If you want to witness the power of slow, come visit me on my oil rig in the Falkland Islands.
I was in library school from '82 - '84. We had a MOdulator-DEModulator (as they always felt the need to explain it in those days) in our department library with the 300-baud connection. This is when some of the important academic and medical bibliographical databases were coming online; the idea that you could enter your search query on a teletype machine and reach the database of the National Library of Medicine in DC was a marvel.
To use the modem you had to fit the telephone handset into the two suction cup-like receptacles on top of the machine.
The worst part is when the 17 days are up you’ll still have a shitty game.
7 Hours and 27 Minutes, why didn’t this thing finish overnight?
And if you dialed the wrong number, you wound up getting a hair breadth from causing global thermonuclear warfare.
How about a nice game of chess ?
Is your download region in Steam’s settings listed as ‘Middle East’?
Your first mistake was playing Civ V. Stick with Civ IV. It’s a much better game.
6 Hours and 27 minutes to go, 1.9GB downloaded. I do not think I am using Steam, but Apple App Store.
Civ IV was fun, but I pretty well mastered it. In Civ V I just now won my first war.
1 hour and 46 minutes to go. Gosh, this sucks.
OK, got the main file. Now it is downloading some sort of editor program, 14 minutes to go!
There I got it, it says “installed.” Now I need the Angry Birds update.
Keep us posted. I’m on the edge of my stool.
Finally, a point on which you and I agree. Which means we aren’t even in YMMV territory here. CIV IV is better, it’s just a fact.
I wonder if the Apple App Store uses the same pipes as for people downloading iOS5. If so, you picked a particularly shitty time to try and download something from Apple.
I get about 700k down and maybe 200k up. Satellite.
But the kicker is the download allowance. 200mb in a 24 hour period. If you exceed that you get throttled down to dialup speeds. About 14k. Great fun let me tell you.
All done, but it does show you the idea that everyone has good internet is a poor model to build computer system on. Cloud computing? Not here, not yet.
Well, in fairness to the company, they probably don’t assume that everyone has good internet.
More likely, they assume (and probably correctly) that enough people have good internet to make their distribution model financially viable.
It’s OK. The file will still be downloading when you get back from the bathroom. 
Remember acoustic couplers? For the ankle-biters in the audience, you dialed the computer system on your own phone (traditional any color you want as long as it is black phones only please) and then crammed the headset of the phone in some rubber cups on the modem.
I’m really surprised they haven’t released a proper "Beyond The Sword- type expansion for Civ V. It took Civ IV from being an outstanding game already to One Of The Best Games Of All Time IMHO.