[HN Gopher] The longest straight line in Great Britain without c...
___________________________________________________________________
The longest straight line in Great Britain without crossing a
public road
Author : samwillis
Score : 136 points
Date : 2023-04-07 13:30 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.statsmapsnpix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.statsmapsnpix.com)
| justinator wrote:
| Being an avid hill walker, I love to see how far away from
| civilization I can get in Colorado on my hikes. I should be able
| to get really out there, right? My State is 1/3 public,
| undeveloped land!
|
| The farthest summit from a road is about 6 miles. Kinda made me
| sad inside. That's how remote you can get from a car.
|
| I have gone on farther trips without crossing a paved road - one
| being 120 miles that took 6+ days (tough terrain!) by following
| the crest of an entire mountain range - quite difficult. As the
| crow flies, that's about 70 miles point to point. If you stretch
| the theoretical limit between paved roads - encapsulating this
| entire mountain range, it's about 78 miles. There's about 3 rough
| 4WD tracks that you can use to cross it - but that's it, in that
| entire range, any other point across you have to traverse by foot
| (and there's only a few trails to do so too).
|
| Hope it stays that way.
|
| But again, it's still always <6 miles to where you can drive a
| car.
|
| I've been to more "remote" places, such as Alaska, with vast
| Wilderness- but they let you fly planes into there, which seems
| somewhat like cheating.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Go to the boundary waters. Huge (1million sq acres) Easy to
| navigate (canoe), sparsely visited, very remote, and no engines
| allowed.
|
| I don't know what the furthest distance from a road is. But I
| would warn against using that as some definitive measure of
| remoteness. Especially since not all roads are equal. There are
| lots of rarely used dirt roads. Additionally, the boundary
| waters are far from any significant metro (5 hours to twin
| cities) and very far from a large metro (9 hours to Chicago).
| The people that go are in driving distance, and there aren't
| that many. Compare that to Denver which is not only 1-2 hours
| away, but has an airport which receives tons of people from the
| west coast and beyond.
|
| There is also virtually 0 traffic from the north because it's
| an international border and more remote wilderness.
| justinator wrote:
| _> I don't know what the furthest distance from a road is_
|
| Looks around 11 miles,
|
| https://www.peakbagger.com/map/bigmap.aspx?t=W&l=CT&d=10&cx=.
| ..
| mauvehaus wrote:
| You're probably aware of this, but motorboats are allowed (up
| to some size and power restrictions) on e.g. the Moose Lake
| chain to Basswood/Prairie Portage, large parts of Basswood,
| and Snowbank, among others. They'll also land the forest
| service's Beaver on any lake big enough for a medical
| evacuation (I facilitated one from another group from Alice
| years back).
|
| Not trying to pick nuts, I'd just hate for someone to show up
| up there and be very disappointed by the presence of
| motorboats.
|
| If you're planning a trip, it's not hard to avoid them. Talk
| to your outfitter and do a couple of portages and you'll see
| none. Do a couple more portages and you can go a couple of
| days without seeing other people.
|
| Oh, and get up-to-date maps. I was using ones from the summer
| I guided some 15 years later, and found a campsite or two
| that had been closed since mine were printed. Some bonus
| paddling resulted.
|
| Hol-Ry!
| paddy_m wrote:
| I miss driving across vast stretches of emptiness in Utah,
| which is somewhat related. I would see these vast spaces and
| want to explore, via bike, dirt bike or foot.
|
| Another fun, related cartography activity is to find the
| longest drive between two very close points on a map. You're
| invariably going around a mountain with pretty scenery.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I feel like not enough people have noted that "furthest point
| from a road" is a _very_ different metric than "longest
| straight line without crossing a road" [0]
|
| It's clear to me that you got that distinction, but several
| replies seemed to have missed it.
|
| [0] and specifically, in the UK, the middle of Rannoch Moor is
| the most remote from any road, but doesn't much in terms of
| longest straight line without a road crossing. And likewise,
| the line in TFA is actually not very far from a road at any
| time.
| kleiba wrote:
| I currently live in central Europe, and just recently had a
| conversation with a coworker who is local. He told me how he
| has always been quite impressed with how much _space_ there is
| North America - which is to say that you actually can get away
| from civilization quite a bit if you want to. Of course, that
| 's not true for all areas of America but it seems way more
| difficult to just get away in central Europe.
| justinator wrote:
| Funny that I go to Europe and impressed by how many _trains_
| there are.
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| Central Europe is more properly compared to the East or
| Midwest in the USA; because the ability to grow stuff means
| that even the very rural parts of those areas of the USA are
| sparsely populated, but populated (you're never more than a
| few miles from a house kind of thing).
|
| But once you hit the west of the Rockies, it becomes VERY
| EMPTY unlike anything in Europe, perhaps comparable only to
| the Ghobi Desert or similar places in Asia.
| bombcar wrote:
| Part of the issue is that the vast western BLM land in the USA
| is mostly some variation of desert; and that desert is very
| VERY easy to put a road down on, if all the road is a slightly
| graded path.
|
| I assume you've seen https://www.projectremote.com/remote-
| statistics/ (updated from defaced/hacked domain)
| detaro wrote:
| easy to create a road, and little that will destroy an old
| and little-used one.
| justinator wrote:
| There is the pressure to build the road in the first place,
| as there is about 1.5 billion cars in existence. Having it
| impossible to find really truly remote places is a symptom
| of just how much cars have absolutely changed the world.
|
| There's the idea that for every car, you need three car-
| sized spaces to support it: The area you park the car, the
| area you drive the car, and the area you'll be driving the
| car to. That's a lot of roads.
| bombcar wrote:
| Many of the dirt roads predate the car; cars almost
| universally demand _paved_ roads, but wagons want roads,
| too.
| justinator wrote:
| There are more cars in existence now, than every wagon
| every built in all of human civilization combined.
|
| There are also now, more roads.
| jstanley wrote:
| If we're being pedantic, I think you only need 2 of those
| spaces while driving the car, and only 1 while it's
| parked.
| detaro wrote:
| Somehow I doubt that's very relevant to random wilderness
| roads in the desert
| burkaman wrote:
| Was this site hacked to add the crypto reference on the home
| page? The rest of the site is very interesting and has
| nothing to do with crypto, but it seems like a lot of
| internal pages have been removed and the links redirected to
| that weird home page.
|
| Edit: Yes, looks like the site has been defaced https://web.a
| rchive.org/web/20170611015950/https://remotefoo.... Very sad,
| seemed like a really cool project and now a lot of pages are
| unreachable with going through archive.org. Even the search
| doesn't work.
|
| Edit 2: I think they lost control of that domain, but they
| have a new site at https://www.projectremote.com/
| bombcar wrote:
| Thank you - I'll update.
| justinator wrote:
| hmm, I think though there's a reason that the road exists -
| even in the desert? Probably to mine or a mine town
| originally? Same with all the roads in the mountains.
| Resource extraction and motor vehicles kinda go hand in hand.
| bombcar wrote:
| Most of the ones I've encountered in the high desert have
| things like ancient mining claims or tiny towns somewhere,
| but others appear to simply be 4WD trails that have been
| used "enough". According to the link; Wyoming has the
| furthest at 21 miles from a road (which is a circle
| containing 1385 sq miles).
|
| Since distance from a road is a circle, the sq miles needed
| to get far from it go fast quickly, even six miles is 113
| sq mile, and since it's likely a road alongside one edge,
| you're talking a square of land at least 144 sq mile.
|
| The only things that big are usually parks/nature reserves
| of some kind, and they often have fire roads or other
| accesses built for reasons (including people camping, etc).
| justinator wrote:
| I've got that point as somewhere near the middle of of
| Yellowstone NP. The farthest point in Rocky Mountain
| National Park from is 6. It takes the wind out of me.
| bombcar wrote:
| In some weird way it's the "no most boring number"
| problem; if a point is the most remote, then there's a
| reason to build a road to it, because it's a point of
| interest, but doing so kills the remoteness.
|
| Personally given how wide a range of things "dirt road"
| covers, I would consider paved road to be the line - some
| things that are dirt roads you can do 50+ mph down no
| problem, others are literally impassible without the best
| 4 wheel drive vehicles; and some not even that - they're
| technically on the map but the road is overgrown so much
| that you can barely get a motorbike down it; and once
| you're using a motorbike you can go almost anywhere in
| the world that humans can reach.
| scythe wrote:
| Depending on your definition of "mainland", you can get
| even more remote in southern Louisiana on the peninsula
| south of Fourleague Bay, southeast of the Atchafalaya
| Delta. Google Maps shows it as around 26 miles from any
| road.
|
| But most of the corresponding "circle" will then be in
| the ocean.
| justinator wrote:
| Ha - yeah, if the land is basically an island, there may
| be an exception. If we look at the map from the article,
| looks like they avoided major waterways as well.
| bombcar wrote:
| One of the terms thrown around is "navigable" - which
| includes things like roads, airports, and waterways that
| can be traversed by (usually motor) boat.
|
| Obviously since helicopters can land on Mt Everest, you
| ignore those.
|
| https://unofficialnetworks.com/2022/12/29/helicopter-
| land-su...
|
| One of the amusing things is that it is not that hard to
| get away from _people_ - you only need to be about 270
| miles from the nearest human to get a situation where
| that nearest human is in the International Space Station
| flying overhead. But you have to map out airliner routes,
| etc, as planes will fly over otherwise empty land /ocean.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Probably to mine or a mine town originally?_
|
| Very often yes.
|
| But also as access roads to infrastructure like long-
| distance power transmission lines, pipelines, or remote
| communication towers.
|
| Also, there are a lot of fire roads. People don't think of
| the desert as a place of wildfires, but the desert does
| indeed burn.
| xcskier56 wrote:
| There's a fun website that I saw that listed all of the most
| remote points in the lower 48. This is defined as farthest away
| from a road.
|
| Amazingly, given all of the vast land in the western US, the
| furthest you can get from a road is only a little over 20
| miles. This is in the middle of the Thoroughfare in Yellowstone
| NP.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I wonder what the definition of road here is. Plenty of roads
| are just tracks in the dirt where enough vehicles have
| traveled to leave a mark like logging roads and such.
| ghaff wrote:
| Unpaved road covers a lot of ground in the western US--from
| unpaved but well-graded and maintained to you'd better have
| high-clearance 4WD and know how to use it--in appropriate
| weather. And the map databases aren't necessarily great at
| distinguishing things at the edges.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _And the map databases aren 't necessarily great at
| distinguishing things at the edges_
|
| Very true. I once had Apple Maps direct me down a one-
| lane road that turned into gravel 20 miles later, then
| into dirt 20 miles after that, and then eventually became
| just ruts in the sand used by horses and mules.
|
| I'm sure it was used as a "road" to calculate distances
| between places, but it was in no way a road.
| bombcar wrote:
| I have a general "do not leave paved roads when following
| GPS" rule to prevent things like death (which have
| occurred). You should know what you're doing and be
| prepared if you leave the pavement.
| reaperducer wrote:
| This was in an area where dirt and sand roads are more
| common than paved roads, so it made sense to follow the
| arrow until it became a track.
| justinator wrote:
| Definition is basically, is it drive-able? Can you
| physically get a car to a point on the road?
|
| An old road could exist, but is in Wilderness, so it
| somewhat doesn't count, as you can't drive it for legal
| reasons.
| ghaff wrote:
| "Drivable" isn't a very useful definition at the margins
| because it depends on who is driving, in what kind of
| vehicle, and in what kind of weather.
| justinator wrote:
| That is why I added a few more sentences to the working
| definition in hopes to clarify it and to thwart off
| contrarianism, which inevitably someone here is going to
| gleefully practice.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| Road implies "path for vehicles" in my mind, but I presume
| something that might be called a path or a trail could
| count as a road as well.
| robocat wrote:
| Furthest distance in New Zealand is probably on the coast
| near West Cape in Fiordland National Park: about 70km from
| roads from what I can tell (the road to Lake Hauroko and the
| road to Deep Cove/Doubtful Sound via Manapouri Dam).
|
| Looks like there are some amazing walking tracks down there:
| https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-
| go/fi...
| regularjack wrote:
| > 'a paved surface for vehicular use'
|
| The author is assuming that all "restricted access" roads are
| unpaved, which I think is unlikely to be true. I wonder if
| there's data about which roads are paved.
|
| Regardless, very interesting stuff, and great analysis.
| pornel wrote:
| In the UK even "public" roads deep in the countryside are often
| unpaved.
| sixothree wrote:
| I remember talking to a group of people about the "vastness of
| America" and mentioned that no matter where you go you're never
| really more than 20 miles from a road. Not a single person
| believed me. I never did follow up with investigation. But I do
| sometimes ask people this question.
|
| Ultimately, people seem to think there are these great patches of
| untouched land on a vast scale where it simply doesn't exist.
| hgsgm wrote:
| I found a reference at http://remotefootprints.org/ linked from
| BBC, but it looks like the site was hacked by a Bitcoin/crypto
| scammer.
|
| Anyway, they claim that in USA rhat 22miles is the farthest you
| can get from a road of any kind that supports a vehicle, and
| still be in "developable" terrain.
|
| That would exclude mountains, lakes, floodplains, and maybe or
| maybe not forests (because they could be cut down?)
| burkaman wrote:
| I think they lost control of that domain but they have a new
| site here: https://www.projectremote.com/
| [deleted]
| adrianpike wrote:
| Yep, even the furthest spot in Wyoming in the Thorofare
| wilderness complex is something like 19 miles out from a road.
|
| One thing to keep in mind is that only a few miles over rugged
| terrain can be a _lot_. A few miles away from a remote forest
| road in the wrong direction and you might not see any people
| for years and years.
|
| I do search and rescue out here, and even with helicopters it's
| pretty vast;
| https://www.peakbagger.com/map/bigmap.aspx?t=W&l=CT&d=9&cx=-...
| technocratius wrote:
| > A few miles away from a remote forest road in the wrong
| direction and you might not see any people for years and
| years.
|
| This is essentially what happened to this McCandless guy in
| Alaska. That book about him - _Into The Wild_ , by Krakauer -
| is super well written and a very interesting story. The movie
| based on the book is also quite well produced.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Pretty sure Nevada has places you can go that are 20 mi from a
| paved road.
| bombcar wrote:
| Road vs paved road does a lot of heavy lifting.
|
| But even so if you calculate the area needed to be 20 miles
| from a road, it gets quite vast quickly (it has to be a
| circle 20 miles in radius).
| sixothree wrote:
| I kinda want to find out now.
| bombcar wrote:
| You'd want to search using GIS tools, and then try to
| verify the pavidity via aerial photos. Around Table
| Mountain might be a place to start. 20 miles is a long
| way, and 40 miles is even longer between roads.
|
| For comparison, the entirety of Mount Rainier National
| Park is less than 20 miles on a side. So you're looking
| for someplace you can fit Mount Rainier on _all sides_ of
| you.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not entirely clear from the article, but it looks like it might
| be a "straight" line on a Mercator-projected map, in other words,
| a rhumb line[1]. So that technically doesn't answer the question
| "what (and where) is the longest distance _you can walk in a
| straight line_ [...]?? " When you are walking in reference to a
| compass (let's simplify and assume it references True North), you
| are actually making a gradual turn to stay aligned with your
| angle to the meridians. Especially at high latitudes like in
| Great Britain. Instead, he should be looking for the longest
| Great Circle[2] line from point to point, which may, in reality,
| be in a very similar location because for short distances, great
| circles often line up very closely with rhumblines.
|
| The author is a founder of a mapping company, so he very likely
| knows this, and the article is aimed at a more layman audience
| who likes to play around with Google Maps and such.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhumb_line
|
| 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_circle
| codeflo wrote:
| Mercator maps are conformal, which means that over small
| distances, shapes are preserved, though you do have to
| correctly adjust the distance scale. So how much does that
| matter over 76 km, would the bend in the line even be visible?
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, admittedly at these distances (<100km) the difference
| will be very small unless at extreme latitudes.
|
| Looks like the points are at approximately N57deg18.280',
| W3deg55.948' -> N56deg54.152', W4deg56.664' if anyone wants
| to do the math. My guess is the rhumb line and GC route
| differ by no more than a few meters.
|
| I was hoping the article would go more into how they searched
| the data and found the points. An exhaustive search of all
| points in the U.K. would obviously be computationally
| prohibitive. Maybe create millions of polygons where the
| edges are roads, and sort them by area to reduce the search
| space? From the article's text it looks like he "eyeballed"
| the map to find empty areas to focus on, which is
| unsatisfying :)
| bluenose69 wrote:
| I get a bit over 200 metres from the following R code.
| (Edit: I forgot how to format code for HM, sorry.)
| library(oce) lat <- c(57+18.280/60, 56+54.152/60)
| lon <- -c(3+55.948/60, 4+56.664/60) m <- lm(lat ~
| lon) # Find points along a great-circle route
| gc <- oce::geodGc(lon, lat, 0.001) # 'scale' is
| distance associated with 1 degree latitude shift
| scale <- geodDist(mean(lon), mean(lat), mean(lon),
| mean(lat)+1) # 'e' is latitude shift from great-
| circle route to 'straight' line route e <-
| scale\*sapply(seq_along(gc$longitude),
| function(i) gc$latitude[i] - predict(m,
| data.frame(lon=gc$longitude[i])))
| plot(gc$longitude, e, type="l",
| xlab="Longitude [degE]", ylab="Distance error [km]",
| col=2) max(e)
| codeflo wrote:
| I'm not familiar with R, but the lm(...) line looks like
| it's linearly interpolating the latitude and longitude.
| However, that's not what straight lines in a Mercator
| projection are. You might be confusing it with the
| cylindrical projection.
|
| The Mercator projection stretches things away from the
| equator vertically to compensate the horizontal
| stretching, in order to preserve local shapes. This makes
| it a bit better for these kinds of local measurements
| than one might think at first glance.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| Yes, `lm()` linearly interpolates. Thanks for pointing
| out my error.
| codeflo wrote:
| To be fair, I'm not sure this will actually make a
| significant difference. :) Even 200m wouldn't be a huge
| error.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| I tried a computation that I think may be correct. It
| gives 319 metres of northing separation between rhumb and
| creat-circle paths. In case it's of any interest, the R
| code is below. # Northing distance
| between rhumb and great-circle paths.
| library(oce) lat <- c(57+18.280/60, 56+54.152/60)
| lon <- -c(3+55.948/60, 4+56.664/60) #
| Great-circle path, first in longitude-latitude space, and
| then # (for Mercator projection) in easting-
| northing space. gc <- oce::geodGc(lon, lat, 0.01)
| # same results for 3rd arg any value < 0.01 gcXY
| <- lonlat2map(gc$longitude, gc$latitude,
| projection="+proj=merc") # Create
| function, f(easting), that computes northing value on
| # a rhumb line. We need this to make the two lines share
| easting # values. p <-
| oce::lonlat2map(lon, lat, "+proj=merc") m <- lm(y
| ~ x, data=p) X <- seq(p$x[1], p$x[2],
| length.out=length(gc$longitude)) Y <- predict(m,
| data.frame(x=X)) f <- approxfun(X, Y) #
| interpolating function # Compute the
| northing error. northingError <- f(gcXY$x) -
| gcXY$y maxNorthingError <-
| round(max(abs(northingError)), 1)
| message("maxNorthingError=", maxNorthingError, " [m]")
| plot(gcXY$x, northingError, type="l", xlab="Easting [m]",
| ylab="Northing error [m]") mtext(paste("max
| northing error ", maxNorthingError, " [m]"))
| cies wrote:
| > Without crossing a pub road
|
| Or crossing water.
|
| I think given this constraints a line from any non-pub-road,
| non-water place in GB to the center of the earth is the longest
| straight line, without considering space bending around mass.
| :)
| jodrellblank wrote:
| The question was "what (and where) is the longest distance
| you can walk in a straight line..." so that rules out the
| center of the Earth.
| [deleted]
| timthorn wrote:
| Specifically, the projection used is the Ordnance Survey
| National Grid projection, which is Transverse Mercator.
|
| The OS published a good introductory (but detailed) guide some
| years ago:
| https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/documents/resources/guide-c...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| If it were to get technical enough to differentiate between
| rhumb and great circle, then maybe it should factor in
| elevation changes too.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| If you include elevation then you have to include tolerance
| for deviation. I live in an old house, so I can't even walk
| across the room without a vertical deviation of some sort :)
|
| Edit: My point here is that if you try to plot a literal
| straight line through 3D space, it will be necessary to allow
| some amount of deviation in one axis. Else your longest 3D
| line will be the distance between your first two points.
| rdlw wrote:
| Then it becomes a coastline problem, with different answers
| depending on the resolution of your elevation data.
|
| Great video on this from Matt Parker (focusing on area in
| this case): https://youtu.be/PtKhbbcc1Rc
| crznp wrote:
| He does: 75.9km on the map, 77.0km when accounting for
| elevation. With the caveat: "Well, it's never as much as I'd
| think and it depends upon the accuracy of your terrain model"
| ta1243 wrote:
| That number surprised me, but because of how much extra it
| was rather than how little extra -- I always assume it's
| negligable, but in this case was over 1%
| teruakohatu wrote:
| I also agree it seems like a lot. If there was 3000m of
| elevation gain and 3000m of elevation loss, I would only
| expect a couple or hundred extra meters of distance
| walked. 77.23 [?] sqrt(77^2+(3+3)^2).
|
| Reading total elevation gain/loss from his graph it hard
| but 3000m up and down seems about right.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| The average gradient of Scotland is 19.3%.
| [deleted]
| cdaringe wrote:
| Loved it. Seemed like it was discovered by manual search
| ks2048 wrote:
| This is mainly about getting getting the correct roads data, but
| I would be more interested in the algorithmic question: given a
| roads network, how do you find the longest line not crossing a
| road?
|
| The linked blog post mentioned they "calculated the areas of all
| the polygons to identify the largest ones". Just drawing some
| lines on a plane, there are not necessarily any polygons. And
| they say start and end points must be on vertices, but I'm not
| sure why. So it's not very clear.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| This paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.07389# uses an algorithm
| called 'branch-and-bound'.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| > Crown copyright and database rights 2023.
|
| Do i, as a US citizen, have to respect Crown Copyright? I mean,
| the USA originated in a revolt against that very same crown. The
| USA is by constitution and temperament forbidden from giving out
| titles and such. We respect free markets, content creators and
| their successors in interest here.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| No need to be edgy. Crown copyright is just the phrase used for
| copyright created when the UK (And Canada, and Australia, and
| others) create copyrighted content.
|
| It's nothing special.
| Veen wrote:
| The Crown isn't really the monarchy when used in this sense and
| it doesn't have much to do with titles and such. It's a
| synecdoche used to refer to the UK government (and the
| governments of some commonwealth countries). Crown Copyright is
| the copyright the government holds in the material it creates.
| In this case, the Ordnance Survey, which is a UK government
| agency.
|
| Whether you have to respect that copyright is a different
| matter, although it may be unwise to use Ordnance Survey
| mapping data for commercial purposes without a license.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The Crown isn't really the monarchy when used in this sense
| and it doesn't have much to do with titles and such. It's a
| synecdoche used to refer to the UK government
|
| That's also the Crown the US was revolting against, so...
| eertami wrote:
| I think it's actually the US which is more likely to take issue
| with you for breaking the copyright, than the UK would.
| Considering the US publishes an annual report on copyright/IP
| rights enforcement about it's trading partners that it deems to
| be insufficient[0].
|
| [0]:
| https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/USTR-2016-Special-301-R...
| Woeps wrote:
| Uhm, kinda, it depends. Overall Copyright is all mushed
| together under some kind of global agreement right?
|
| Because must I remind you, of your post of an hour ago:
| "property rights are paramount." ;)
| lljk_kennedy wrote:
| Technically, legal proceedings could be taken against you in
| the UK. Realistically - most of the stuff covered by Crown
| Copyright falls under the Open Government License and is free
| to use once attributed.
|
| https://www.cla.co.uk/crown-copyright
|
| https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-lice...
| matthews2 wrote:
| The United States is party to the Berne Convention, so yes.
| bigdollopenergy wrote:
| In as much as anyone has to respect the copyright coming from
| any jurisdiction they are not in. Which for the most of the
| world generally means that, yes, you do have to respect it. It
| being the UK and your historical reasoning isn't very relevant.
|
| One of the main things that allows global trade to happen as
| freely as it does, is countries cooperating so that copyright
| can be legally enforced across them. The resulting court cases
| are likely to be less actionable if you have no presence there,
| but you can be sued in that country for breach of copyright and
| have a judgement placed upon you. It's bilateral, a Brit may
| wonder the same thing about the US or any other country and the
| answer would be the same.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| The Pirate Bay disagrees. They rather splendidly told the usa
| to gtfo, as did kim dotcom. Ymmv.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| > We respect free markets, content creators
|
| That's awesome. Please respect the content creators at the
| Ordnance Survey then.
| swarnie wrote:
| Since the US don't extradite even for serious offences You can
| probably just ignore it and be tried in absentia if caught and
| prosecuted.
|
| You'll have to join the 66% of your countrymen who can't travel
| abroad however.
| [deleted]
| drstewart wrote:
| Can't is a strong word to use word for people who opt not to
| have a passport.
|
| I'd use that same logic to then say 99.9% of Europeans can't
| travel abroad since they don't have a valid airline ticket in
| their possession. If your response is "well they can just get
| one!" then maybe you should rethink your argument.
| tialaramex wrote:
| > I'd use that same logic to then say 99.9% of Europeans
| can't travel abroad since they don't have a valid airline
| ticket in their possession.
|
| That doesn't make any sense, you can _literally_ walk to
| foreign countries from most of Europe. Because of Schengen
| large parts of the EU you don 't even need any paperwork,
| the rationale is that it was legal for you to be on that
| side of the border, you strolled over onto this side,
| chances are you're legal here too.
|
| If you're in a vehicle (which again, you can walk, it's not
| mandatory) the Schengen internal borders have no permanent
| checks. During COVID some of them were closed, and once in
| a while somebody might put up police stops - like they
| would for drunk driving (Americans surely have that right?)
| but in general in Schengen the country borders matter only
| slightly more than your US state borders do.
| drstewart wrote:
| >That doesn't make any sense, you can literally walk to
| foreign countries from most of Europe
|
| Replace "abroad" with overseas then.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Most people of Europe does not currently have enough food
| and water to make a trip across a national border, if we
| are still talking about arbitrary temporary constraints.
|
| Almost no one in Great Britain can travel to the
| Continent unless they are already in a boat.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| How long do you think it takes to go to a foreign
| country? Couldn't a Brit just take the Eurostar to Paris?
| swarnie wrote:
| I'd love to know where you get your news.
| crote wrote:
| ... what?
|
| I think you are greatly overestimating the size of many
| European countries. A significant fraction of the
| population lives within 75 miles of a national border.
| That's a bottle of water and a snack by car - if you're
| feeling thirsty when you leave. If you go by bike you
| might want to pack a lunch, but that's about it.
|
| If you have a job, _any_ job, you have the means to be in
| another country tomorrow evening.
| Lio wrote:
| This is such nonsense.
|
| People in the UK can travel to Northern Ireland, part of
| the UK, and legally walk into the Republic of Ireland, an
| EU member nation. So the point still stands.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Interestingly, paperless travel was the norm in Europe
| before 1914, too, though there was no Schengen. Happier
| times before the war tore down mutual trust among
| countries.
|
| Only the Russian empire and the Ottoman empire required
| passports from foreign visitors.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| > That doesn't make any sense
|
| They know. That's the point.
| rjsw wrote:
| There can be customs checks at or near Schengen borders.
| crote wrote:
| Yes, just like two thirds of Americans can encounter a
| customs check on their daily commute because they live
| within 100 miles of a border.
|
| Schengen borders _can_ have customs checks, but only
| temporarily in nature as a last resort in case of a
| serious threat to public policy or security, and in such
| a way as to impose the absolute minimum of restrictions
| possible.
|
| In practice Schengen borders are comparable to state
| borders in the US. Sure, they _technically_ are borders,
| but in practice it is just a line drawn on a map. It is
| not uncommon for European armies to accidentally
| "invade" another country because they took a wrong turn
| during an exercise.
| swarnie wrote:
| No i think its accurate.
|
| At the point of asking "Can you travel abroad?" the answer
| for 67% is "No"
|
| Also as a European i can walk to another country now before
| nightfall if you pack me some sandwiches and promise me a
| bed/pint when i arrive.
| Woeps wrote:
| Funnily enough you can go to most countries in the EU
| without a passport or a airline ticket if you're European.
| (you only need an ID card)
|
| But I digress and think you're right. Probably lots of
| people simple don't need/want a passport to travel outside
| of the US. Otherwise they would have had one
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| you might not even need an ID practically, just legally.
| I've never been checked at borders or whatever in Europe.
| Not even when flying to Madeira or exiting/entering the
| Geneva airport, which is not EU.
| Lio wrote:
| You're assuming you need a valid airline ticket to travel
| abroad in Europe, you don't.
|
| It's perfectly possible to travel abroad in Europe without
| any form of ticket. You can just drive, walk, cycle or sail
| and many people do regularly.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| They're explicitly not making that point. They're in fact
| arguing that "can't" is a weird choice of word for which
| the post they're responding to has drawn an extremely
| arbitrary line.
|
| If anything, you and (at the moment) all of your siblings
| are helping explain just how arbitrary the line is.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Is it not possible to drive, walk, cycle or sail from the
| US to Canada or Mexico?
| Lio wrote:
| Not legally without a passport.
| qwytw wrote:
| > 99.9% of Europeans can't travel abroad
|
| Some of them and I'm guessing more than 0.1% could just
| walk to another country by midnight (it's 5PM CET). And way
| more than that if they set off next morning.
| crote wrote:
| In seven hours I can leave The Netherlands, cross
| Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, and end up in
| the southern part of Germany. Give me two more hours and
| I can visit Liechtenstein, Austria, and Italy too.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Traveling internationally from the US is a major trip in a
| way that it's just not in the EU.
|
| From Edinburgh, you can reach 9 foreign countries in 1000 km:
| Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands,
| Luxembourg, France, and Ireland. That's on the edge of
| Europe! If you're in Vienna, it's a whopping 31: Denmark,
| Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Russia,
| Moldavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, France, Belgium,
| Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Czechia, Switzerland,
| Slovakia, Monaco, San Marino, Vatican City, Slovenia,
| Croatia, Northern Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia,
| Kosovo, and Hungary, with Turkey and the UK juuuust out of
| reach.
|
| From the US, if you live in Miami, a whopping four countries
| are within 1000 km: Cuba, Bahamas, Jamaica, and the UK (via
| its offshore islands). For most of the US, it's just one--
| either Canada or Mexico. Only if you're in Puerto Rico can
| you access a large number of countries in a short distance,
| and that's mostly because almost every Antilles island is a
| different independent country.
|
| Or another way of putting it, in the distance it takes to get
| from the third largest city in the US (Chicago) to the
| largest (New York), it is hard to find a straight line in
| even the largest European countries that _keeps_ you in the
| country!
| ledauphin wrote:
| this is an interesting statistic. I'd love to have a
| reference!
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Seems there are some stats running around about the number
| of US citizens who hold passports.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/804430/us-citzens-
| owning...
| pacaro wrote:
| https://today.yougov.com/topics/travel/articles-
| reports/2021...
|
| Apparently only 37% of Americans have a valid current
| passport
| ghaff wrote:
| Even assuming that includes passport cards for
| Canada/Mexico, unless someone lives near the border, an
| international trip is a relatively big deal for a lot of
| families. The US is big and has a lot of variety for
| travel. It's really not surprising that a (sizable)
| minority don't have near-term plans to travel
| internationally.
| pacaro wrote:
| Absolutely agree. The socio-economic breakdown of the
| research backs this up. It's very strongly correlated
| with household income
| gooseyman wrote:
| Even cooler when you consider the right to roam
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam
|
| I live in a state that has very little public land, which would
| make any attempt to walk it incredibly difficult
| jkaptur wrote:
| It looks like the author found this line using manual inspection,
| but it seems possible to automate the search:
| https://github.com/BradleyWood/Longest-Line-In-Polygon/blob/....
| It might even be sufficiently fast, despite the O(n^3) running
| time, because the 'n' is the number of points per polygon, not
| total, and you can operate on each polygon in order of "wingspan"
| (you can't stop once you find the longest straight line in the
| longest polygon, but you can once your best line is greater than
| the wingspan of the remaining polygons).
| karaterobot wrote:
| This is neat. I pretty easily found a 183km straight line through
| central WA, from Wenatchee/Cashmere, NNW up to the Canadian
| border. I can only visually confirm (via Google Earth) that it
| doesn't cross paved roads though.
| legitster wrote:
| Uh, that can't be right. Highway 20 would cut through that in
| the middle. Perhaps the software is a bit confused because the
| highway closes during winters?
|
| Also, the terrain profile of this straight line would make the
| Scottish line look like a mini-golf course!
| chihuahua wrote:
| Since Route 20, a state highway, goes all the way across the
| state, from west to east, and it's between Wenatchee and the
| Canadian border, it seems to me that your straight line would
| have to end when it intersects Route 20 somewhere near Diablo.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Yep, you're right. So, at most 148km.
| corwinstephen wrote:
| This would be a cool metric to use in various analyses. It's a
| number that's guaranteed to be shrinking fast in today's world
| and I'd bet there's a quality-of-life benefit to be had by trying
| to optimize for growing it rather than shrinking it.
| shrx wrote:
| I see a new GeoWizard [1] series covering this in the future
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7w986ni7_g
| sixothree wrote:
| Even before I finished reading the headline, I assumed this was
| part of his work.
| neom wrote:
| Was just coming here to comment about GeoWizard. Probably my
| favorite YouTuber, straight line challenge is awesome, how not
| to cross American is my favorite YouTube series by a long shot.
| eCa wrote:
| The "How not to travel America" playlist: https://youtube.com
| /playlist?list=PL_japiE6QKWrCfn7NFL86bRSW...
|
| Don't miss the similarly named Europe trip either, for anyone
| new to GeoWizard.
| spuz wrote:
| Along those lines, someone else whose attempts I've really
| enjoyed watching is Ally who recently uploaded the first part
| of his attempt to cross Scotland in a straight line:
|
| https://youtu.be/_Lcu6qL7NWs
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