Is Your Network Not Reliable?

People build applications and systems assuming that latency is zero, right? This is something that's actually come up in my own interactive work. Time outs aren't a bad idea, but for an application to be able to tell you whether something is in the process of happening or not would be, i think, really valuable to users. The difference in responsiveness between graphic heavy web pages and more information oriented web pages can be quite noticeable to the user.