Technology, how much do you know?

When I talk to most people they have many misconceptions about modern day technology, and only a very basic understanding of how the the Internet works. There are 3 major factors to how we, the consumers, access the technologies bounty.

1. Our ISP (Internet Service Provider) and their Terms & Conditions (TaC)
2. Our average Download / Upload speeds
3. Your Computers overall 'power'

Don't forget that I am a heavy internet user and that I take advantage of everything possible, for this reason I will have more gripe with these problems than an average user. However it will provide an insight into the problems that those who use such sites as "thepiratebay" or "rapidshare" suffer.

ISP's are either the savour or destroyer of your enjoyment of the internet. They control your top speed, whether you can download at all during peek times, if you can access certain sites and more. 'Peek time' is the annoyance ISP's provide, with the phone peek times increase the cost of calls however for ISP's peek time means a massive capping of your internet connection to generally 200kb. This only affects those downloading with a 2mb+ connection, others don't notice, yet I remember numerous times I wanted to watch a program on Sky Player or BBC iPlayer and *WHAM* my connection is slapped down from 900kb/s to 200kb/s.

Downloading speeds is one of the major misconceptions. Many people feel the higher the better, however once you reach around 8mb regardless of how much faster you go you won't see an increase in surfing speed (Except on heavily flash'd sites) or a better ping when playing games against people around the world whether on the PC or Xbox 360. Going above 10mb to say 50mb on fibre option broadband you'd be paying for something quite worthless to the average user. However for the 'pirates' you'd be laughing manically.

Computer power relates to how fast you're pc can process programs, now days this more relates to whether you have Blu-ray players or a surround sound system than CPU speed. This is due to most computers now having enough power to easily surf the web and run numerous word processing programs.

However when you put all these things together it can either mean you have a very quick method to access illegal content or you don't. The way human nature is, the easier to do something the more likely we are to do it.