I'm surprised modern browsers don't just natively support the torrent protocol in some fashion. Even if they don't seed, it'd still make file distribution a lot easier for smaller entities that can maybe throw up an FTP but couldn't handle full distribution.

Did you like...just read the first sentence of his/her post and then ignore the rest?

first ++pre

BT also provides FTTH and in many areas Fibre-on-demand (i.e. fibre isn't installed but you can pay to get it installed if you want). I dare say france is in a similar position of pure fibre in some areas, hybrid fibre/coax in others and pure copper in the more remote areas.

Very doubtful, the reason you're getting "up to 3.0Mbit" is because it's largely a guess based on how far away from the Exchange they think you are. The 1.5Mbit is likely because there's more copper than they anticipated, the copper is of low quality or you're actually using an aluminium line which is even worse.
Still, the closer you are to the fibre, the less significant the drop-off is. ADSL, ADSL2 and VDSL2+ all end up at about the same speed after a certain length - http://www.internetstreams.co.uk/images/vdsl2_downstream_500w.gif and it seems as though you are beyond this length to be only getting "up to" 3Mbit. If this technology were in play, you should be a lot closer to the DP and thus length is less of an issue. Line quality still will be, but it means you've got a much better chance of hitting well above 500Mbit, assuming the degradation is about the same.

You are quite correct, it's the MAC address of the router and it's for this exact reason that most home routers let you change the MAC address (As some ISP's are particularly fussy about a MAC address changing).
I'll be honest, I'm not 100% certain how it works in a PPoE environment because in the UK at least, very few ISP's actually use PPoE and it's generally possible to change your equipment whenever you want. Our big Cable ISP is the exception to this and you HAVE to use their equipment, but you can just treat it as a dumb modem and the router just connects via Ethernet and the DHCP requests are forwarded on.

In any case, while I agree that the OP is lacking in some basic networking knowledge, I do think they're likely correct in what they're saying about MAC changing causing an IP change.

Because the ISP uses DHCP. Please go learn how DHCP works - it leases an IP address to the MAC address, otherwise how else can it communicate with a device that doesn't have an IP address? That MAC address will then be stored on the DHCP server until the lease expires. So if you change the MAC address of your router, suddenly you'll get a new IP address because the previous IP was leased to a different MAC. Change the MAC back and you'll have the previous IP address, if it hasn't expired yet.

Source: I used to work for a large ISP.

Ah yes, I can see how that could be read differently. I fear I may have jumped the gun on this one (apologies to the above AC if that was your intention all along).

Yes and I suppose when he said "contributes", he wasn't talking about anything like the most powerful economic and social tool ever invented.

The speed of your internet connection is irrelevant to the speed of your home network connection. There is such a thing as a LAN.

The world wide web was invented by a Britt, you ignorant twat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

It also wouldn't be backwards compatible, either, unless it c.

Or just use a longer PIN than 4 digits. Even a 5 digit pin would extend 20 hours to about a week.

That's not true, the spec was finalised in 2003 and CPU's were capable of playback in 2004 (at admittedly high usage). The first MOBILE chips capable of hardware playback were around 2006 if I recall.

However, this time around is different. Qualcomm has already demonstrated h.265 playback on an S4 Pro earlier this year (For those not familliar with mobile processors, the S4 pro is essentially last year's model, the 600 featured in the HTC One and Galaxy S4 is much faster - and the 800 coming in devices this year is faster still). That's in software and works just fine. They said they'll build hardware decoding into their chips as soon as h.265 is finalised.

This is true and it does highlight the "shift" I mentioned. However, that doesn't account for what's actually in use today. Do a quick survey of the people you know and very few are running 20"+ monitors (those that still have PC's, that is).