[Dusteh]

I think everyone would mind a 2mb pic download, regardless of profession. The only time you want a 2mb image is for stcok photography.

[longisland6]

well there you go...

[Agricola]

Many people are still using dial up, America still has a significant percentage using slow connection speeds. Not only do you get slow connections with dial up but from sharing bandwidth with other people. Someone may work in an office, or be sat in internet cafe, where several hundred people are sharing a single connection.

There is also another factor to take into account, webrage. this is unfortunately a growing symptom of todays society, webrage is basically same as road rage, but with people venting their frustrations at slow connection speeds and long page download times.

Although there is such a thing as a target audience, it is often inaccurate to assume that everyone who wants to visit your site will fit within this model. If you are desigining for a buisness then obviously every sale counts, by having a large image size that takes more than like 8 seconds to load will result in the visitor leaving , thus resulting in lost business.

Another factor is most people don't care about images or graphics, look at th emost largest and popular sites, Amazon for example doesn't have anything flashy and is rather dull with layout, but its popular and works for it.