The only way the internet could be coming from your own personal computer was if you hosted your own site, directly off of your personal computer. Meaning the URL that people visit to access your site would translate into your computers IP address and that you are streaming the data to them, rather than uploading the information to an offsite server. About 99.9999999999999999% of your average everyday people who have a personal web site.. or even about 90% of the businesses out there, upload their website data to a much much larger server (ie comcast, charter, aol, google, yahoo, excite, whoever hosts this site for yarr..and even then about 50% of those upload that data inturn to other companies that all they do is host websites for those companies). If you ever wonder about the pathing btwn your computer and the site you are accessing.. run a dos prompt and at the c:/ type traceroute
http://www.msn.com or whatever website you'd like to trace. This will show you all of the 'hops' that your querey is taking, and the ping btwn each hop. a lot of times this is a great diagnostic tool if a company or you personally are having a slow download/reaction time from a website. You can see if its something coming from your provider, or if its something from an outside hub. There are also several programs that you can download that run this same utility, but in a more user friendly interface that a dos prompt. You can search for one at
http://www.tucows.com if you'd like. Because of this system, it could be entirely possible for someone in say, china to access a given persons website much faster than a person in the house right next door. It all depends on the bandwidth of each ISP hosting each hub that the signal travels through for upload and downloads. This can be seen when on occassions people in certain areas of the country get disconnected from the game, or have trouble accessing certain web sites, while others have no problems at all. Its all because of routing issues and a certain hub going down. Think of it like airports.. when you leave some airports you can get a direct flight from one city to another. leave from another airport in the same city and you have to make several stops to acheive the same end point, but it takes much much longer.
The reason no one answered this question for that guy is because its truly a sad and scary question. Not only was he online, posting on a message board with absolutely NO clue how the internet works, but that there's 2 of them, living in the same household, debating over the issue. I can't say I'm entirely shocked though, given my experience working in the restaurant/customer service industry for over 10 years, I've seen more than my share of, as mythrandir so loves to cal it, the 'algae' of society.
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