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I think this will be a bit harder, as you don't really have control in what order the images are being loaded. They could be loaded in parallel for example. If you try to circumvent it by adding delay's on the server side you quickly block the browser as you will reach the maximum amount of parallel connections.
I don't think so. What you could do is have the webserver set up chunked encoding on a resource (say an image) and vary the size of the chunks for each user.
You could use this bookmarklet which translates all short URL's in to long ones. But then again maybe you do not trust longurlplease.com.
javascript:void(function(){if(typeof%20jQuery%20==%20'undefined'){var%20s=document.createElement('script');s.src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js;document.getElementsByTagName(head)[0].appendChild(s);}var%20l=document.createElement(script);l.src=http://www.longurlplease.com/js/jquery.longurlplease.js;document.getElementsByTagName(head)[0].appendChild(l);function%20runIfReady(){try{if($.longurlplease){%20$.longurlplease();%20clearInterval(interval);}}catch(e){alert(sadsda)}};%20var%20interval%20=%20window.setInterval(runIfReady,100);}())You should really take a look at Ajax.org, they show some of the smoothest interactive 3D javascript plots i have ever seen. I have just submitted it in the new section.
http://www.ajax.org/public/presentation/tae/presentation2.ht...
When you are optimizing your website, 60k is a lot, especially when this gets re downloaded on every page.
Client side optimizing is a big thing, by using CSS/JS compression, CSS sprites or late loading through stuff such as labjs you are talking about relatively tiny pieces. But you can feel this extra latency and it will show in your conversion and bounce rates.
Why is its 'boot time' such a selling point? Does anyone turn off their machines anyway?