When I interviewed Bram Cohen back in March I realized how brilliant BitTorrent was: a content-delivery mechanism that actually scales better than linearly. The more downloaders, the cheaper the cost per download. I’ve used BT on and off for a few months, but tonight I wanted to see the clip of John Stewart on CNN’s Crossfire (thanks, Dave). I clicked on the link and the download was painfully slow. Then I remembered — I recently re-initialized my firewall.

I forwarded ports 6881-6889 to my PC and re-started the download. Wow…superfast! If you have popular large objects, it’s awesome. But you already knew that, right?

And the Golden Rule of BitTorrent: When you’re done your download, don’t close the BitTorrent Window. Give unto others as you would have them give unto you. It costs you nothing.