Comment by drcube | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drcube | Hacker News Reader

I've wondered about this with the Superbowl, aka "The Big Game". I understand that refusing to let people mention your hugely popular event without paying is a quick way to make money. But does it help in the long term?

For events no one's ever heard of, obviously, it would be better to spread the word, rather than delete all unofficial mentions. It seems to me that eventually, the Superbowl will be better known as "the Big Game" or some other euphemism, and the NFL will be stuck wondering why they squandered their valuable trademark.

The Olympics, due to its historical nature, may be less susceptible. But how do you trademark a term that has been used since ~750 BC? I'm wondering what would happen if there were a movement to follow the rules religiously. Imagine if the only place you heard "Olympics" was in crappy advertisements? And every real human you talked to just said "The Quadrennial International Grab-Bag of Sports". Or maybe the "Quigbos".

Anyway, I'm rambling. I just really hope these language police get what's coming to them.

But how do you trademark a term that has been used since ~750 BC?

You pass an Act of Parliament to that effect. I'm not even kidding; that's what they've done.

True in the U.S. as well; the Amateur Sports Act of 1978 granted a special trademark on "Olympic" and "Olympiad". That trademark was challenged by the Sports Event Formerly Known As The Gay Olympics, but the Supreme Court upheld it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Arts_%26_Athletic...

Remember the UK doesn't have a constitution and hence it's not clear what it can't do. One common theory is "Parliament can pass a law on anything that's not physically impossible". Kinda makes a change from "only regulat interstate commerce"

While it's not always good, it does allow government to move quickly and avoids the kind of weird deadlocks (eg. over healthcare, the budget) that one sees in the US.

There are also limits: MPs individually vote, and on something that was hugely controversial they would defy the whips. It's not "the Government" but a collection of individuals. And in the end we can vote them out and overturn absolutely any legislation in the next Parliament.

Allowing government to move quickly and without restriction is not something that many would see as a good thing.

Government deadlocks are not always a bad thing, either, particularly when the issue is controversial. I'd argue that it is far better to have an issue debated and for compromises to occur, than to have one party's solution shoved quickly into place. This includes so-called emergencies, which are often excuses to go after civil liberties.

Rushed legislation is usually bad legislation.

As a UK citizen I agree with you, the real problem is the apathetic electorate though, we get the politicians we deserve.

Unfortunately, the recent US budget fiasco shows that governance rules intended to discourage excess speed and encourage debate can backfire.

And the lack or party disaplin means that you have to make lots of dubious deals to dole out pork or to pander to fringe extremists. Oh and in most places adding unrealted riders to bills for pork is banned.

Germany has the same problem caused by PR Andrea Merkal needs 1 green vote to stay in power so buy buy Nuclear power

I am sure Rep or Dem whips visiting the HOC must be jelous of the power that their counterparts have.

Of course the UK has a constitution, what we don't have is a single "core document" that codifies the constitution:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_King...

Said constitution can also be changed by any act of Parliament, so I'm not sure. Parliamentary supremacy was supposedly part of the UK constitution until parliament gave up some of its sovereignty to the EU.

Forgive my political ignorance, but can the US government not also create constitutional amendments?

Yes, but with an extremely high threshold.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Five_of_the_United_Stat...

It essentially requires 2/3 of both the House and Senate to agree on it, and then 3/4 of the States have to ratify it.

These days, meeting such a threshold is probably effectively impossible.

> These days, meeting such a threshold is probably effectively impossible.

At first I was inclined to agree with you, but consider this: there were six amendements to the constitution in each half of the 20th century but just four in the entire 19 century. (The Bill of Rights and the 11th Amendment were all passed before 1800.) Now, it's true that when you throw out the 27th Amendment (whose multi-century ratification time makes its 1992 passage deceiving), it has been 41 years since the last amendment was passed. But there was 60 years between the 12th and 13th Amendments and 43 years between the 15th and 16th. Neither of those two lulls were signs that the Constitution had become effectively un-amendable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Unite...

To add to what ceejayoz said: From an American perspective, the whole point of the constitution is that it places restrictions on the government which cannot be overridden with the mere congressional majority votes necessary for normal legislation and without an agreement by a super-majority of the states. The difficulty of changing the constitution is its defining characteristic. (The commonplace definition of a constitution--"a document which defines how the government operates"--is incidental.)

They can create them, but they can't pass them. It requires a popular referendum, and (edit) 75% of the states must ratify the amendment. Over 10,000 amendments have been proposed, but only 27 have passed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Constitution#Pro...

From an American perspective, the importance of the constitution is not that it is a single document, but rather that it is substantially more difficult to change than normal law. The UK has no constitution in the specific but important sense that no laws passed by Parliament can be "unconstitutional".

Ah yes, this is why while the UK has rule of parliament the US has a non-elected ruling council of 9 wise elders.

Well, first, the 9 elders only have input insofar as the meaning of the constitution is disputable; they don't get to decide whether the general idea of freedom of speech is a good thing day-by-day like the UK parliament does. But more to your point, that the US constitution leads to rules being created by small group far removed from the election mechanism: yes, that is exactly the point. The authors of the constitution were quite deliberate in their choice to insulate several parts of the government from the whims of the people.

It would be more precise to say that the UK doesn't have a written constitution.

I remember long and fruitless, yet highly enjoyable, arguments with a friend on this one: if we have a constitution but it's not written down anywhere how do we know what it says? If we do know what it says then it can be written down.

If it can't be written down how could it enter as a factor in any legal proceedings?

Worth the paper it's not written on IMO.

    A: "You can't do that it flouts the UK constitution"
    B: "Oh right, what's the constitution say?"
    A: "Well, I can't tell you that ..."

It is written down, in 800 years of case law and legal decisions.

It's just a little more complicated than a few cliches about "all men being equal" written by slave owners

Sorry but that's from the Declaration of Independence. By the way, those clichés were not clichés when they were written -- that's why they were so revolutionary at the time. England certainly didn't recognize individual rights at the time. Dismissing the Constitution and the Declaration as a few clichés is to reveal an ignorance of the historical context of those documents.

Additionally, The British had slavery until 1833 -- slavery wasn't an American invention. Disparaging the paradox of slave owners writing all men were created equal is also revealing as to a lack of understanding of history and the context in which those documents were created as well as the political realities at the time.

Stick to code, your historical snark makes you look foolish.

So English (UK?) constitution === stare decisis with common law?

That of course makes the constitution unknowable because the supreme court, the House of Lords, can ignore precedent. So that still leaves us with no way to know the constitution the best we could hope for is to form a quorum of Lords and check that something is legally OK with them; even then they could changed their minds.

I still think that without a clearly defined and codified set of basic principles a nation doesn't have what I would call a constitution.

In practice I'm not sure it makes much difference.

Mostly constitutions, charters of rights and freedoms, or whatever are full of wonderful phrases about mankind. Especially if you get somebody good like Thomas Paine to write it. But it's the courts that decide if abortion is allowed and reject claims that smoking bans go against magna carta.

There are also administrative uses - the constitution sets down how often elections happen and who succeeds who. But if you are a 'nice' country that abides by that constitution then you would also presumably abide by the historical convention that the Queen picks the prime minister with the most seats in the house - even if that isn't written down.

If McArthur had decided to seize Washington in a military coup then a Constitution isn't physically going to stop him (that's what the marine corp is for!)

Similarly in Russia the new democratic constitution stopped Putin serving another term - but it didn't stop him putting a puppet in place.

According to Paul Levy, everyone calling the Superbowl the "Big Game" is stupid; they should just call it the Superbowl: http://pubcit.typepad.com/clpblog/2012/02/brand-name-weenies...

Sounds more like Paul Harvey.

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