Keep repeating this mantra, Ryan: "Just three more months. Just three more months. Just three more months."

Oh, I'm counting the weeks, believe you me. I am so ready to blow this popsicle stand...

Yah BitTorrent is qute handy. Matt introduced it to me a while back and now I've got downloads going at work at all hours of the day.

As a Mandrake user, I feel your pain, but my understanding is that it's pretty standard practice for institutions like universities/colleges to jealously guard the openness of their ports to the outside world. I mean, when I was studying at the University of Bonn, even *SMTP* was blocked (talk about limiting basic uses of the Internet!). That's an extreme example (we also had a download quota of 2 gigs per month; anything more than that and they'd cap your bandwidth at about 20 kps), but I still don't think that Covenant's position on BitTorrent is as unreasonable as you present it, especially since it's only fairly recently really caught on for legal things like Mandrake ISOs (certainly not in the last "decade or two," more like one or two years).
That said, at this point the sysadmin needs to actually evaluate the security risk involved in openning the port used by BitTorrent (whatever it is; I don't feel like looking it up) and open it if possible. For the sake of the children.

Actually, it's my understanding that with the vast majority of American universities, their residence hall network is entirely open. You can run an FTP server if you think you can get away with it. Some of them are starting to impose bandwidth caps, especially on things like P2P, but it hasn't been until the RIAA went apeshit that they're imposed any actual technical restrictions on students' use of the Internet.

Hasn't "this RIAA apeshit" been going on at least since the days of Napster?

Nah, I was referring specifically to the recent bout of subpoenas and lawsuits directed against individuals. Shutting down corporate P2P networks had no effect on students' accounts through their universities.

Consider that Covenant could very easily increase their upload and download bandwidth to 10 mb and not pay a dime more than they're paying now. It would mean leaving bell-south though, and they made a big mistake and signed a contract making it necessary that they use bell-south internet for using bell-south phones. A really dumb move.

I freaking HATE how Covenant cache's everything. I get screwed up problems from all covenant users all the time because of that.

So ditch freaking Bell-South for their phones! That might cost a little bit more, but sheesh, to increase bandwidth by a factor of 6? There isn't really enough for normal use now. Frequently I'll watch a download that could easily run at 150K/s chug along at 8K/s, and I can only assume that it's because Covenant's servers are evening out the load. Why bother allowing downloads at all?

Is is not possible for you to do Ctrl-F5 to force IE to refresh from the server and not from cache?

No, because the cache here isn't on my computer. It isn't like it's refreshing from my history log. Whenever Covenant's servers see that I or anyone else is looking for someone it thinks it's already downloaded, it sends us there instead of to the net.

This is why I really like the system that Glasgow Uni has set up. They don't allow any chat messengers and there is no dorm network to speak of (only because most housing is spread throughout the city), but their speeds are incredible, and I can download whatever the hell I want (ok, DIVx and mp3s not included), as long as I don't save it to the harddrives.

I'm not looking forward to going back in time next semester.