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McDonald's and Sony Offer Music Downloads
J ROC writes "CNet reports that McDonalds and Sony are teaming up to offer free music downloads to customers who buy a Big Mac Extra Value Meal. The offer, which begins on June 8, offers customers an access code to download one free song at Sony's Connect online music store. Hmmm, let's see, about 600 calories in a Big Mac, an average of 12 songs on a CD, so that's about 7200 calories you will need to consume in order to get an album's worth of music (and I'm not including the calories from the fries and softdrink). Does this offer also include a free gym membership?"
The free gym membership comes with the triple bypass.
Everything in moderation, even moderation.
No, especially moderation.
I thought McDonald's was supposed to start promoting it's more healthier meals now? What's the point of tying that to a Big Mac extra value meal? They should put it with their healthier stuff to spark up sales of that since that's where their business looks to be heading...
Hmmm.
I'd rather pay the 99 cents and get it off iTunes, besides... I don't touch anything with "special sauce".
Sony's Connect store is the one only offering the ATRAC3 format files, which is only compatible with Sony players.
I admit that iTunes is only offering DRM Protected AAC, which is almost as bad, but at least AAC has a pretty high quality. By comparison, ATRAC3 sounds like you're hearing the music through a tube. Not to mention that ATRAC3 has some of the worst DRM and restrictive software I've ever seen.. You have to check music into and out of your portable player device, I believe. It's just wacky as hell.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Customer: I'll have a chocolate shake, Don Henley's Greatest Hits, and, ummmm, The Eagles Greatest Hits to go, please.
McD: You want Frey's with that?
Before buying any more fast food, check out Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. I'm reading it right now, it has lots of interesting information about the fast food industry that might effect your desire for their food.
Of course there is also Super Size Me the movie about the guy who ate nothing but McDonald's for a month & the effects on his body. I haven't seen it yet (I'm waiting to finish "Fast Food Nation" first) but I hear it's good.
do feature a pedometer. So after you stumble to the emergency room during the major cardiac infarction, the coroner will eventually be able to tell how many steps you walked before your untimely demise.
In what dimension do Slashdotters care about counting calories? I'd have thought that the discussion would be about how to circumvent the Sony DRM. or building a beowulf cluster of McDonalds pedometers -- something more befitting of this community.
Be proud of the ketchup stains on your t-shirt, goddammit!
"I usually like mine with an angioplasty."
I wish everyone would quit their bitching about how unhealthy McDonalds is. I don't mean to be a defender of bad food, in fact, I'm a vegetarian and eat at McDonalds once or twice a year, but it's not like McDonalds ever pretended that their food was healthy. If the American public is too retarded to tell that eating a jucy burger, deep FAT fried french fries, and a calorie-sugar-caffene laden soda isn't good for them, the maybe they deserve to have their arteries clogged.
Sure, it's a bit sad that they market their product so strongly to children - but adults have no reason to complain. If you don't want horribly unhealthy food, don't eat there - or at least get one of their moderately healthy parfaits or salads or the new veggie burger.
The only thing that really pisses me off about McDonalds is that when they finally started making a Veggie Burger, they made it taste like shit. There's lots of veggie burgers out there that taste great, but McDonalds had to make one that could never compete in taste with their real meat patties.
This is Andrew Q Ranter, signing off.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
Why are people so worked up about McDonald's food these days? It's never been a big secret that fast food isn't healthy. After all, it's called Junk Food for a reason. Heck, McDonald's has had nutritional information posted in their restaurants for twenty years. (And it's on their website too.) Anybody who cares the slightest about what they eat has all the information they need to make an informed decision. McDonald's doesn't hold a gun to your head and make you buy/eat their food. It's not addictive. If they want to gorge and eat an UltraMegaSized Triple Big Mac with extra mayo, why should you care?
If you don't like the food at McDonald's, buy your food somewhere else. Is it too much to ask people to accept some personal responsibility for their lifestyle choices?
It's thousand island dressing. With a little tiny amount of extra pickle in it.
;-)
"'Cause Knowledge is power!"
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
You forgot to factor in what scientists and dieticians like to refer to as the BAAM factor (not to be confused with Emeril's BAM!). Which many believe is McDonalds way to actually decrease the weight of their customers, a diet of sorts.
BAAM is expanded as Barf At Abhorrent Music, which would not only eliminate the 600 Big Mac calories, but whatever else that had not yet been digested. Depending on which Pop band's CD you buy, you can actually end up at negative calories for the day.
Excessive consumption of fast food IS the enemy. It is easy to blame people health problems on fast food companies but when it comes down to it, the problem is really with the mental state of people today. We want everything right now, and we want LOTS of it. If everyone ate fast food in moderation and got some exercise there wouldnt be any problem. The same goes with drinking, drugs, partying, eating OTHER food, sex, porn.. etc etc etc... Its all too east to OVERindulge in something that has the perceived benefit of being fast, or makes you feel good. There is a healthy balance, and once people figure this out there wont be a problem anymore. But we dont have to worry about that happening anytime soon. I personally think we should worry about cutting down on people smoking. More people die annually because of smoking then they do of obiesity. If we can get people to give up smoking, which people have been doing for ages, it should be easy enough to get people to realize the dangers of eating fast foor every day.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I haven't seen it yet (I'm waiting to finish "Fast Food Nation" first) but I hear it's good.
It's very funny and well made, but his point utterly fails. First off, he does something inordinately stupid.. he comes up with "rules" that virtually guarantee he'll eat the biggest, most fattening thing that they offer. And then when he becomes sick, he expects you to have not expected this in the first place.
This is one of those "well, duh" moments. It's like when researchers announce that they've done some 3 years of studies and found that kids don't like to go to school. Well, duh.
If you eat nasty fattening shit all day, every day, you won't be healthy. If you override your body's desires for foods that it needs with some arbitrary set of rules, you won't be healthy.
Health isn't a matter of what kind of foods you eat. Not really. Health is a matter of balance. Sometimes you need fat in your meal. Other times you need salad. If you eat the same damn thing all the time, it doesn't matter *what* it is, you're not eating healthy by definition.
He's trying to make a point that this food is unhealthy. In this, he fails miserably. The food is not unhealthy. His behavior in eating nothing but that food is unhealthy. If he wanted to prove that any particular chain was unhealthy, he should have tried to eat a balanced diet using only foods from that chain. They have a big menu for a friggin' reason. They do offer salads. They do offer healthy choices (admittedly, not many). Just because they offer a lot of fatty foods doesn't mean you have to eat nothing but those fatty foods.
So the movie, while funny, utterly fails to make any commentary that has any real meaning. It's a mockumentary at best. He didn't actually prove anything that anybody wouldn't have known from hearing the premise. "Well, duh."
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
But which will kill you first -- the food, or the music?
You've got ronald mcdonald, a scurvy-ridden freak who's the prime representative of mcdonalds to the public. He's got major nutritional problems, besides his chalky-white face he's got bright-red hair and eye problems. Kind of like Joker when he fell into the vat of acid. Makes you want to think twice before biting into that cheeseburger, doesn't it?
Then you've got grimace, who's name is a synonym for making a face like you just ate something nasty. Actually, merriam-webster gives this definition : "a facial expression usually of disgust or disapproval" And what kind of mutant blob is he supposed to be? How many big macs did his mom eat while she was pregnant, to mutate him so much?
Fry-guys. Okay, so the french fries there don't even come from potatoes but from some obscure animal lifeform. Are they driven to extinction? Maybe they're last remaining hideout is in some corners of the Amazon rainforest. Or are they a collection of fries that, due to the toxic chemicals they're made from, suddently acquired a collective concious. Hmmm.
And the hamburgler. Yup, eating at mcdonalds makes you so addicted you resort to stealing to be able to get your next big-mac fix.
Seriously, what a bunch of weird-ass characters to represent a company. They are like their own X-Men or similar.
make world, not war
Set aside the sucky iTunes song quality, and the fact they screw over musicians. , and setting aside that Fatty Fast foods are addicting, and bad for you. The cost of a Big Mac is in upwards of 3 dollars, and one song on iTunes is $1.00. Why not buy two songs from iTunes, and go buy a hot dog from a hot dog stand.
What's another word for Thesaurus?
-Steve Wright
I really don't think anyone is eating healthier or dieting... Take a look around, America is still a pretty fat place. The recent jazz about the Atkins diet is just that; jazz. Diets like that have no lasting effects because people do not learn the CONCEPTS before they implement. They hear "Atkins sez: Don't eat bread, eat meat!" so they go eat 2 lbs of ground beef wrapped in cheese and covered with bacon. "It's cool", they say. "...No BREAD!".
I was a vegetarian for about 4 years of my life, and it made me much more selective and concious of what I was eating, and thus I lost a considerable amount of weight and became more aware of my body's needs calorically, etc. Then, about 2 years ago, I went back to eating meat, and ballooned up at least 20 pounds. Why? Because it just became food food food all over again. Burgers, steaks, whatever. Much like you stated with the common American food consumption mentality, you get in a mindset where it becomes so hard to moderate yourself, you really lose a grip on your food intake and just go hog wild. Even an INCREDIBLY active person can not sucessfully maintain a healthy body if they were to participate in the diet of "fat" Americans.
I went back to being a vegetarian about 3 months ago and have also gotten my ass on a treadmill, and I'm starting to shed off those pounds I gained from when I started eating meat again. I'm not advocating that vegetarianism is the means to lose weight here. Rather, I'm just stating that personally, for me, being a vegetarian puts me in a mindset where I'm just so much more concious of what I'm eating that I see HOW BAD most food sold in America really is. And the sad thing is, it seems people aren't necessarily always living to eat rather than eating to live, but they just can't get a decent healthy meal anywhere else.
--
Is it me, or did it just get fatter in here?
Two of my great joys in life are putting a CD on for the first time and discover that it's a fantastic piece of music and having a good meal in a restaurant I've tried for the first time. The fun in both of these activities is increased by a degree of exploration - either trawling through Internet music sites and music shop displays or driving around in an unknown area to find a good-looking place to eat.
I'm not into fast food particularly or music downloads (music for me is about full albums, not single tracks) but I have no issue with McDonalds selling fast food or Sony/iTunes/etc. selling downloadable music, if that's what people want.
I do have a problem with the modern general populace, however. Many people today, especially the youth generation, seem to want to live in this constant "safe zone" of life - at least here in the UK, they want the same theme pubs, fast food joints and bland popular music. In all three cases, they are assured of knowing "exactly what they are getting" beforehand without any risk of paying for something they may not think is worth the money. They rely on "product branding" to keep them from taking any risks in life and, to me, seem to live in fear of the unknown because standing out from the crowd would not be "cool".
I don't claim to understand their motivations and when I was their age, I had many of the same traits. I therefore hope they learn, like I did, to develop the confidence in their own decision making and to not give a damn about what "everyone else" is doing and make their own decisions.
In the meantime, just how many musicians and chefs are there out there who, because they are not a mainstream "branded product", have not had the opportunity to play us their music or cook us a meal?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.