In 2006, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation published a report, confirming that the amount of greenhouse gas emissions generated by just the farm animals which are raised for meat production are higher than the entire CO2 emissions generated by all forms of transportation.
Last week, the Swiss Federal Government
published the results of a study
conducted by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich. A study, which was commissioned by the Federal Office for Agriculture, the Federal Office for the Environment and the Swiss Farmers Union, the powerful conservative lobby of the swiss farmers. A study, which was to find ways to help reduce those greenhouse gas emissions.
The result of the study: The way to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions is to eat less meat. Nothing can reduce greenhouse gas emissions as effectively as reducing the amount of livestock, and that is only possible if the meat consumption is also reduced. There are no technical or conceptual means to effectively reduce these emissions any other way. No surprise to me, but it is nice to see the hardcore lobby that is fighting against this change, having to officially confirm the negative impact of its own policies.
This means the single measure of replacing the beef consumption with a vegetarian diet would essentially fix the global warming problem. As a minor nice little side effect, it would mean that we would no longer waste over half of the world's fishing catch as feed for livestock. We would free up 70% of all agricultural land - that is almost 30% of the earth's land surface - in order to grow vegetables, nuts and grains, which would easily yield a 50 fold increase in global food production. Since we wouldn't need that much food, we could convert large amounts of land back to forests, which would provide a huge amount of CO2 neutral fuel and construction material. The rainforest could thrive again, providing increasing natural habitat for exotic, some un-known, many almost extinct animals and insects. Plus, this would further improve the CO2 balance, since these forests would massively absorbe CO2 and produce oxygen. Plus, we could combine these advantages by growing our fruits, vegetables and nuts in
edible forest gardens
. Switching to farming for a vegetarian diet would conserve 70% of the earth's clean water, since farming animals requires over 10 times the amount of water. With the energy required to produce 1 kilogram of beef, you could easily run your Macbook for 100 years. Switching to a vegetarian diet, our life expectancy would increase by 15 years, and we would live not only longer but healthier, reducing the cost of our health care system. Should I go on?
Clearly, we should try to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
Every time we consume animal products, we directly and actively lower the quality of life on planet earth. Most drastically that of the animals who were used for that production, but also the quality of life of everyone else - and our own.
Living life without consuming animal products actively and directly improves the quality of life on planet earth. Yours and everyone else's.
23.6.2009, 13:04
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> Surrender by Cheap Trick
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> A car has nothing to do with a carpet
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> ES5 Candidate Specification
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> ReverseHttp and RelayHttp
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> The best solution is that one isn't needed
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> New Eclipse Helma plugin project
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> Is the Bespin web-based code editor the ideal future ServerJS IDE?
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> Server-Side Javascript Standard Library
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> First Soleil on Mont-Soleil
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> Rhinola 0.8 - Server JS reduced to the minimum
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> Helma turns 1.6.3
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> Helma 1.6.3-rc3 ready for testing
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> Helma 1.6.3 Release Candidate 2
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> Release Candidate 1 of Helma 1.6.3
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> Helma at the 2008 OpenExpo in Zurich
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> Large Hadron Collider
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> Ecmascript Harmony
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> The A-Z of Programming Languages jumps to Javascript
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> Helma at the Linuxwochen in Linz
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> Brendan on the state of Javascript evolution
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> Stuff by George Carlin
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> Is AppleScript done?
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> ES4 Draft 1 and ES3.1 Draft 1
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> Want ES4 in Helma today?
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> SquirrelFish!
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> Permaculture 101
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> ES4 comes to IE via Screaming Monkey
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> Apple's position on ECMAScript 4 proposals
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> Helma Meeting Spring 2008
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> Attila Szegedi about Rhino, Helma and Server-Side Javascript, and scripting on the JVM in general
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> Helma 1.6.2 ready to download
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> Larry Lessig's case for creative freedom
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> Earthlings - Can you face the truth?
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> The Story of Stuff
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> A Quick Start to Hello World
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> The Overlooked Power of Javascript
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> Adobe's position on ES4 features, plus the Flex 3 SDK source code is now available under the MPL
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> Solar cell directly splits water for hydrogen
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> Asynchronous Beer and Geeking and other opportunities to talk about Helma, Rhino and Javascript on the server-side
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> Openmocha and Jhino updated to 0.8
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> e4xd and jhino - javascript server-side soft-coding
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> Additional Filename Conventions
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> Update to Helma 1.6.1
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> Netscape, the browser, to live one more month
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> Hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will
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> Helma 1.6 is ready!
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> Helma 1.6.0-rc2
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> Bootstrap is out of the bag
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> Helma 1.6.0-rc1
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> Introducing Planet Helma
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> Helma ante portas
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> Fixing Javascript inheritance
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> Upcoming Helma 1.6, new reference docs and IRC channel
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> Making Higgs where the Web was born
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> More on Javascript Inheritance
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> Mocha Inheritance
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> Helma 1.5.3
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> Fresh Rhino on Safari
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> Truly Hooverphonic!
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> Helma 1.5.2
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> RFC 4329 application-ecmascript
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> Helma 1.5.1 ready to download
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> Building the Conversational Web
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> I love E4X
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> Javascript Diagnosis & Testing
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> Catching up to Continuations
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> Rails vs Struts vs Mocha
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> The JavaScript Manifesto
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> OpenMocha is ready for a spin
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> The limits of harmonization
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> Le Conseil fédéral au Mont-Soleil
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> The people must lead the executive, control the legislature and be the military
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> Copyback License
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> The Doom of Representative Democracy
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> Violence in a real democracy
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> Concordance and Subsidiarity
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> Wrapping Aspects around Mocha Objects?
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> Future of Javascript Roadmap
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> Baby steps towards Javascript heaven
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> Mac OS X spreading like wildfire
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> Trois petits filous à Faoug
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> Jackrabbit JSR 170
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> More Java Harmony
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> Mac goes Intel
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> Google goes Rumantsch
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> Rico and Prototype Javascript libraries
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> Paul Klee - An intangible man and artist
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> Mocha multi-threading
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> Moving towards OpenMocha
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> Google goes Portal
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> What Bush doesn't get
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> Unique and limited window of opportunity
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> Persisting Client-side Errors to your Server
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> Dive Into Greasemonkey
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> Brown bears knock on Switzerland's door
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> The experience to make what people want
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> "Just" use HTTP
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> Yes, what is gather?
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> A Free Song for Every Swiss Citizen
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> Java in Harmony
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> Jan getting carried away
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> Evil Google Web Accelerator?
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> JSON.stringify and JSON.parse
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> Ajax for Java
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> The launching of launchd
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> Timeless RSS
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> Kupu
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> SNIFE goes Victorinox
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> AJAX is everywhere
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> Papa Ratzi
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> How Software Patents Work
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> Mocha at a glance
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> Adobe acquires Macromedia
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> Safari 1.3
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> View complexity is usually higher than model complexity
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> Free Trade Neutrality
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> SQL for Java Objects
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> Security Bypass
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> Exactly 1111111111 seconds
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> Kurt goes Chopper
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> Choosing a Java scripting language
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> Spamalot's will get spammed a lot
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> The visual Rhino debugger
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> The Unix wars
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> EU-Council adopts software patent directive
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> FreeBSD baby step "1j"
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> Never trust a man who can count to 1024 on his fingers
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> Visiting the world's smallest city
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> Finally some non-MS, non-nonsense SPF news
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> Ludivines, the "Green Fairy" of absinthe
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> First Look At Solaris 10
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> EU Commission Declines Patent Debate Restart
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> Alan Kay's wisdom guiding the OpenLaszlo roadmap towards Mocha?
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> 1 Kilo
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> Re: FreeBSD logo design competition
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> Schweizer Sagen
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> Europas Eidgenossen
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> Art Nouveau La Chaux-de-Fonds 2005-2006
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> XMLHttpRequest glory
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> The Number One Nightmare
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> Safe and Idempotent Methods such as HEAD and TRACE
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> Sorry, you have been verizoned.
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> Daemons and Pixies and Fairies, Oh My!
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> Sentient life forms as MIME-attachments: RFC 1437
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> Anno 2004: CZV
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> Web Developer Extension for Firefox
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> Refactoring until nothing is left
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> Brendan, never tired of providing Javascript support
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> Catching XP in just 20 Minutes
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> Designing the Star User Interface
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> Rhino, Mono, IKVM. Or: JavaScript the hard way
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> Re: SCO
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> Judo
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> Convergence on abstraction and on browser-based Console evaluation
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> Today found out that inifinite uptimes are still an oxymoron
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> New aspects of woven apps
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> Original Contribution License (OCL) 1.0
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> Unified SPF: a grand unified theory of MARID
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> BSD is designed. Linux is grown.
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> 5 vor 12 bei 10 vor 10
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> Mocha vs Helma?
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> Schattenwahrheit: Coup d'etat underway against the Cheney Circle?
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> Abschluss Bilaterale II Schweiz-EU
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> From Adam Smith to Open Source
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> Linux - the desktop for the rest of them
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> Big Bang
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> Leaky Hop Objects
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> Return Path Rewriting (RPR) - Mail Forwarding in the Spam Age
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> Microsoft Discloses Huge Number Of Windows Vulnerabilties
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> Steuerungsabgabe statt Steuern
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> Anno 2003: deployZone
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> The war against terror
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> The war against terror (continued)
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> The relativity of Apple's market share
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> Are humans animals?
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> Server-side Javascript
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> Democracy Now!
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> The Cluetrain Manifesto
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> Anno 1999: Der Oberhasler
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> Anno 1998: volksrat.ch
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> Fan traces "lost" singer Rodriguez
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> Anno 1998: crossnet
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> Think different
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> The right time to buy Apple stock
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> Geschwindigkeit vs Umdrehungszahl
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> Anno 1997: Xmedia
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> "The meaning of life is to improve the quality of all life"
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> Cute Barristas at Peet's Coffee
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> Anno 1996: CZV
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> Alternative 1995
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> BZ Internet Cafe
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> Xjournal
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> How do I set a DEFAULT HTML-DOCUMENT?
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> Searching Gopherspace
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> Crossnet - der kollektive Intellekt der Schweiz
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> Global Screen Design Services
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> NEW-LIST digests
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> ACTIV-L Digest
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> Eternal September
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> AOL expanding Internet services
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> Anno 1993: Macro-micro navigator
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> Freude herrscht!
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> Anno 1992: Intouch i-station
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> You register me in 50 states
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> Anno 1991: mediacube
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> Friedrich Dürrenmatt - Die Schweiz als Gefängnis
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> Anno 1990: RasterOps
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> Enable the Creative
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> Photoshop Startup Memories and First Demo
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> Anno 1989: Lambada by Kaoma
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> Anno 1988: Perfect by Fairground Attraction
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> Bürgerbrief
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> Morgana - Selling Digital-Font based Sign-writing
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> Macworld Expo 1988 Amsterdam
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> Acorn Archimedes RISC Technology
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> Anno 1987: Knowledge Navigator
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> Anno 1986: Max Headroom in the News
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> FidoNet
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> Anno 1985: Amiga 1000
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> Hello World on C128 in CP/M Mode
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> Analog Desktop Publishing in 1984
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> Anno 1982: Vic-20
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> Gamchi
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> Postel's Law
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> The Future Is Unwritten
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> Earth Mother and Fortieth Floor by Lesley Duncan
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> La Linea by Osvaldo Cavandoli
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> CoinFest 2016, April 5-10, Mont-Soleil
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> California by Joni Mitchell
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> Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog
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> Neil Young
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> Kurdistan-reve-de-Printemps
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> Whole Earth Catalog
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> Anno 1968: Mony Mony and People Got to Be Free
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> August 28th 1968: William Buckley Vs Gore Vidal
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