OS X takes this even farther, as its display technology is in part based on PDF. Any print dialog has a button labeled "Save as PDF", even if you don't have Acrobat installed.
I have more than a gigabyte of saved journal articles that are in PDF format and I can search the lot, print them, archive them, etc. The scientific community is moving toward a digital publishing system that will make it less necessary in the future to build huge libraries to hold printed journals. At least one journal I look at (J Cell Biol) has made its online version the definitive version, and the institution I work at (Wash. Univ. Sch. of Med. in St. Louis) is already starting to subscribe to many journals online only.
I'm all for that, as it saves tons of time: no need to go to the library, locate books, photocopy desired articles -- and we even can print the PDFs in color and pay a lot less than the library's comparatively high per-sheet charges for their color copiers. And the output looks better, too (perfectly aligned and everything.)
Take a look at NIH's PubMedCentral if you'd like to see some examples.
Yeah, it's silly. If a game requires the CD, why can't it run from the CD and use minimal disc space? If a game wants the CD, fine, but it should justify that request. If it doesn't (and copies everything to the drive but requires the CD anyway), then I don't feel bad about using no-cd patched executables. I don't have any pirated games, but I think it's reasonable to ask that applications earn the disk space they use (Windows included, but that's a totally different argument.)
For that matter... why aren't we getting games on DVDs? I bought Doom 3 and had forgotten how annoying the installation disk swap dance really is -- and DVD readers are so cheap these days that it would make sense to bundle a DVD into the case (those double cases can hold four discs, and D3 comes on three) but I could not find an option to purchase a DVD version. Apple does this for iLife (I use my OS X Powerbook for non-gaming purposes) because some of the apps (iDVD, GarageBand) are very large.
And... internet access required for a LAN? Why? Just because something is a "network" does not mean it's part of teh intarweb. The "L" in LAN stands for "local", after all. Some programmer must have forgotten to look that up.
Can't we just buy it normally in a store and not use the online auth mechanism unless we're doing single player or local LAN play? If I buy Half-Life 2 I want to just be able to do it that way, and 99% of my play time is spent quietly sipping soda and munching chocolate and playing games at my own pace.
Hey cool. My longest-standing friend (e.g. the one I've known the longest and am still in touch with) used to sysop Orca's Ocean. We regularly lament the decline of BBSes. Here in St. Louis, they disappeared once the Internet started taking hold among the general public.
Personally, I'm so sick of technological "change" and increased monitoring and ads being shoved in my face and everything being so complicated that I think Anne McCaffrey had the right idea in her Pern books: get a private fleet together, get the hell off this mudhole, and start over again with a simpler society that doesn't have all the baggage and complexity that modern society comes with. Take your ship apart so you can't go back (worked for Cortez, right?) and get rid of any notions of having second thoughts.
I think I'd be happy there. Just give me a telescope and a place to live in the middle of nowhere -- with no big cities and their annoyingly bright and wasteful lights, the seeing will be much better -- and I'll be happy. Sure, that particular planet comes with "taxation" in the form of supplying their version of an air force with what it needs to keep going, but hey, there's no such thing as a free lunch, according to a different sci-fi author.;)
Sometimes, the best sci-fi is the sci-fi that says "Wait a minute..." instead of advocating going through with all kinds of complicated stuff just because we can. It doesn't necessarily mean we should.
There doesn't seem to be a mention of Armadillo Aerospace here, and since Carmack runs the company, I think it should be mentioned in a "what we're up to" story, even if the story is basically about id Software. So, here it is:
Armadillo Aerospace is based in Mesquite, Texas, and is a rocketry research firm that is one of those trying to win the X-Prize. The Armadillo prototype crashed during its last flight test and it doesn't look like they'll be able to compete for the prize because of what it will take to get their vehicle rebuilt and flying again (in terms of money and time), but they'll keep going and see what they can do to reach the point where they're ready to launch manned flights.
And there's a video available of the crash in MPEG format.
I'm still expecting the Scaled Composites team (led by Burt Rutan) to win, but I'm still intrigued by AA and the Canadian Arrow team; I'm still dubious about the DaVinci Project, which has yet to actually fly anything.
This is exactly what the X-Prize is meant to do, though: spur the development of a new industry by providing an incentive for privately held teams and individuals to step in and make space accessible to the public.
I applaud Carmack for not being afraid to try. It's amazing what ingenuity can do even when you don't have the deep pockets of government-funded space efforts. Or maybe especially when; necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.
And yes, I bought the game; I'm proud to say that I, no matter if it was not done directly, helped to support an effort to put civilians into space with civilian launch systems.
And you would be correct. Statistics say, for instance, that more people are killed in automobile accidents every year than are killed in aircraft crashes (no matter what their cause). Yet, sadly, public perception is such that air travel is seen as a good way to get yourself killed than driving to work even though the opposite is true. I credit this to, in general, the uninformedness of the general public.
For instance, someone I know insisted the Concorde was a deathtrap after its fatal crash despite my attempts to explain, never mind the fact that driving your car over metal shards in the road will probably pucture your tires and could cause a severe blowout, which could then cause you to lose control of the car and crash. Just because it's a snazzy jet doesn't mean it's immune to the same dangers that can endanger passengers in ANYTHING with tires.
I'm not against manned spaceflight -- I'm actually a lifelong space buff -- I just become frustrated when I find that people don't understand what the risk levels are, that risk IS necessary (the current fear of doing anything risky whatsoever drives me nuts), and the fact that people just have misguided ideas of where the real dangers in life lie.
I got some 512MB PC3200 DDR RAM modules for $75 or so each online, from a reputable warehouse/discount outlet. Everyone else wants at least $100 for them. Since I have a motherboard that has two DDR slots and two SDRAM slots (you can use one or the other but not both simultaneously) I also looked at SDRAM, since I figured it'd be cheaper. Nope! Same prices.
If commonly-needed computer components were being sold at such low profit margins, we wouldn't be getting ripped off so badly (last time I upgraded my machine a while back I got 512MB of RAM for... $50? I don't recall anymore) but the prices never seem to go down, which they should be as the industry matures. They're not.
Not every astronaut is a "hero" -- but it does take a lot of guts to do something that you know might kill you and willingly do it anyway, and those of us who do things for the love of it believe that if we die doing them, we'll be going out doing something we love and not quietly in our sleep at the age of 101.
Jimmy Buffett once said that "Most are fine as oysters, while some become pearls." He spoke of Charles Lindbergh and Elvis Presley; two people who had a dream and went out and changed the world with what they did. Heroes? Probably not. Afraid? Heck no. Brave? Heck yes -- to stake everything on a dream takes guts.
Just curious here -- what body is the '81 Cutlass Supreme on? When I was young we had a diesel Cutlass -- ugh, what a piece of junk. GM's crappy diesel engines are largely responsible for the current funk the diesel market is in here; that and the high-sulfur diesel fuel we're stuck with til 2006. In Europe, 40% of the market goes to diesels. Here, it's a joke; the only passenger car diesels on the market right now are the Volkswagen Golf/Jetta/New Beetle/Passat TDIs (the Touareg is a large SUV and falls in the truck class) and the Mercedes E-class. While this will expand soon (diesel Focus, for instance) it's not soon enough for me.
I saw a good show on new car technologies on PBS earlier this week and hydrogen is looking mighty interesting, especially in Iceland, which gets a lot of its other power from geothermal plants.
I'm hoping my next car will be a Golf TDI -- I've got a Golf 2.0 right now because the TDI wasn't widely available enough when I was in the market. Great car. People still think it's brand-new after 4 years!
It doesn't seem to me like they were using it for a public e-mail service. E-mail service isn't the same as a newsletter that goes to a limited group of people, etc. That doesn't seem "close enough" to the current expectation among people I know that "gmail" means "web-based email service run by Google". So... they might have a case. I'm not a lawyer, but that's what it seems like to me.
How can you reserve someone an airfare and not reserve a hotel room for that? Even the secretaries where I work (who do that for visiting professors/speakers/etc) don't mess that up much, from what I know of how that stuff is handled. Google should have paid for you since by the time they called you, the trip was uncancellable. Did they? I hope you raised enough of a fuss to get that part of your money back, too. (I bet just one e-mail isn't enough...) If a secretary screwed up that badly, the secretary should have been given a stern talking-to. Like you say, what they did to you doesn't reflect very well on the company as a whole.
Mine (Finescale Modeler and Model Railroader) both do this. (They are, I admit, published by the same company and usually show up on the same day.) I wondered about this myself. Somewhere, I read that the date on the cover is the date the magazine is taken off newsstands... but that seems odd. You would think that the month on the cover is the one in which it appears on stands and goes to subscribers' houses.
Here's a weird one: FSM does not get published in August, but MR does. I've never personally seen another magazine that does that; they're either every month or every month and you get 12 or 6 issues, depending. Not 11 or 5.
A stick of RAM says it's an idiot gawking at the accident on the other side of an unconnected, separated by median, divided highway that shouldn't be affected by wrecks on the other side in any way whatsoever.
So, does that not mean that rubbernecking is a ticketable offense? I'm pretty sure it does! And if it doesn't, well dangit, it SHOULD mean that!
I've already settled on H-rated (130MPH or better) tires for my next new-tire purchase. My vehicle is aerodynamically limited to a speed slightly lower than this, and I have never found myself exceeding 110MPH. Ever. But you are quite correct about the fact that many drivers don't consider their tires part of the safety system of their car, or even something that has limits and that requires maintenance.
So, I encourage anyone who reads this comment to look at the following page, which explains how to determine your tires' maximum rated speed. Don't exceed that speed or even approach it unless you are in danger of injury or death, or in imminent danger of inflicting same upon others.
Find out how fast your car is physically capable of traveling and buy tires which are rated for that speed or higher. (You can find this info in reviews -- car magazine testers will push cars to their actual limits, which may not always be published in the owners' manual for liability reasons.) There may be an aerodynamic limit separate from the limit imposed by a governor -- if the aerodynamic limit is higher than the governed limit, use that as your baseline in case you ever modify the car to remove the governor or in case it fails, however remotely unlikely that is.
They're also not the ones that authorize subpoenas. The court system does that. The court system is thus the party which is not investigating things that actually have potential to cause real harm.
It was a bunch of people who were refusing to pass a slow old guy in a Crown Vic. They weren't actual vigilantes -- just people who were not passing someone who was going blow the limit and also not moving over so others could.
Except when it's artificially low just to get "free money". e.g. speed traps. When that happens, the limits aren't set by engineering recommendations but by the research that shows what limit generates the most tickets. There are local roads in many cities whose speed limit is set 30 (!) mph lower than what is determined safe by analyzing the road and conditions.
Anyway, "driving at what feels like safe conditions" doesn't necessarily mean that drivers are moving at 90mph or above, which seems to be the misconception here. Driving at the speed for which a road was designed isn't irresponsible. Driving significantly below it is. And no road is perfectly flat, and even if there's an effort to minimize blind spots that cause accidents, some are still there. That's where the crashes are going to happen.
Common situations like the ones I described in earlier posts are ones in which cars were moving at a prevailing speed of 70mph on a road perfectly safe for this speed to the AVERAGE driver (which by definition includes those with inflated self-opinions), except for a pack doing 50-55. Exactly. In the right, left and center lanes. (The speed limit on the road when I encountered the pack I'm thinking of? 65.)
The minimum was 45, so the slowpokes technically weren't doing anything wrong (they aren't likely to get a ticket) -- unless there's a "slower traffic must stay in the slow lane unless passing" rule. Which there was in this case.
They were driving slowly why? Because an old man in a white Crown Vic was driving slowly. No one was passing him even though other drivers, traveling at 65-70mph, were bunching up in legitimate passing lanes attempting to pass... despite a law in force in the area stating that drivers must remain in the slow lane except when passing, which none of them were doing.
Some pages that have more to say about proper speed limit selection and driver behavior and what's mechanically safe/unsafe (stopping distances etc):
It's not a jam, not that kind of pack. It's a group of people who know that they are moving more slowly than prevailing conditions, yet who have not respected the rules of the road by moving into the slow lane and permitting others to move on by. There is clear road ahead of the pack where cars are moving at the optimum speed drivers have chosen for that road and the conditions -- something they do by instinct (studies of driver behavior support that.)
Some states are actually making it a ticketable offense to fail to move to the slow lane except when passing because of the fact that this kind of behavior is causing crashes.
Studies have repeatedly shown that drivers will drive at a speed that they deem to be safe in the vehicle they are driving under the conditions that they are driving in on the road that they are driving on. "Too fast" is a condition in which a driver feels that conditions are no longer safe.
Drivers will individually select speeds that vary relatively little because a perception of too much difference in speed between your car and other cars contributes to a feeling of unsafe conditions.
A pack of cars that covers the entire road yet fails to account for this fact is a pack of reckless drivers because of their disregard for the safety of other drivers. If you do not want to maintain the speed collectively selected by others as the "right" one, move right and allow others to pass.
I came across one of these mobs earlier this week and it never occurred to any of the drivers in it that slower traffic needs to move right, not take up the middle and left lanes as well.
A pack of slow cars indeed dangerous -- other drivers coming up over a hill at the prevailing speed aren't going to be able to see it and may plow into the rear of one of the pack cars, causing a chain reaction accident (I've seen several accidents of that sort).
If you are driving slower than the rest of the traffic on a road, then you are basically an obstruction in the road which other drivers have to get around. Since they do this by moving in front of other drivers in the next lane over as they see you, they are creating a necessity for the other driver to brake. Not all drivers are equally skilled and one or more may panic brake, causing rear-end collisions. You are assuming that all drivers are equally skilled, which they are not.
You wouldn't consider it safe to just park in the travel lane of a major road, would you? If there's enough of a relative difference between your speed and that of other cars, you are basically doing exactly that.
I know how to drive pretty well and I've gotten really tired of idiots who insist on doing 60 whenever everyone else is doing 80, including me (because blending in with the flow of traffic is the safest thing to do unless the speed of that traffic is inherently unsafe) and creating a choke point, because I have to either dodge their stupid ass by risking cutting off some other driver, or running the risk of getting myself rear-ended if somebody coming up behind me doesn't see the jam you created by not considering the safety of everyone else on the road.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazing... I share my birthday with Linux! (but I'm 29 today, not 10!)
OS X takes this even farther, as its display technology is in part based on PDF. Any print dialog has a button labeled "Save as PDF", even if you don't have Acrobat installed.
I have more than a gigabyte of saved journal articles that are in PDF format and I can search the lot, print them, archive them, etc. The scientific community is moving toward a digital publishing system that will make it less necessary in the future to build huge libraries to hold printed journals. At least one journal I look at (J Cell Biol) has made its online version the definitive version, and the institution I work at (Wash. Univ. Sch. of Med. in St. Louis) is already starting to subscribe to many journals online only.
I'm all for that, as it saves tons of time: no need to go to the library, locate books, photocopy desired articles -- and we even can print the PDFs in color and pay a lot less than the library's comparatively high per-sheet charges for their color copiers. And the output looks better, too (perfectly aligned and everything.)
Take a look at NIH's PubMedCentral if you'd like to see some examples.
Yeah, it's silly. If a game requires the CD, why can't it run from the CD and use minimal disc space? If a game wants the CD, fine, but it should justify that request. If it doesn't (and copies everything to the drive but requires the CD anyway), then I don't feel bad about using no-cd patched executables. I don't have any pirated games, but I think it's reasonable to ask that applications earn the disk space they use (Windows included, but that's a totally different argument.)
... why aren't we getting games on DVDs? I bought Doom 3 and had forgotten how annoying the installation disk swap dance really is -- and DVD readers are so cheap these days that it would make sense to bundle a DVD into the case (those double cases can hold four discs, and D3 comes on three) but I could not find an option to purchase a DVD version. Apple does this for iLife (I use my OS X Powerbook for non-gaming purposes) because some of the apps (iDVD, GarageBand) are very large.
... internet access required for a LAN? Why? Just because something is a "network" does not mean it's part of teh intarweb. The "L" in LAN stands for "local", after all. Some programmer must have forgotten to look that up.
For that matter
And
Can't we just buy it normally in a store and not use the online auth mechanism unless we're doing single player or local LAN play? If I buy Half-Life 2 I want to just be able to do it that way, and 99% of my play time is spent quietly sipping soda and munching chocolate and playing games at my own pace.
Hey cool. My longest-standing friend (e.g. the one I've known the longest and am still in touch with) used to sysop Orca's Ocean. We regularly lament the decline of BBSes. Here in St. Louis, they disappeared once the Internet started taking hold among the general public.
Personally, I'm so sick of technological "change" and increased monitoring and ads being shoved in my face and everything being so complicated that I think Anne McCaffrey had the right idea in her Pern books: get a private fleet together, get the hell off this mudhole, and start over again with a simpler society that doesn't have all the baggage and complexity that modern society comes with. Take your ship apart so you can't go back (worked for Cortez, right?) and get rid of any notions of having second thoughts.
;)
I think I'd be happy there. Just give me a telescope and a place to live in the middle of nowhere -- with no big cities and their annoyingly bright and wasteful lights, the seeing will be much better -- and I'll be happy. Sure, that particular planet comes with "taxation" in the form of supplying their version of an air force with what it needs to keep going, but hey, there's no such thing as a free lunch, according to a different sci-fi author.
Sometimes, the best sci-fi is the sci-fi that says "Wait a minute..." instead of advocating going through with all kinds of complicated stuff just because we can. It doesn't necessarily mean we should.
There doesn't seem to be a mention of Armadillo Aerospace here, and since Carmack runs the company, I think it should be mentioned in a "what we're up to" story, even if the story is basically about id Software. So, here it is:
Armadillo Aerospace is based in Mesquite, Texas, and is a rocketry research firm that is one of those trying to win the X-Prize. The Armadillo prototype crashed during its last flight test and it doesn't look like they'll be able to compete for the prize because of what it will take to get their vehicle rebuilt and flying again (in terms of money and time), but they'll keep going and see what they can do to reach the point where they're ready to launch manned flights.
Armadillo Aerospace's X Prize Prototype Crashes
And there's a video available of the crash in MPEG format.
I'm still expecting the Scaled Composites team (led by Burt Rutan) to win, but I'm still intrigued by AA and the Canadian Arrow team; I'm still dubious about the DaVinci Project, which has yet to actually fly anything.
This is exactly what the X-Prize is meant to do, though: spur the development of a new industry by providing an incentive for privately held teams and individuals to step in and make space accessible to the public.
I applaud Carmack for not being afraid to try. It's amazing what ingenuity can do even when you don't have the deep pockets of government-funded space efforts. Or maybe especially when; necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.
And yes, I bought the game; I'm proud to say that I, no matter if it was not done directly, helped to support an effort to put civilians into space with civilian launch systems.
And you would be correct. Statistics say, for instance, that more people are killed in automobile accidents every year than are killed in aircraft crashes (no matter what their cause). Yet, sadly, public perception is such that air travel is seen as a good way to get yourself killed than driving to work even though the opposite is true. I credit this to, in general, the uninformedness of the general public.
For instance, someone I know insisted the Concorde was a deathtrap after its fatal crash despite my attempts to explain, never mind the fact that driving your car over metal shards in the road will probably pucture your tires and could cause a severe blowout, which could then cause you to lose control of the car and crash. Just because it's a snazzy jet doesn't mean it's immune to the same dangers that can endanger passengers in ANYTHING with tires.
I'm not against manned spaceflight -- I'm actually a lifelong space buff -- I just become frustrated when I find that people don't understand what the risk levels are, that risk IS necessary (the current fear of doing anything risky whatsoever drives me nuts), and the fact that people just have misguided ideas of where the real dangers in life lie.
I got some 512MB PC3200 DDR RAM modules for $75 or so each online, from a reputable warehouse/discount outlet. Everyone else wants at least $100 for them. Since I have a motherboard that has two DDR slots and two SDRAM slots (you can use one or the other but not both simultaneously) I also looked at SDRAM, since I figured it'd be cheaper. Nope! Same prices.
... $50? I don't recall anymore) but the prices never seem to go down, which they should be as the industry matures. They're not.
If commonly-needed computer components were being sold at such low profit margins, we wouldn't be getting ripped off so badly (last time I upgraded my machine a while back I got 512MB of RAM for
Not every astronaut is a "hero" -- but it does take a lot of guts to do something that you know might kill you and willingly do it anyway, and those of us who do things for the love of it believe that if we die doing them, we'll be going out doing something we love and not quietly in our sleep at the age of 101.
Jimmy Buffett once said that "Most are fine as oysters, while some become pearls." He spoke of Charles Lindbergh and Elvis Presley; two people who had a dream and went out and changed the world with what they did. Heroes? Probably not. Afraid? Heck no. Brave? Heck yes -- to stake everything on a dream takes guts.
Just curious here -- what body is the '81 Cutlass Supreme on? When I was young we had a diesel Cutlass -- ugh, what a piece of junk. GM's crappy diesel engines are largely responsible for the current funk the diesel market is in here; that and the high-sulfur diesel fuel we're stuck with til 2006. In Europe, 40% of the market goes to diesels. Here, it's a joke; the only passenger car diesels on the market right now are the Volkswagen Golf/Jetta/New Beetle/Passat TDIs (the Touareg is a large SUV and falls in the truck class) and the Mercedes E-class. While this will expand soon (diesel Focus, for instance) it's not soon enough for me.
I saw a good show on new car technologies on PBS earlier this week and hydrogen is looking mighty interesting, especially in Iceland, which gets a lot of its other power from geothermal plants.
I'm hoping my next car will be a Golf TDI -- I've got a Golf 2.0 right now because the TDI wasn't widely available enough when I was in the market. Great car. People still think it's brand-new after 4 years!
It doesn't seem to me like they were using it for a public e-mail service. E-mail service isn't the same as a newsletter that goes to a limited group of people, etc. That doesn't seem "close enough" to the current expectation among people I know that "gmail" means "web-based email service run by Google". So ... they might have a case. I'm not a lawyer, but that's what it seems like to me.
How can you reserve someone an airfare and not reserve a hotel room for that? Even the secretaries where I work (who do that for visiting professors/speakers/etc) don't mess that up much, from what I know of how that stuff is handled. Google should have paid for you since by the time they called you, the trip was uncancellable. Did they? I hope you raised enough of a fuss to get that part of your money back, too. (I bet just one e-mail isn't enough...) If a secretary screwed up that badly, the secretary should have been given a stern talking-to. Like you say, what they did to you doesn't reflect very well on the company as a whole.
I've gotten a ton more of those in the last week than in a long time... it's not just me, then?
BTW, I get it even more dirt cheaply, and legally. I work at a university. Bwahahah.
Mine (Finescale Modeler and Model Railroader) both do this. (They are, I admit, published by the same company and usually show up on the same day.) I wondered about this myself. Somewhere, I read that the date on the cover is the date the magazine is taken off newsstands ... but that seems odd. You would think that the month on the cover is the one in which it appears on stands and goes to subscribers' houses.
Here's a weird one: FSM does not get published in August, but MR does. I've never personally seen another magazine that does that; they're either every month or every month and you get 12 or 6 issues, depending. Not 11 or 5.
Anyone know?
A stick of RAM says it's an idiot gawking at the accident on the other side of an unconnected, separated by median, divided highway that shouldn't be affected by wrecks on the other side in any way whatsoever.
So, does that not mean that rubbernecking is a ticketable offense? I'm pretty sure it does! And if it doesn't, well dangit, it SHOULD mean that!
Sorry -- 130mph OR LESS. Though if you've followed the link, you should have been able to spot the typo yourself. :)
And incidentally, also keep in mind that you shouldn't be going 110mph unless you're on a track! Never do so on public roads.
I've already settled on H-rated (130MPH or better) tires for my next new-tire purchase. My vehicle is aerodynamically limited to a speed slightly lower than this, and I have never found myself exceeding 110MPH. Ever. But you are quite correct about the fact that many drivers don't consider their tires part of the safety system of their car, or even something that has limits and that requires maintenance.
So, I encourage anyone who reads this comment to look at the following page, which explains how to determine your tires' maximum rated speed. Don't exceed that speed or even approach it unless you are in danger of injury or death, or in imminent danger of inflicting same upon others.
Find out how fast your car is physically capable of traveling and buy tires which are rated for that speed or higher. (You can find this info in reviews -- car magazine testers will push cars to their actual limits, which may not always be published in the owners' manual for liability reasons.) There may be an aerodynamic limit separate from the limit imposed by a governor -- if the aerodynamic limit is higher than the governed limit, use that as your baseline in case you ever modify the car to remove the governor or in case it fails, however remotely unlikely that is.
Here is the link:
Tire Tech - Tire Size Information
They're also not the ones that authorize subpoenas. The court system does that. The court system is thus the party which is not investigating things that actually have potential to cause real harm.
It was a bunch of people who were refusing to pass a slow old guy in a Crown Vic. They weren't actual vigilantes -- just people who were not passing someone who was going blow the limit and also not moving over so others could.
Except when it's artificially low just to get "free money". e.g. speed traps. When that happens, the limits aren't set by engineering recommendations but by the research that shows what limit generates the most tickets. There are local roads in many cities whose speed limit is set 30 (!) mph lower than what is determined safe by analyzing the road and conditions.
... despite a law in force in the area stating that drivers must remain in the slow lane except when passing, which none of them were doing.
Anyway, "driving at what feels like safe conditions" doesn't necessarily mean that drivers are moving at 90mph or above, which seems to be the misconception here. Driving at the speed for which a road was designed isn't irresponsible. Driving significantly below it is. And no road is perfectly flat, and even if there's an effort to minimize blind spots that cause accidents, some are still there. That's where the crashes are going to happen.
Common situations like the ones I described in earlier posts are ones in which cars were moving at a prevailing speed of 70mph on a road perfectly safe for this speed to the AVERAGE driver (which by definition includes those with inflated self-opinions), except for a pack doing 50-55. Exactly. In the right, left and center lanes. (The speed limit on the road when I encountered the pack I'm thinking of? 65.)
The minimum was 45, so the slowpokes technically weren't doing anything wrong (they aren't likely to get a ticket) -- unless there's a "slower traffic must stay in the slow lane unless passing" rule. Which there was in this case.
They were driving slowly why? Because an old man in a white Crown Vic was driving slowly. No one was passing him even though other drivers, traveling at 65-70mph, were bunching up in legitimate passing lanes attempting to pass
Some pages that have more to say about proper speed limit selection and driver behavior and what's mechanically safe/unsafe (stopping distances etc):
Speed Limits - A Case of "Majority Rule"
Speed Limits
It's not a jam, not that kind of pack. It's a group of people who know that they are moving more slowly than prevailing conditions, yet who have not respected the rules of the road by moving into the slow lane and permitting others to move on by. There is clear road ahead of the pack where cars are moving at the optimum speed drivers have chosen for that road and the conditions -- something they do by instinct (studies of driver behavior support that.)
Some states are actually making it a ticketable offense to fail to move to the slow lane except when passing because of the fact that this kind of behavior is causing crashes.
Studies have repeatedly shown that drivers will drive at a speed that they deem to be safe in the vehicle they are driving under the conditions that they are driving in on the road that they are driving on. "Too fast" is a condition in which a driver feels that conditions are no longer safe.
Drivers will individually select speeds that vary relatively little because a perception of too much difference in speed between your car and other cars contributes to a feeling of unsafe conditions.
A pack of cars that covers the entire road yet fails to account for this fact is a pack of reckless drivers because of their disregard for the safety of other drivers. If you do not want to maintain the speed collectively selected by others as the "right" one, move right and allow others to pass.
I came across one of these mobs earlier this week and it never occurred to any of the drivers in it that slower traffic needs to move right, not take up the middle and left lanes as well.
A pack of slow cars indeed dangerous -- other drivers coming up over a hill at the prevailing speed aren't going to be able to see it and may plow into the rear of one of the pack cars, causing a chain reaction accident (I've seen several accidents of that sort).
If you are driving slower than the rest of the traffic on a road, then you are basically an obstruction in the road which other drivers have to get around. Since they do this by moving in front of other drivers in the next lane over as they see you, they are creating a necessity for the other driver to brake. Not all drivers are equally skilled and one or more may panic brake, causing rear-end collisions. You are assuming that all drivers are equally skilled, which they are not.
You wouldn't consider it safe to just park in the travel lane of a major road, would you? If there's enough of a relative difference between your speed and that of other cars, you are basically doing exactly that.
I know how to drive pretty well and I've gotten really tired of idiots who insist on doing 60 whenever everyone else is doing 80, including me (because blending in with the flow of traffic is the safest thing to do unless the speed of that traffic is inherently unsafe) and creating a choke point, because I have to either dodge their stupid ass by risking cutting off some other driver, or running the risk of getting myself rear-ended if somebody coming up behind me doesn't see the jam you created by not considering the safety of everyone else on the road.
And obstructing traffic IS a ticketable offense.