Sparticus Invented the internet

Very busy at work so another post I wrote a long time ago and never got around to posting as a reply to someone who annoyed me...

Look I'm fed up with this "we invented the internet" attitude. Lots of countries had their own nationwide computer networks, some educational, some military; it just so happens that Arpanet became the successful one.
Does it mean it was the better network? Maybe, but if Arpanet had never existed, then any of the other networks in existence in any other country could have become dominant and we'd still be surfing the net, just the underlying protocol may have been based on some ISO/OSI model instead of the IP model (for example). or on anything else any of those prototype networks used.

Maybe people feel that the US is vital to the internet? Fine unplug yourselves and see who suffers more. I'll truly miss google, wikipedia, archive.org - but life will carry on, I'll still keep sending emails to all my friends, I'll still make VoIP calls to my parents and I'll still keep getting new versions of the latest Linux distros.

I see the fact that Arpanet/TCPIP "won" as no more of a validation of the technology than VHS over betamax. Please remember that most trunk traffic still travels over ATM, and that most broadband connections run as ATM too; the link to both my place of work and my home are both IP over ATM.
An old rule always applies that given two competing products the American one will normally win - the Transputer, IBM PC, VHS etc.
On that note I'm waiting for some American company to rediscover the Transputer in the next decade and 30 years later I'll be here still online with people saying that Americans invented parallel computing like they claim they invented computers. ENIAC may have been the 1st by some definition but it was neither the first electronic computing device (Colossus) or the first stored program computer(Manchester Mark 1). It's a half way house and computers evolved - you might as well try and find when a chicken first evolved.

Not that I'm complaining of course - I'm employed by an American company, but I still find it fascinating how these things pan out.

Embryo/Abortion Rant

I wrote this a while ago as a rant after an online discussion and i never got the chance to post it. So here it is:

A human embryo has the potential to become a human being. An embryo has no claim to humanity other than the DNA/other gubbins it contains. Change the DNA for another chunk of DNA and you no longer have a human.
So does the information in the DNA count as humanity? I hope not, if we have sequenced the DNA of a human, then each copy of this I delete puts me as a murderer.

You cannot make judgement based on something's potential. The obvious example is I have the potential to be a murderer, but you don't arrest me. Any woman is equipped to be a prostitute, but you don't send her to jail.

When the day comes that we can take a computer representation of a cell and hook it up to a machine which will spin a cell from that, then every computer in the world will have the potential to be a father/mother.

Is it intelligence then? I'd argue most dogs show more intelligence than a new born baby, so why do they have different rights? How about disabled adults who either mentally or physically can't perform functions we'd expect of a human.

No, there is no scientific answer to when a human becomes a human; you might as well ask where a rainbow starts.