When you use a credit or debit card at an ATM or in a store, a good chunk of those transactions now go through the internet. In 1995, they all dialed up/used leased lines to a packet switched network (DATAPAC, TYMNET, etc.) or a terminal bank. Your hypothetical Sally/Sam the Wallmart Greeter who doesn't use the internet works at a store where ordering, inventory, POS and other essential activities require an Internet connection.

Actually, no.

Modems are/were rated in actual bits in decimal with no base-2/base-10 shenanigans. So 56k was actually 56000... Or more then likely you actually got 44000.

http://www.nemertes.com/studies/internet_interrupted_why_architectural_limitations_will_fracture_net

Not nearly as bad as the Sunday Times article...

2450DPI on an inkjet printer is almost always a marketing number. Usually, they consider the dyes/inks separately. The paper itself can't deal with points that far either. The purpose of having higher DPIs on a printer is:

(a) Marketing.
(b) Reducing the visibility of the pixel artifacts (i.e.: supersample, blur, spray on the paper).

Specific special case. Basically large 3D matrices of doubles.

3D MRI registration using X-correllation as objective function as implemented by DL Collins et al. It's available as part of the MINC package.

Fink and MacPorts both have the same problems:

1) It's impossible to successfully compile anything complex with 64-bit compiler flags (i.e.: -arch x86_64 -m64) since all libraries will be built without said flags... So you have to manually figure out all the dependencies yourself or backtrack the 32-bit install piecemeal.

2) X11 is/was often broken and needed XFree86 compiled instead of Apple's X11. This might have been dealt with in all cases now.

3) They are hopelessly behind every major O/S release. It took forever to have a 10.5 compatible fink and/or macport that was officially released.

All in all, I had to build a 64-bit application chain for 10.5/Intel and it took me two days to get ~30 packages compiled and linked successfully and fink/macport couldn't be used. I often had to reverse engineer fink mac patches for the packages that it did have, it's silly that I couldn't use fink to build them in 64-bit!

The rationale for a 64-bit build was a 40% performance improvement.

If you need guaranteed bandwidth, you buy it. We receive hundreds of MRIs per months at work and we don't have a residential DSL. We have an optical fiber link (GigE) with an ultimate "Internet" (for what it's worth in a BGP world) link around 300mbps 95-percentile. Guess what, we get our contracted bandwidth... All the time. It's not exactly cheap though, but then we're not downloading porn torrents...