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Comment by petitmiam | Hacker News Reader

"The absurdities don't end there. According to Britain's Daily Telegraph, Fish and chip stalls have been advised they are not allowed to serve chips on their own without fish as McDonald's is the official chip maker of the Games."

That is absurd. McDonalds sells fries, not chips.

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"French fries", also known as "Pommes frites", are known as "Chips" in UK. Fish and chips is awesome.

And yes, McD is being a douche bag here, but the biggest *rse is probably UK itself allowing this to happen.

I've only been to the UK once, but I don't remember fries being called "chips" in UK McDonalds.

I've always thought of "fries" as those skinny things McDonalds/Hungry Jacks/Burger King sell, while chips are the chunkier version you get at a proper Fish'n'Chip shops or pub. Restaurants here (Australia) generally distinguish between the two.

Well, either way it's deep-fried potato.

It does seem really stupid though. Are you going to go to a fish-and-chips shop, ask for "chips but no fish", get told that they're not allowed to sell that, and then say "OK, we'll go to McDonald's instead"? That's never going to happen!

"We will give you the fish for free as long as you promise to throw it at the brand police."

"Yes but I don't want to assault anyone."

"Ok. We are cooking special, non-salted fish for that purpose."

As somebody in the UK I'd have to agree french-fried and chips are different things. One is reconstituted potatoe's into small thin like eddibles of a uniform small size and chips are cut potatoes into chunkier like bits.

http://www.okeiweb.com/experience/images/stories/Image/pictu... is as good as any picture of a chip and as you can see it is nothing like a french fry.

> reconstituted potatoe

I've never seen a deep fried reconstituted potato called a french fry. The closest thing I can think of do that is a tater tot.

Where I live, the fried potato-variant in the image is the same thing as fries - we don't distinguish between our variants. We might go as far as calling them thick fries, but that's about it.

McDonald's call them "fries" because they're American. Down the pub (or at least down mine) they'll be called chips.

I think the point is that they're physically different products (McDonald's chips and Fish&Chip shop chips).

Chips and French fries aren't quite the same - it's a dolphins and porpoises thing. French fries would commonly be regarded as chips, but chips aren't necessarily fries.

Broadly speaking when we say chips we're referring to any hot bits of fried potato (so not cold fried potatoes referred to as chips in the US which we call crisps). Traditionally they'd be larger than French fries (maybe 1cm square and about the same length) but usually not as crispy. That's the way they're normally still served if you buy fish and chips. Sometimes they're even made from cutting up potatoes (rather than mashing and extruding them).

With the growth in popularity of McDonalds and the like in the 80s, French fries caught on. Most people would still call these chips but they're obviously different so if you want to be precise you'd use fries.

There are also larger chips (the traditional size or larger) that are fried until crispy confusing the whole matter further. These might (or might not) be referred to as chunky chips depending on where you are.

London has been all too willing to toss out the freedoms of its people in exchange for profits to the IOC.

This is how major sporting events work. It's pretty disturbing.

I don't know about the IOC, but I sincerely hope there's a backlash building against FIFA, and that maybe in a decade or so we'll have a World Cup that doesn't involve governments rewriting laws and such overzealous "protection" of corporate sponsors.

The Olympics is an incredibly complex event, but staging a bunch of football matches across a country is pretty simple, so there's little reason besides political convenience to allow such a corrupt organization to keep running the sport.

Profits? I find it hard to believe they'll do better than limit losses to something bearable.

This is a sincere question: what losses? It seems that they use 80% of revenue to help the location offset its massive costs and keep 8% for themselves.

My understanding is the games are going to be a massive loss for the city.

Given McD sell a fillet-O-Fish then it could of been alot worse. Still nice to know you can get alternitives from the McD selection, even if there are catch's.

Though it is somewhat scary that buying food is akin to buying illegal drugs in many ways -- pssst wanna buy some chips.

Now savaloy and chips - wonder how that works out.

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