McDonald’s serving up ‘restructured meat technology’ – you want fries with that?

Well, it’s that time of year again when McDonald’s rolls out  its venerable McRib sandwich. Tens of millions of Americans will purchase  one – or, judging by the nation’s ever-widening belt line, several – but most  will do so without knowing all they should know about this popular  sandwich.

Besides high caloric content, there are several other reasons  why you should avoid the McRib, a boneless pork product smothered in BBQ sauce  that famously resembles a rack of ribs, as much as you avoid most of the other  “delicacies” served by this fast-food behemoth. In addition, The Blaze  reports, there are several “fun facts” about the sandwich you may not have  known: A sandwich ‘built’ from scratch?: The McRib is a product of  Rene Arend, who came up with the idea and design of the sandwich. That said,  Richard Mandigo, a professor from the University of Nebraska, who  developed the “restructured meat product” that the McRib is actually made  of.

According to Chicago magazine, citing a 1995 article by  Mandigo, “restructured meat product” is described thusly:
Restructured  meat products are commonly manufactured by using lower-valued meat  trimmings reduced in size by comminution (flaking, chunking, grinding,  chopping or slicing). The comminuted meat mixture is mixed with salt and water  to extract salt-soluble proteins. These extracted proteins are critical to  produce a “glue” which binds muscle pieces together. These muscle pieces may  then be reformed to produce a “meat log” of specific form or  shape. The log is then cut into steaks or chops which, when cooked, are similar  in appearance and texture to their intact muscle counterparts. … Such products  as tripe, heart, and scalded stomachs are high in protein, completely edible,  wholesome, and nutritious, and most are already used in sausage without  objection.
Still hungry?

Packed with calories – and ingredients: In a  time of labeling, when government entities and the public are pushing for more  disclosure, the package for the McRib would have to grow just to list all of its  ingredients.
According to the current box labeling, the sandwich consists  of just five basic components – a pork patty and BBQ sauce with pickle slices,  onions and a sesame bun.

But, as Time magazine points out, a  closer examination of McDonald’s own list of  ingredients reveals that the sandwich contains a total of 70 ingredients,  including azodicarbonamide, a flour-bleaching component that is often used to  produce foamed plastics (think gym mats and the soles of shoes). In fact, “the  compound is banned in Europe and Australia as a food additive,” says Time. Other ingredients include ammonium sulfate and polysorbate  80.

Besides, the sandwich itself contains an incredible amount of  calories – 500 at least – along with 26 grams of fat, 44 grams of carbohydrates  and 980 milligrams of sodium, nearly half the recommended daily amount of about  2,400 milligrams.
Not a good choice for your heart: The  ingredients, combined with a dose of 10 mg of saturated fat (nearly half  of the recommended daily allowance), make the McRib an enemy of a healthy heart,  say the experts.

“Think about that for a second: When you eat a McRib,  you’re eating the same chemical ingredients and compounds in those disgusting  yoga mats at the gym. And that’s on top of the fact that it tastes terrible in  the first place,” writes Rick Paulas, food editor for KCET, a public  television network in southern California. “Which means it’s time to ask: Why  are we still eating this?”
That’s a very valid question. In the meantime,  that sound you hear is the further tightening of the nation’s belt  line.

Source: Silent Crow News

The Unintended Consequences Of The Copyright Alerts System

Since we've learned of the plan for so-called Six Strikes programs by ISPs, there has been protest and warnings from multiple sources about multiple issues. Accordingly, Daily Dot has a nice little piece about what sort of unintended consequences we can expect to come out of this plan. A couple of them are well-traveled ground here at Techdirt, including whether businesses will still offer WiFi when "pirates" naturally flock there to carry out their piratey actions. Likewise, we've discussed the importance of the Open Wireless movement, which will certainly take a massive hit if and when these ISP plans are spun up. All that being said, the third unintended consequence mentioned in the article is probably the most important, since it will render all of this an exercise in futility: greater adoption of privacy tools by the masses.

According to comments Lesser made at an Internet Society meeting in November 2012, the definition of who the CAS is after is extremely narrow, at least for its planned first iteration. It only tracks those who upload the most-popular copyrighted content, like blockbuster movies and best-selling albums, via the peer-to-peer service BitTorrent, and it only identifies them by their Internet protocol (IP) addresses. That's it. So pirates who can avoid BitTorrent, or peer-to-peer altogether, or download without uploading (a major faux pas on some torrent sites), or hide their IP addresses, will avoid detection.

Learning to conceal one’s IP address is already a major point of Internet activism, for reasons that have nothing to do with piracy. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, for instance, suggests bloggers in dangerous parts of the world hide their IP addresses to ensure their anonymity from authoritarian governments.

In other words, these plans will spark an interest in privacy tools designed to get around the "strikes". It's an arms race that essentially cannot be won, because every new tactic simply spurs the growth of interest in counter-tactics and probably leaves the average computer user even more prepared for the next attempt than they would have been otherwise. This type of thing likely creates tech-saavy people where there previously would have been none. Meanwhile, businesses and WiFi device owners will close off access out of fear.

Torrent Freak backs this key point up, noting how few bittorrent users are currently masking their IP addresses and making the case that that number is going to jump after Six Strikes begins.

BitTorrent proxies and VPN services are the preferred way for people to remain anonymous while downloading. These services replace a user’s home IP-address with one provided by the proxy service, making it impossible for tracking companies to identify who is doing the file-sharing. In the U.S. 16% of all file-sharers already hide their IP-address, and this is likely to increase when the copyright alert system goes live.

What's missing from all of this is exactly how any of these plans are going to get previous "pirates" to turn into paying customers for media companies. History suggests they will not do so, will not curb piracy, and will in fact only annoy people who like open WiFi connections and prepare users for the next round of the race all the more. If there were a more perfect definition of a plan that achieves nothing except collateral damage than 6 strikes legislation, I cannot imagine what it'd be.

Source: Techdirt