Despite everything you learned in business school, hoping or planning for the outcome is a deal killer.

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That miniscule time delay added by outsourcing is a deal killer for people trading commodities and pretty much anything else.

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The 201-horsepower, 2.4 liter model is more responsive, but it only comes with a six-speed manual transmission, a deal-killer for most buyers.

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We hope that nothing in it is a deal-killer.

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Timothy Anderson, an analyst at Prudential Equity Group, wrote in a note yesterday that liver toxicities seen with Prexige could be a commercial "deal killer" but that the results may help Merck.

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The actual deal to merge the top two U.S. satellite outfits and create a category-killer behemoth with 18 million subscribers is now beside the point.

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Besides obviously needing a CableCard-ready TV set (most new digital HDTVs have to have CableCard slots), there are a few downsides, like you can't access your cable company's onscreen programming guide and you can't order pay-per-view or video-on-demand programming (at least not using your remote), but the real deal killer for us is that you won't be able to use it with a digital video recorder.

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