruit first, especially APPLES. I'm going to get modded off the board for this.
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
Ants don't like hot water. Really hot I mean. Pour some water in the holes of the computer to kill them all.
.sig: No such file or directory
While a student I had a cruddy job and one day was watching the clock waiting to be able to leave, when the clock (which had a second hand) just stopped (mindblowing enough by itself). I picked up the clock to shake it and about 1000 cockroaches fell out -- I imagine one or more roaches or their excrement jammed the clock's gears.
See - Macs have just as many bugs as Windows machines...
:))
(Know it - too bad a joke to be posted - but i just got out of bed and dont think clearly
I only have one ant installed on my box.
Manufactorers have been known to put pheromones in their products. It attracts people (and insects) to it. Perfumes and cosmetics have had them for ages. I wont be surprised if Apple tried that trick also.
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
"The ants were crawling all over the laptop like slashdotters on a poor server"
Where the ants migrating from Windows, by any chance ?
Wow.. iBook: $ 2300 Ants who saw the ads and decided to do their own "switch": free For the price of an iBook, you should start charging rent for those squatters. It's heated, AND it has a large supply og organic plastic compounds. Damn ants...
Now watch this drive.
This sounds like girl-talk. Since when girls started posting headlines on Slashdot?
Maybe Kompressor had something to do with this.
couple of things:
1) The person states that multiple queens were in the I-Book strike number 1, the only time you have multiple queens is when they are immature larval stages, the Princess kills off her compentition, finds herself a nice young hunk of a male, gets pregnant then flies off to start her own colony.
2) queens don't move, so they couldn't be in the machine... A queen ant is freaking huge compared to all of her subjects, it is highly unlikely that it could get into the guts of the machine itself.
3) He dissasembled his I-Book layer by layer... um (this may be old info) but notebooks don't really come in layers.
there were more but its late and I do not want to reload the story up, especially considering it is most likely fake.
There's a popular book by the same authors called Journey to the Ants.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Now you can have your iBook fully loaded with photoshop and real marching ants!
Meh
"Now that's an art farm of a different color!" - Dieter
Chris
I just moved to Houston a month or so ago, and didn't know a damn thing about what fire ants looked like. from what people had said I expeced something like the huge red ants we had in Colorado. I have to go out side every hour or so for my breathing treatment (read smoke) and got in the habbit of taking little bits of cookies and candy to the little cute ants out side... low and behold they are fire ants, and I've been feeding them...
to correct my mistake I got an air compresser out and started blowing the hill away... its been 3 days and there aren't any ants around the house still... hum... perhaps I should patent this..
Math is like sex. People who get it are popular in class, people who don't are not.
yeah ants, little black ones seem to be the worst, I have them in an old cd player, a portable tv, the stereo, and the microwave, they made a mistake when they invaded the microwave, just stuck a cup of water inside and nuked them ;)
With all these rat and ants infestation stories, I guess I better buy usb cameras and stick them inside my computer.
That way I can monitor ants and other little creatures getting into my computer! It a "live" insect scanner!
Has anyone else tried doing this?
Ants leave a pheromone scent-trail so their colony-mates can find them. Its like an invisible highway -- have you ever seen a trail of ants travellign two or three 'shoulder to shoulder' in both directions? -- bottom line, disincect (well) the entire area and dont put the ibook back there for some time... theve 'marked-up' the inside already.
Hopefully he realizes that his vacuum cleaner is now infected and disposes of the bag ASAP.
This reminds me of Rudy Rucker's SF book, The Hacker and the Ants. Go SquidBoy!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Now, I'm off to get some of those ant cups for my iBook; do you think plastic will do well on top of my processor?
I'm laughing so hard, I'm actually crying :-D
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
The samething happened to me with a cell phone I left on a dugout bench during a softball game. When we were leaving the field I saw that my phone was surrounded by ants and coming in an out of every whole he damn phone had. I could never figure it out because I didn't see anys anywhere else in the dugout. I wonder if they were attracted to the signal the phone was emmitting????
Just like any other lazy pc do-it-yourselfer I failed to place the covers on the eisa card slots on an old 486 that I had in my basement
One morning it wouldn't boot up and I decided to open it up to see what was going on. It could only be described as a nest with the owner nowhere to be seen. Dryer lint had been formed into a cozy area over the cpu and memory. The power supply cables where turned into makeshift chewsticks.
Needless to say, I inspected the components, replaced the power supply, and replaced the modem which seemed to have shorted out due to mouse urine. Power on -> Post -> login:
Moral of the story: those card slot covers make good mouse deterrents.
I caught another critter last month but, that's another story
I don't think it was the warmth or even the tasty aroma of the wiring that attracted them. You must have been playing some "classic" 1980s music in order to attract the ants.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
This "odorless decomposition" can happen if a small animal dies of dehydration, particularly after eating certain types of poison bait. And a rat can get in anywhere its head can fit -- that's a hole about fingertip-sized (so a missing slot plate or a fan gap at the bottom of the front panel would be big enough). If there wasn't any chewed wiring, I'd guess it was already 3 parts dead when it arrived, albeit under its own power.
;)
Unless, of course, you noticed this guy's roommate (if any) walking around with the most peculiar smile..
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
my cat was standing on my wireless router.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
What he doesn't know is, his marquee selection tool is realling a bunch of ants square-dancing.
For those being invaded by streams of ants (who most often enter a building looking for water):
Ants will NOT cross a swath of diazinon granules (corncob-base *only* -- the newsprint-base type like Ortho doesn't work) and the few that try it won't survive the attempt. Also, two tablespoons of diazinon granules dribbled around the entrance to a hill is enough to kill the ENTIRE colony overnight -- and this even works with those aggressive mound-building fire ants. You can also use it to block their path thru cracks in concrete floors, etc. (Not recommended for any unventilated spaces where warmblooded creatures sleep, tho the weird smell goes away after a day or two.)
Borax is also reported to work, tho I can't attest to that one personally.
I like ants.. fried or in chocolate or anywhere OUTDOORS!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I worked at a Field Force Automation specialist - we supported users with laptops and printers. We would swap out 2-10 items a week - new machines, new printers because the sales people in NYC were really hard on thier machines.
... well... It was finely ground bits of cockroaches! All the nice paper pinch rollers in the printer also kill roaches dead! So, we just tossed it into the dumpster including the shipping box. I think we marked it in inventory as "Scrapped for parts".
So, we replaced a printer - an HP320 portable inkjet. We got the old machine back and as we unpack it, there is a light brown dust falling from it. My Co-worker (and wife) passed the box to me and said "I don't want to know"
Coldnight
I've noticed a few ants around my computer, but I thought they just came for the warmth.
And the l33t shall inherit the 34r7h.
Lickable Interface.
It looks like Steve's reality distortion has reached new levels (and new species).
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
The floor, man! The floor! It is so damn ugly! Where in the world did you get that kind of floor panel from?
He should have just fired up Mozilla and watched as the Gecko started to eat them. Problem solved.
and this is news, why ?
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
You can find it here
Ants eating my car (where can I find the relays)
When you ask a Mac user to set up a "honeypot" machine.
That's one hell of an image. Thank you!
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
My Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server came in a box full of ants, some of which died on Windows update. Can i sue Microsoft for killing those ants ?
-- Reality is just an extended dream.
A couple winters ago I had a mouse living in my home computer. He never really caused any problems and he was really cute so I let him stay. After all, it was probably the warmest place in the house.
A few weeks later, my landlord put out poison and I got to enjoy two months of rotting carcass stench in my apartment. He must've died in between the walls.
This got me thinking about my laptop. I got it for free from a government project (take obselete computers from companies, give them to schools), so I have no idea who owned it. And I'm getting paranoid about the thing now. What if the fan doesn't work because of dead insects blocking it? What if ants have been eating away at the speaker cables, causing really bad screeching noises to come from it? What if my friend's CD drive is locked shut by a corpse?
Uggggh.
I was called to a restaurant once to look into why their electronic time clock wasn't working right once. Upon opening the unit, I found the local cockroach clan had set up shop and wigged it out. Real life computer bugs...
Then do as I instructed as above and stop your bitching.
Some time in 1995, hudreds of ants invaded my Texas Instruments notebook. My laptop never was able to fully recover from this since the ants have created an nest on the other site of the LCD. Although the ants were gone, the mono LCD screen looked pretty damaged.
This happened to me several times when I worked in California doing comercial and residental construction related stuff. Ants would come in over night and get into my Makita cordless power pack battery charger when I left it in charging. Other people at my construction site reported very similar things with their battery chargers. I never experienced the ants trying to nest in the chargers because I never found eggs, but they definitely liked being in there. It seems that the ants like the high frequency voltage, which gives them a buzz. I suspect that the ants like to get high, go figure.
I discovered a sort of rule to it some time later. In general, if you can hear it buzzing while it is charging, bugs might take a liking to it.
For those who don't know, Makita makes power tools, especially professional grade cordless power tools. Their signature is that they use a turquoise/blue plastic or paint housings.
http://www.makita.com/
So what I've had Ant Running on my apple laptop for months. I didn't get any slashdot press.
Story.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Caveat: IANAMacUser Maybe it was the sugary interface which attracted them?
G. M. Manath
Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both 'Yes' and 'No.'
Anyone play Discworld 2 on PC or PSX?
D'ya remember 'Skazz' from the High Energy Facility?
"They're not ants, they're bugs!"
"You've like, de-bugged it, man... You've broken it!"
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
Had Ant Attack for my ZX Spectrum around 20 years ago. It was cool.
Steve.
Last summer I had a colony move into my mailbox. I opened the box and there they were, moving in right on top of my mail, but mostly towards the back of the box. I dusted the queen, workers, and eggs off my junk mail and closed the box after getting over my initial repulsion (at least there weren't any fliers). The next morning I was going to evict them with a hose before the mailman arrived, but they had already moved out.
:)
Did the bugs leave a forwarding address? They still owe me rent
This reminds me of the time that ladybugs took over a window in my bedroom. I don't know why they did that or why they kept living there. Eventually I got used to them there, and the sad thing is, that I actually missed my 'pet' ladybugs when they just suddenly dissappeared one day...
'Phone-jacking: Give someone a ring, they'll have to answer to find out who it is!' - Threni
I used to work at San Clemente Island, where they have waves of growing things, first the grass grows 20 feet tall then the earwigs eat all the grass,(fast forward to comments below), then the mice eat all the earwigs and we have a serious rodent problem, rinse, repeat.
Back to the earwigs, they aren't as "smart" or organized as ants, but I've had to SHOVEL dead ones, and even filled a 15 gallon ShopVac(tm) FULL of the damn things. Amazing how heavy 15 gallons of dead bugs can be. Plus the end all get all is, they loved to huddle together inside some of our test equipment, they seemed to prefer Oscilloscopes. I had a guy bring one to me to repair because it "smoked" when he turned it on. Well, in my experience, a power supply failire isn't all that uncommon, however, I wasn't prepared to have my boots covered in crawly things when I slid it out of the case. That's the one and only day I had appreciation for the Navy requiring me to wear boots.
~~Thank god there's not a surveillance camera out there to get a shot of the heebie jeebie, I got the willy's jump-a-thon dance I did at that point, it was a Kodak Moment(tm) I'm sure.
Tweet, tweet, all id10t's out of the gene pool, open swim is over.
Almost forgot too. I hope he put some diasonon or something in the vacuum cleaner, otherwise they'll escape into the house. :(
'Phone-jacking: Give someone a ring, they'll have to answer to find out who it is!' - Threni
When do ants invade a computer?
When they know it doesn't have RAID hard disks.
My cousin had a mouse living in his pc. he left one of the slot plates (the things that go over unused pci slots) and the mouse went through that. packed his pc full of dogfood. it pissed and corroded the metal. The reason he asked me to look at it was the mouse chewed the ide cable.
-Foxxz
The old company I worked for used macintosh, ack! Anyway, one day I noticed a lot of ants coming in through a hole or break in the window. To my surprise all of the ants were filing into the macintosh G4 cube that I had been using below my desk. I wonder if the power supply or any other piece of hardware inside the bos uses are weird frequency that the ants are attracted to??
I'm not that surprised that this has happened to another person. Needless to say, that day I had alot of fun inventing ways to off ants with office supplies.
"When I look back, my life is not a foreign country, it's more like a library book returned long ago." - ????
A friend's old Powerbook (500 series) became a hive. They didn't know it, but all of the ants that had been infesting their kitchen were roosting in their laptop set up on the kitchen counter. When the machine finally died from the generations of life that had lived in their machine, they had another friend open it up and discovered that it was packed full of ant-hive. The ants themselves had moved on by the time they had the machine looked at, as it had been turned off since it began to malfunction.
Further, I myself have a power supply for my speaker system that from time to time becomes infested with the tenacious little bastards. This thing is packed with them, I tell you. To get rid of them, I always just unplug the power supply for a few days.
could this be how the borg started?
If they vaporize after you kill them, you should run.
A US scientist has named an ant after Harrison Ford.
Edward Wilson has called a Central American ant, Peidole harrisonfordi, to honour the actor's conservation work.
Ford is Vice Chairman of the American society Conservation International.
Wilson, a Harvard University scientist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has also named a shiny brown ant from Mexico, Pheidole mooreorum, after Intel Corporation co-founder Gordon Moore and his wife Betty.
The Moores are leading environmental philanthropists.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
[Cmdr Taco] The next posting was sent in by Lucas Bamberger of Mac-baden. Here he has come across an Apple Powerbook, which in itself is not so disturbing. Until it is turned over to reveal... ANTS! ANTS! ANTS!
[Cowboy Neal]
Now that's an ant farm of a different color!
This is why I leave old pizza boxes and half full cans of soda everywhere... to attract the ants and keep them off my precious computers and other electronics... that... and I'm a fucking lazy slob.
I guess cockroaches are different... but maybe they're not.
I live out in the bush here in Australia and there is just no way we can keep any kind of insect life out of our house, so we just don't bother. The floors are wooden, but 100 years old, so there are cracks that all kinds of spiders and beetles and critters come up through.
It's easy to live with we just:
a) NEVER leave food out and keep all the cupboards closed at all times.
b) NEVER leave clothes that we are planning on wearing again on the floor because pretty much everytime this happens I find a spider of some description hiding underneath.
c) ALWAYS check under the dunny seat for spiders.
d) DON'T even bother to spray around fly spray or similar because it just won't work.
Apart from that it's fine, relatively hygenic, and doesn't bother us at all, in fact I quite like having little spiders living in the window frames and critters and stuff living down the back of the couch.
I only wrote this because everyone is posting: "found heaps of horrible bugs so I killed them with xxx."
Maybe you should give them a second chance?
Um, sounds great, we'll, er, be sure to visit, uh, real soon.
My wife would have a stroke at more than one spider at a time. I've talked her down a bit -- I kind of like them because they eat things I really don't like, and are beautiful -- but they are still escorted outside. Here, inside and outside are still distinct, though there was that raccoon I had to chase off a few days ago....
And they carried all my data to the neighbor's PC byte by byte.
Table-ized A.I.
I lent a joystick (an MS Sidewinder 3D Pro) to a friend. It sat at his house for a while, during which time I sorta forgot about it, and two months later I got it back. At this point I was really itching to play some Descent II, so I brought it in, hooked it up, and launched the game. Everything loaded fine and the game recognized it without a hitch, so I started playing a game I saved before I lent him the joystick. I was able to ignore the crunching noises every time I bent the stick for a few minutes, but when I looked back at the joystick, I saw ants crawling all over the joystick, my hand, and the computer desk. Of course I promptly shut down and removed the infested device, but the horror (and odor) I experienced when I first opened it up cannot be described.
Are you listening, Evan?
Although I'm not going to discount Soviet scientists, who definetly did have a really great grasp of higher mathematics, I don't see how you can say that a "design bureau" is functionally different than a corporation. Both are driven by greed, one for money, the other for power (which might as well be the same thing). That's not the same as a computer being made by "the people". If you want to talk about computers made by people, check out this list, and don't drag out something that's really got nothing to do with freedom.
Ants in a computer...I remember that... One time at work, an entire classroom's computers were infested with ants (the teacher left the room extremely messy, with bits of food all over). They almost did some damage...lol...
izm
Umm, hello? Are you really claiming that capitalism doesn't make everyone's life better, wise guy?
In a country where even the `poor' have cars, spacious apartments or houses, refrigerators, air conditioning, computers, and so forth?
In a country where even the `poor' have a standard of living which no other society has provided even to it's `rich'?
Nice try, wise guy.
(and yes, I'm posting non-AC now. Posting limit per day and all.)
What those of you who claim that capitalism is `breaking down' miss is that capitalism continues to deliver improvements at all levels of society, unlike any other system out there.
To give a clear example, the bottom 20% of society in the US in 1990 had, consumed, and spent as much (after adjusting for inflation) as the middle 20% had done in 1950.
No other system provides growth like that. That's why while you whine and complain, the `workers' (if such a term even makes sense in a society with as much social mobility as ours) aren't on board with your tyrranical ideas.
I HATE ANTS.
I too live in SoCal, and our apartment was infested with ants a couple of weeks ago, after the first rain. The bastards were crawling around our brand-new iMac, were in every cabinet in the house (including the one where we store only clean dishes, no food) and were even crawling on us. My fiance and I went to war using Avon Skin-So-Soft as a weapon. Ants hate the smell of that stuff, so we sprayed it all over the apartment.
Luckily, they were not fire ants, but they are disgusting!!!
What he's saying is that the closest anyone in this country comes to being `fucked' is to have one car instead of two, two bedrooms instead of four, or a pentium II instead of a pentium IV. Even the `poor' have that much, plus refridgerators, air conditioning, cell phones, and all the other things that the poor in a non-capitalist system such as the Soviet Union could only dream of.
So if you want to call that `fucking over the little guy', go ahead -- just don't expect people to take you seriously.
Our company has had the exact same problem you described only with a tape backup. We are in the Pacific NW and ants are common. One day we went to do a backup of a machine and ants were crawling around like crazy. Upon using the canned air we showed the same result, ants carrying white eggs from the tape drive. We actually ended up scraping the tape drive and getting another one. I just think it's funny that someone else had the same situation. Maybe it's the heat generated, who knows.
Your kidding yourself -- there's no one in this country who couldn't have a computer (or a car, or a house), if those were there priorities.
If people choose to spend their money on other things instead, well, unless you're telling us that you have a right to tell them where to spend their money, well, that's how things end up.
The only thing sad about the situation is that it's exactly those who listen to idiots like you and blame others for their problems instead of working to make their lives better who suffer.
Fortunately for everyone, that's not very many, though it must burn you up that that's the case, eh?
In the winter, field mice are attracted to the warmth of the building. One of them decided to build its nest under the speaker of my AppleII! It was eating cough drops (wel, licking them) and leaving black poops all over the place. I took the machine outside in a plastic bag and let it out only to see it run back in the building within a second.
D'oh!
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Actually, you're sounding like a spoiled kid -- unlike you, I have lived in this world for a while, raised kids, and the whole lot.
I understand that you're pissed that your father made bad decisions. Really, I do. But it's sad that you extend this into calls for changes which would only make everyone suffer.
The fact is, capitalism, as practiced here, has done very well at providing a baseline. All socialism has ever accomplished is to set a ceiling -- and to show how low the floor could go, as the system dragged everyone down.
I'd almost feel tempted to shed a tear for the poor sap!
Especially if it was one of those bulletproof iBooks... it just seems kind of ironic that it's not ant proof.
I'm not conceited, conceit is a fault and I have no faults.
You can hurl insults all you want, but `uncaring' would be pursuing a system which has already been proven bankrupt by history, instead of the system which has brought more people more liberty, prosperity, and democracy than any other in the world's history.
Because Apple == apple... means food and sweet... dun your just get it??? Luckily Linux is using Penguine but not donuts...
Thanks
Neo Gigs
"Follow the white rabbit..."
More than a decade ago, when I was working at a repair shop, I serviced a Toshiba laptop that was infested with a small colony of tiny spiders! The owner was a woman, a freelance journalist, from the Maldive Islands, and the spiders were native to the Maldives. They had stowed away in the nice, warm, comfy laptop's innards and made the trip to California with her. Did any of them escape my big squishing thumb, to naturalize in sunny SoCal? Only time will tell....
Mark
Sure it does, do you know how many geeks live in unsanitary conditions with soda and cookies all arround their computers? And since there is no help section for "My Computer is Infested" someone has to report on it.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
iBooks have more ant_ennas :-)
Or maybe because you take for granted all that you have, you don't realize that you're already living better than the citizens of any socialist system ever have or ever will. Now you claim that you're not living better than you are now because `the rich people have all the wealth', but that claim doesn't make any sense:
See, let's take it for granted that the claim that people like you make is true, and the top 5% or so of society control 50% of the wealth (what this means when the top 5% is a constantly changing group isn't clear). So let's do what you'd seem to like, and kill them outright and `redistribute' (it sounds so much better than `steal') their hard-earned wealth.
Well, if that's 50% of all wealth, than that's enough to take everyone else and double their holdings. Now ask yourself honestly -- if your wealth was doubled tomorrow, how long would it take you to spend this money and be back where you started? A couple of months? A year? Two years?
And then what? The new top 5% doesn't hold nearly as much as the last one, so you're not going to get very far by killing them too, and in the meantime, you've destroyed an enormous pool of investments which had been hard at work creating jobs, growing new technologies and so forth, so everyone is doubly hurt by your plan.
Sure looks to me like you haven't thought this through all the way...
You argue that capitalism `hasn't been good' to your family, even as they enjoy a standard of living unheard of in the world's history, and miles beyond that enjoyed in any socialist state ever.
And then you suggest that we dismantle the engine which got us this far, and is getting us farther with each generation (you live better than your father ever did, and your children will have more than you do) in search of some pie-in-the-sky `redistribution' scheme, whose results history has already shown us a dozen times over to be tyrrany and disaster.
I guess you haven't really thought about this too much, have you?
i have always hear that you could lock a coloney of roaches in a tank with a TV and they could thrive... they may just need a lil water and air, but the TV is enough nutrition for them. maybe we should take big (escape-proof please) tanks of roaches and dump in all those old computers that are going to infect landfills.
The only time you have multiple queens is when they are immature larval stages, the Princess kills off her compentition, finds herself a nice young hunk of a male, gets pregnant then flies off to start her own colony.
I'm guessing you haven't lived in California where they are all just one big huge colony. I had the garbage bin under my sink infested once. I counted around 5 queens. They *were* huge compared to the rest of the thousands of worker ants. Granted, they didn't move that much (compared to the workers). They will not attack each other if you shovel one colony onto another.
"Would you rather have a playstation addicted dork wearing a star wars t-shirt?"
First off, a lot of rich people do indeed get there with hard work -- the number of millionaires in this country, for example, has been growing by leaps and bounds for years now, and even the fortune 500 has a fair amount of recent wealth in it.
But that's completely beside the point -- by obsessing on the idea that someone, somewhere might have more than you, you are both a.) ignoring the opportunities and wealth which you have in this society which you wouldn't have in any other society, and b.) ignoring the fact that this society, unlike others actually uses the wealth of the rich to produce wealth at all levels of society.
In short, you're laboring under two misconceptions: