With bit torrent files are broken up into a whole bunch of chuncks. 
These chunks then have checksums run against them and put into a torrent 
file.  When you grab the torrent file your computer grabs chunks of the 
file from everyone else that is downloading the file, not just the 
server.  It doesn't grab then from start to end like a normal download 
it grabs them out of order and in parallel.  Your computer can verify 
that people are sending you unaltered chunks of the file by comparing 
the checksums of the received chunks to the original checksums in the 
torrent file.  If they match, the chuck is kept, if they down, the chuck 
is downloaded from someone else until it does match the original checksum.

Because of the way that everyone that is downloading the file is also 
participating in uploading to other people downloading, Torrents really 
shine when you have a rush on a particular file.  In the old days, when 
the latest version of a distro came out you might as well wait a while 
before downloading it, because you were going to get less than a modem's 
worth of speed... it could and would take days to download the ISO.
Then along came torrents and everyone could now download parts of the 
ISO image from everyone else.  With bittorrent in the picture this means 
that the first day a distro comes out is now actually the best time to 
download since there is a lot more total available bandwidth than later 
on when it's not in such high demand.

Brian Cluff

On 01/25/2013 10:45 AM, Michael Havens wrote:
> how is downloading from a torrent better than just from a single location?
> :-)~MIKE~(-:
>
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